Pretty good selection here!

I enjoy that your home base is a purgatorial room with no entrance/exit in which Pac-Man must just play his old games.

Genuinely boggles my mind there is some discourse about the "IP" and they re-named Pac-boy or something... ummm ok.

There are some awesome games and some trash, but it's all interesting enough to warrant dipping into. Little thoughts on each game:

Pac-Man : Good OG port. Missions gave me motivation to improve my skills a bit which is cool.

Super Pac-Man : Pretty wild. I feel like I've never seen this one in an arcade. I like the eating the locked up fruits mechanic and becoming the titular big Pac-Man.

Pac & Pal : Not as interesting or fun as Pac or Super but entertaining enough to play around with a bit.

Pac-Land : Love this game and still find it crazy it doesn't seem to own its historical clout as almost certainly majorly influencing Super Mario Bros. It's really fun but also would have benefited from some type of Save-State system.

Pac-Mania : It's isometric Pac-Man with a jump button. It's real cool... can be a little frustrating that the point-of-view is a little small so you aren't sure what the nasty ghosts are up to.

Pac-Attack : Went into this one very skeptical... actually ended up having a real unique puzzle mechanic that uses Pac-Man well. There are blocks, ghosts, and a Pac-Man. It's a combo of Tetris and landing your Pac-Man on the ghosts which I thought worked well.

Pac-In-Time : Love the lazy porting here or the weird licensing issues that caused there to be English subtitles under Japanese characters for a game that has an English translation!

The platforming and puzzling are intriguing but I found Pac-Man's floaty and floppy movement disgusting.

Pac-Man Arrangement : Both of these (there are two separate ports) just kind of feel like pretty and easy Pac-Man.

Pac-Man Championship Edition : It's cool this finally gets a port off of 360. The port is not amazing... it looks to be 720p to my eyes, but the game is incredible. The music, vibe, and pacing of the Championship Edition games make for one of the most satisfying and addicting game experiences I've enjoyed. It looks beautiful and gets your adrenaline going in a way that for me, it feels as if I want to become one with Pac-Man.

Pac-Motos : A re-skin of some other game... you knock things off a platform... I was unimpressed.

Pac 'n Roll Remix : A port of the Wii port of the DS original. It does not feel good to control and you can 100% tell it's a touch screen designed game. Seems like it might have been cool on the DS... it ain't cool here!

Pac-Man Battle Royale : If you've got some buddies, this thing brings the goods. Excellent party game tucked in here on this collection. Playing the CPU sucks.

Pac-Man 256 : First time this game gets a console release. It's a fun little Pac-Man mobile game where you are sort of endlessly collecting power pellets and escaping/eating ghosts. You can see where the micro-transaction piece would have been built in. It's actually a cool little score-attack game.

An amazing collection I had a blast with! The games play super well and I love the customizable arcade they have here too.

There's a few small things I wish the collection had (ex. Turn off border art, screen options, better crt filters, option to use Arcade Archives Pac-Land controls) but said things I wanted isn't enough for me to rank this collection lower. I was disappointed by recent game collections, but I'm really happy that this was a heavy hitter.

The missions were fun to do but I did hate how grindy Pac-Man 256 missions were. Its where I spent the bulk of my hours on

Overall, amazing collection glad I was abke to play Pac-Man Arrangement and Pac N Roll Remix again. I also really enjoyed Pac-In-Time. Didn't think I'd enjoy it but I ended up loving it.

Jogado no Xbox Game Pass. Eu definitivamente não sou o maior fã de Pac-Man, então não sei se teriam melhores opções de jogos pra uma coletânea dessas, mas colocar Pac-in-Time e o Arrangement de console foi um ultraje complicado. Mas Pac-Man Arrangement (arcade), Pac & Pal e Pac 'n Roll Remix foram gratas surpresas e mostram tudo que já tentaram fazer com essa bola amarela.

Como coletânea de aniversário, eu esperava vídeos e imagens dos bastidores, artes conceituais, algum tipo de modo história com missões pra andar pela linha do tempo da série... mas tem um minigamezinho de gacha e decorar salinha. Fazer o que.

Probably one of the best collections out there, up there with Sonic Mega Collection and Kirby's Dream Collection. 14 games, some of which haven't gotten good rereleases in ages, or flat out have never been released outside of arcades getting full accessible releases is great.

