When it comes to mini-arcade machines, My Arcade is one of the well known makers.
And as a guy who grew up on arcade games of yesteryear, the Namco Museum Mini Arcade Machine is no doubt one of those machines that made my day.
The arcade machine is about 10 inches high and the screen is about 4.25 inch full color vertical display.
The machine has front-facing speakers, volume controls, four-way joystick (joystick can be unscrewed), power button (via the coin trap) and a glowing title marquee and the rear has a 3.5 mm headphone jack and is powered by a micro USB Power Adapter.
But the selling point is that it comes with 20 fully playable classic arcade games built in which include the following games: Battle City, Dig Dug, Dig Dug II, Dragon Spirit, Galaga, Galaxian, Mappy, Pac-Panic, Pac-Man, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, Pac-Mania, Phelios, Rolling Thunder, Rolling Thunder 2, Rolling Thunder 3, Sky Kid, Splatterhouse, Splatterhouse 2, Tower of Druaga and Xevious.
All games are arcade games with the exception of “Rolling Thunder 3”, “Splatterhouse 2”, “Pac-Panic” and “Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures” which were released for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis system.
In some ways, I’m grateful to see My Arcade adding these games from the ’80s and ’90s but I have to admit, I was hoping that games such as “Pole Position”, “Ms. Pac-Man”, “Dragon Saber: After Story of Dragon Spirit”, “Ordyne”, “Rally-X” games were included but it’s hard to knock when you have 20 awesome games included.
I also want to emphasize that aside from the games mentioned, the others are the arcade version. I know in Japan for the “Mappy” My Arcade machine, people thought they were getting the arcade version but it had five stories and it was the NES version. I can confirm for this release, Mappy is the six story arcade version.
The games let you select a original or full screen. Buttons are Coin, Reset, Start and the main buttons are X,Y,A,B.
Another positive is that you don’t have to waste any quarters, you can insert as many coins you want and just keep playing. Granted, it’s on a small screen but for any retro gaming fan, I found it to be pretty awesome.
With that being said, I did test out the mini-arcade machine on a variety of power banks. Depending on the power bank, I didn’t have much success on smart phone power banks, but I did have success on an emergency power bank (the ones that allow to recharge car batteries or electronic devices).
Now some games will make you wish it had a bigger screen (some text are hard to read but for what it’s worth, the point of My Arcade machines are to give you miniature arcade machines and targeting the retro gaming audience.
There is no saving, so no high scores can be recorded. But I wasn’t expecting it either. The same with the smaller screen, it’s a given that certain aspects will be hard to read.
If there was one thing that I found complicated was using the joystick, but I can easily unscrew it off and play the game via the gamepad.
Overall, I am delighted for this release from My Arcade. I own Namco Museum on the consoles (and I even find this even better than the PS2 version) and I like the fact that My Arcade are releasing these collections, the first with the Data East arcade machine and now the Namco Museum release (which has more well-known arcade games).
It’s not perfect, in fact, it’s not going to please everyone. But considering you get 20 awesome retro games, many which are wonderfully emulated via software, for those who spent a ton of coins to play these games back in the day, how awesome now to play these games without having to worry about that.
And no matter how much time has passed since these games were out in arcades…these games are still tough! Frustrating, yet a lot of fun!
Overall, I recommend My Arcade’s “Namco Museum” mini-arcade machine!