Only major downsides are that Mrs. Pac-Man isn't here for relatively predictable reasons, that game is a rights nightmare, Pac-In-Time is a surprisingly unenjoyable game, and holy shit, who thought it was a good idea to have the main lobby's theme be a cacophonous mess of Pac-Man arcade noises and SFX haphazardly over-layed over one another. I know it's supposed to sound like an arcade of Pac-Man games running at once, but in the end it straight up sounds like a garbled mess and is terrible to listen to. Something more chill and low-tempo such as History from Sonic Mega Collection would've been more befitting to make me actually want to hang out in the lobby some and just simply sit around.

Psychological experiment by Namco to see how many times the human mind can be exposed to the Pac-Man theme in one hour before going completely insane. Very disturbing!

An ideal game for Game Pass - the sort of light-touch curio that would make you resent Pac-Man forever if you paid full price for it, but is very enjoyable as a noncommittal "free" offering that you can dip in and out of while playing your big meaty 4K HDR games and say stuff like "Pac-Attack fucking sucks!", "Can I unlock Baby Pac-Man?" and "Man, video games sure have come a long way since Pac-Man!"

The decision to host this smorgasbord of slice-stolen pizzas in an customisable iso-hub reminded me of the multi-storey Nintendo museum I built in Animal Crossing for the GameCube back in the day, which is nice, though I don't understand why a bunch of crummy original Pac-Man variants get their own cabinets and like, a dozen really good console and mobile games are all crammed into one games machine in the corner. Sad! Like Kirby and the Forgotten Game, there's a sort of deep sadness that comes from installing a virtual gatchapon machine in your virtual arcade, feeding it virtual coins that you got by playing a terrible 1987 US-only port of Pac-Man for the Amiga so that you can own virtual statues of cherries and berries...

Anyway, to save you some time:

MUST-PLAY
- Pac-Motos
- Pac-Man: Championship Edition
- Pac 'n Roll: Remix
- Pac-Man 256

SHOULD PLAY
- Pac-Land
- Pac-Man Arrangement

SHOULD PLAY, BUT YOU WILL BE WEIGHED DOWN BY AN INESCAPABLE SENSE OF LONGING FOR YOUR FRIENDS
- Pac-Man: Battle Royale

MORALLY OBLIGED TO PLAY
- Pac-Man

DON'T PLAY
- Pac-In-Time
- Pac & Pal
- Pac-Attack

What an intersting Pac-Man collection if I have to say so myself! I was lucky enough to win this game from Pac-Man himself (from the official Pac-Man Instagram). It's a solid collection with great games, but with noticeable flaws.

PROS
- First of all, the selection of games is pretty good overall! It has all the games of the original base Pac-Man Museum, which I really enjoyed.
- My personal favorites from the collection are Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Pac-Land, Pac-Man Arrangement '96 (Arcade), Pac-Man Championship Edition and Pac-Man 256.
- Though they're not my favorites, I did enjoy Pac-Man Arrangement '05 and Pac-Motos as well.
- Pac-Man Arrangement '96 finally has the correct audio pitch! Previous releases from the early 2000s Namco Museum game made the OST from the game very high pitched, and it felt awkward in comparsion to the regular pitch. I also adored what they did to restore the credits and created their own loop to the game's attract mode from Classic Collection.
- I also really enjoyed the customizable arcade aspect of the game! My arcade went through 4 major revisions throughout my playthrough, and I loved being able to see other Pac-Man characters wandering around the arcade, as well as being able to listen to music from the games while at the main screen.
- I really liked the idea of missions! There are some missions I don't like doing but they give me more of a sense of completion whenever I complete them.

Now there's sadly issues I have with the collection.
CONS:
- Emulation is rather sub-par: Alongside notable forced bilinear filters, incorrect display ratios/no pixel perfect modes, there's noticeable input delay and there's this awkward sound emulation error that occurs during all the classic arcade games. In addition to that, there's this heavy audio splice thing which shows up if you play for an extensive period of time. Going to the system menu and resuming the game fixes it, but it shames me that they didn't bother to fix it despite having several updates. The video options are also rather lackluster in comparison to previous compilations, and the CRT filter is pretty barebones, most especially in Pac-Land.
- The lack of game options for the classic arcade games in this collection really bothered me honestly, considering how previous collections always had these customizable options.
- Some of the games are based on their Japanese counterparts, most notably Pac-Mania and Pac-In-Time. While I understand some of the changes, I've been rather iffy with the choice to use Pac-In-Time's Japanese version internationally, considering how the US version is already there and with the Japanese version being considerably harder and more painful to play through.
- Like Arcade Archives Pac-Land, Ms. Pac-Man's near-complete erasure from all the games is what bothered me the most about this collection. It baffles me that they went to completely censor Ms. Pac out of all the games where she appears, and it's a huge shame that AtGames and Bandai Namco are unwilling to cooperate to bring her back from this legal jumbo.
- Some of the missions, most especially the excessive coin grinding required for Pac-Man 256.
- This collection generated my dislike for Pac-In-Time.
- This is just a personal thing but I really wish there was online play for any of the games, wish being able to play Pac-Man games with multiplayer was easier.
- I ALSO really wish there were more surprise picks for Pac-Man titles like Pac-Man Championship Edition DX and Pac-Man Adventures in Time (latter will probably NEVER happen), but hey maybe in the next collection

Overall a neat collection! Most of my problems mainly consist of the emulation and presentation of the bonus features, but it's a really solid collection of games! I'd recommend this one only if you're a true Pac-Maniac though, otherwise you might Pac-Away for the next compilation featuring him or settle in with the Arcade Archives games.
(Finished with all missions completed and all non-DLC Gashapon figures obtained)

It's Pac-Man. What else is there to say? The digital arcade frontend is cute enough (though I do miss the museum aspect of the previous collections...), and the games are emulated quite well. The achievements are probably what's going to keep you busy for the longest time, but i personally just wasn't into them. The Ms Pac-Man stuff is a bit of a bummer, but at the end of the day it doesn't really affect the games themselves. A shame Ms Pac-Man itself couldn't be on the collection due to all the legal bullshit though. This game could have really popped off if they just added more games via dlc or something but they didn't, kind of a bummer. As it is though, the collection is fine and a good way to replay a lot of these classics.

Full video review: https://youtu.be/_r5xU9xSkLs

Nearly twenty years ago, I had this fun little Gameboy game called Pac-Man Collection. It was a bundle of four different Pac-Man games that allowed someone like myself - who didn’t get to really experience the arcade era - a chance to get into the Pac-Man series proper. Now here we are in 2022 with an exponentially better version of that game.

Overview & Customization
Basically, this is a collection of a bunch of different Pac-Man games with this cool “arcade” customization feature thrown on top of it. As you play more games, you unlock tokens which you can use to play other games as well as roll in a gashapon machine to unlock statues that you can then use to deck out your arcade.

Each game has a bunch of different “missions” to complete and these too unlock more cosmetic things to place, whether that be flags, figures, benches, tables, or even new wallpapers. Overall, the whole arcade customization thing is kinda basic, but it’s a fun enough distraction and definitely a better alternative than just a menu listing the different games you can play.

Games
That Gameboy game I mentioned earlier? It has just four Pac-Man games. This collection? It has fourteen, including everything from the original 1980 arcade game to lesser-known ones like the 2005 DS game Pac 'n Roll or the 1995 SNES game Pac-In-Time. Most of the games take up the traditional Pac-Man style gameplay, but those two examples, along with others, offer up a bit more variety - mostly in the way of platforming.

Not to say that they are all good though - I wasn’t really a fan of Pac-In-Time and Pac-Man Battle Royale is pretty much the worst thing ever if you don’t have others to play it with. It’s mostly balanced out though - a bit of good, a bit of bad, a lot of just okay. My personal favorite was probably Championship Edition.

Missing Games
That said, the collection is missing a few key Pac-Man games I would have liked to see. The major one of course being Ms. Pac-Man, although that is likely because the game was not developed by Namco directly. But then you’re missing stuff like Championship Edition 2, which is very surprising seeing as how the first one is included and Championship Edition 2 is perhaps the most definitive Pac-Man experience yet and would have likely been my favorite game in the pack if it were included.

There are others of course - the Pac-Man World series definitely deserves its own collection - but overall, it’s a solid collection and covers a lot of Pac-Man’s history. In fact, it is by far the most definitive collection of Pac-Man games yet and I would have no trouble calling it the best.

Overall
The collection plays well, runs just fine, looks great at 4k, and has just enough customization to make it more than just another collection of Pac-Man games. That and it even works right out of the box on the Steam Deck - where I had fun jumping from game to game.

So yes, PAC-MAN MUSEUM+ a pretty easy recommendation to make, not just for Pac-Man fans, but for fans of retro gaming in general. It’s got a fun batch of games to play through, some nice bonus features by way of leaderboards and arcade customization, and I am honestly struggling to find anything negative to say here - it’s just an all-around solid release and a great way to get into one of the medium’s most important series.

a solid collection! it's a really cute package with an alright selection of games. would have loved if they threw in some of the pac-man world games and got some quirkier ones like pac motos and pac n roll. the only big omission i don't understand is ms. pac-man. stuff like pac-man, pac-mania, pac-man arrangement (and less so the remake), championship edition, and pac-man 256. the rest range from not great to awful though. for 20 dollars if you're a pac-man fan and wanna run through some of the weirder pac-man games in a really well put together package with a fun customizable arcade room this is well worth your time!

Overall, this is a pretty decent set of games. It's great to have a reasonable way to play Championship Edition, Arrangement rules, and Pac-n-Roll Remix and Pac Motos are neat inclusions that I'm glad aren't stuck on the Wii forever. There are some choices about the games in this collection that I'm not so sure of, but I'll get to them later. The main complaint I have is about the presentation. Pac-Man Museum takes place in an arcade (which isn't a museum, so already failed the test) that you can customize. You unlock furniture by playing games and more characters will show up if you play more. This is mostly harmless, except there was very little thought put into any of it. The space you have is kind of small, so you can't make anything too elaborate without running out of space. You can't customize the furniture, and also you can't remove any of the cabinets, in case you were thinking of trying to just get rid of Pac and Pal. The characters that come in just kind of wander around without you being able to interact with them. I doubt anyone would find this part of the game anywhere close to something like decorating in Animal Crossing.

Every machine in the Arcade, except for one which houses all of the console games, uses coins. You start with 500 coins and earn more by playing the games. At first, you hear "each play of a game costs some of this in-game currency" and shudder, but the money never actually becomes an issue. The only way you can end up not having enough to play the machines that require money is if you just dump credits into a game or you spend it all at the gacha machine for more furniture. Money in this game is so inconsequential I'm assuming it's only here for the gacha machine because there should be no world where you could possibly not be able to play Pac-Man in Pac-Man Museum. It just feels pointless, along with everything else about this arcade. There's also a mechanic where some games need to be played twice in order to unlock other ones, which is very dumb, and even though I'm about 13 or 14 levels into Pac-in-Time, the game still hasn't registered me as having played it, so after days of owning this game, I still can't play Pac-Attack (not that I'm dying to play Pac-Attack). I guess I have to end my current playthrough of the game for it to count as a play, but then WHY would you ask me to play Pac-in-Time twice then, a game that is not played the same way the other arcade Pac-Man games in this collection are?

For a game called "Museum", there also isn't much in the way of archival content or extras. Most games do have some good art in their borders, but no concept art or stories about development, no scans of manuals or art collections, I think that kind of stuff should be standard given how many of these collections are coming out these days and carry this kind of content.

Lastly, I do have some gripes about some of the choices of games here. There's a reason why Ms. Pac-Man isn't on here, but its absence is still a bummer. Surely Namco can work SOMETHING out with the people who own the rights to that. The console version of Pac-Man 256 is also here and has always been strange to me. I can't imagine engaging with that game outside of playing it on your phone when you're bored, and its inclusion here feels more like trying to add more "value" to the collection than anything else. Championship Edition DX would've fit in so much better. Pac-in-Time and Pac-Attack are here, but no Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures? If the reason they didn't put that here is that they think it's bad, then why do Pac and Pal and Pac-Attack get a pass for being bad? And hey, why not try and figure out how to make Baby Pac-Man work as a console game, that would be a fun exercise.

If you have any affinity for Pac-Man, I would say this collection is worth getting. It has lots of great games, some of which are not easy to come by or even emulate, and having them immediately accessible on Switch made the collection worth it. I just wish there was more thought put into the presentation and arcade environment, and more effort into making this the "definitive" collection of Pac-Man games, which it, unfortunately, isn't.

EDIT: After playing this collection on and off for the past couple months, mostly for Championship Edition, I feel like I need to bring up the input lag. Maybe the Switch version just has it worse than other versions, but it’s become very noticeable, especially when I compare it to how CE DX feels on PC. As I’ve gotten better at the game it’s gotten more unbearable, so im knocking off a star for this collection. Still has its good points but im not convinced it’s worth a purchase really.

This is a really solid Pac-Man collection with a lovely presentation. I appreciate it making the titles unlockable by playing other games twice, which opened my eyes to other Pac-Man games that are pretty sick that I would normally have overlooked for CE.

What marks the game down tho is that Pac-Man Battle Royale doesn't have online play, which I feel like is the only way to play that on console. It's very much a multiplayer experience, and locals cuts its potential short.

Also it's lacking all the World games. Just turn Ms. Pac-Man into Pac-Mom and call it a day, I wanna play Pac-Man World 2 on something that isn't my dusty Gamecube at this point!

Other than that it's pretty good, I would recommend it. You can't go wrong getting it on Game Pass, since that's """free""".