Reviews of Namco Gallery (Battle City, Galaga, Mappy, Namco Classic) and “Card Game”.

Welcome to Game Boy Crammer, episode 14. Today I’ll be reviewing Namco Gallery (which includes Battle City, Galaga, Mappy, and Namco Classic Golf), and another game, simply called Card Game. Let’s go!

Namco Collection. This is going to be a longer review, because this is a review of four games. Battle City, Galaga, Mappy, and Namco Classic. Three of these games are available separately.

You can buy Battle City, Galaga, and Namco Classic Golf separately. Namco Gallery came out in 1996, only in Japan. When you start up the game, you get a choice of four games. You can also see your rankings, you can see what scores you’ve got. You can’t really save your game, but you can save your score.

It’ll give you a password, so you can save all your scores. So there’s no battery in this game to replace. Let’s start off with Battle City. This game had already come out on its own in 1991 in Japan. It was never released outside of Japan. Now this game is really simple. You drive a tank, and it’s a top-down view.

You can’t go diagonally, you can go up, down, left, and right, and shoot. So, very easy to control. The map scrolls around, so you can see like a little radar, which shows you a few dots, that’s where the enemy tanks are. And you have to protect your base. Your base looks like a little eagle crest, with a little bit of wall around it.

So you have to knock out a certain number of tanks, and then go to the next level. And if your base is destroyed, or you run out of tanks, then that’s game over. There are 35 levels in this game. Each level has 20 enemy tanks that you have to take out. There are various types of tanks, and you can upgrade your tank as well.

Now the enemies don’t come from outside of the screen. I mean, they just kind of warp in, in these little warp zones. So it’s kind of like enemies respawning in a first-person shooter. So you can actually shoot them while they come into the screen. Bullets cancel each other out. If you’re shooting, and someone’s shooting at you, and the bullets collide, they cancel each other out.

Now even though there are 20 tanks per level that you have to take out, there are never more than three at a time. These aren’t just empty maps, they have different types of terrain. There are walls that you can shoot through, you can kind of take them down brick by brick. There are some really heavy brick walls that you need a heavier tank to blast through.

There’s kind of like a foliage. You can kind of drive through it. It basically obscures… I don’t know if it obscures their vision, but it certainly obscures yours. There are rivers, which obviously you can’t drive over with a tank, but you can shoot over them. And there are power-ups. They kind of appear randomly, so it’s a good idea.

While you can just hang around near the respawn zones to zap enemies while they come in, you’re going to miss out on all these different power-ups. It pays to wander around the map a bit. There’s a shovel, which just seems to give you points. There’s a bomb or a grenade. When you grab this thing, it just wipes out all the enemies.

Now, it sounds exciting, but you can only wipe out a maximum of three. There’s a timer that pauses the screen for quite a long time, so you can sit there and take everybody out. There’s a bonus life, like it looks like a tank. And there’s a star. Now this star thing upgrades your tank. There are four levels of tanks.

The first one is the weakest one. It goes the same speed as the enemy tanks, and you can only fire one shot at a time. The next level of tanks is a little bit faster. After that, you can fire two shots at a time. And then the highest level, that would be the fourth level, you can shoot down any kind of wall, so you can shoot down the harder type of brick.

And it goes really fast. And the enemy tanks are the same kind of way. You’ve got basic tanks, and you’ve got some really tough ones that take a few shots to take out. There are level passwords, too, so you can continue where you left off. You know what I like about this game? It’s got a really good difficulty ramp up.

You could give this game to anyone, even people who’ve never played video games before, and they can pass the first few levels, no problem. I don’t know, it’s really good. I would buy this as a single game as well. Next we’ve got Galaga. Don’t get confused, because there was something in Game Boy Color called Galaga Destination Earth.

This is not that. That one came out in 2000. This one came out a year before the Namco Collection came out, and you could actually get it in the US and in Europe. It came with Galaxian, so you’ve got Galaga Galaxian together, but this version doesn’t come with Galaxian. I’ve tried both of them. As far as I can tell, they’re identical.

So the Galaga that you get in the Namco Collection is identical to the Galaga you get in the Galaga slash Galaxian cartridge. I shouldn’t go into too much detail about Galaga, because you probably, if you’re listening to a podcast about retro gaming, I’m sure you’ve played it before. It’s as common as Pac-Man.

The graphics on this thing, it looks a little bit like the arcade. You don’t get the stars in the background. The colors are reversed, so the background is light and the enemies are dark. It’s actually a little easier to see that way. You get the same settings as the arcade version, which is 30,000 points for your first chip and 70,000 for the next, and you start with three ships.

But here’s one strange thing. You don’t see your score on the screen. It does keep it a lot more clean, and it gives you a lot more room to play. One thing I really like about this version compared to the NES version is the aspect ratio of the screen. Because the screen is more square, you know, because the arcade version is, the screen is turned sideways.

It’s taller than it is wide. In this version, it’s not taller than it is wide, but at least it’s closer to the arcade version. You still get, you still get to see the score at the end of the level and when you get a game over, and you still get the stats. Galaga will tell you your percentage of stuff you’ve hit and stuff like that.

The music is a little different. It doesn’t sound quite the same as the arcade version, and most of the gameplay is the same. It feels pretty much the same. I do find the challenging stages. I do a lot better on this than I do in the arcade version, so it might be a little easier. And I seem to survive a little bit longer.

The shots are not timed exactly the same. I’ve played Galaga so many times that, you know, the first few levels I know exactly where the shots are going to come from. When they’re diving in on the screen, they don’t shoot exactly in the same spot. So if you’ve memorized the patterns, they’re not going to help you here.

Once in a while, you get some sprite flickering, but it’s not too bad. You can actually trick the game into doing reverse colors. If you have a Game Boy Color, when you turn the thing on, hold B and push right. You’re going to get a dark background and light graphics. It actually looks a little bit more like the arcade.

If you do play this on an emulator, it doesn’t emulate very well. I’ve tried it on a couple of different emulators because I had to record the sound and take some screenshots. It ran very poorly. I was surprised. But on a Game Boy Color, it runs very smooth. I haven’t actually tried it on a Super Game Boy yet because at the time of recording this, I do not have a Super Game Boy yet.

I just got a Super Famicom yesterday, so I’m on the lookout for Super Game Boy. If you like Galaga, this game will give you a good Galaga fix. It’s not like some of the other arcade ports where it’s a really poor representation. It’s actually a pretty decent Galaga. Most of the time, I forget that I’m playing a Game Boy version of Galaga, and I just get right into it.

I tend to survive pretty much the same as I would the arcade game or any other version of the Galaga. Next, we’ve got Mappy. Mappy was one of those games that wasn’t that popular. I remember seeing it in arcades, but it wasn’t that common. It wasn’t like Galaga or Pac-Man. It was one of the less common Namco games.

From what I hear, it was really big in Japan. This is the only version of Mappy in the Game Boy, and if you look at the Wikipedia page at the time of this recording, they don’t even mention that there’s this version of the Game Boy. You control this little mouse who is a cop. Mappy means, I think it’s a play on mappo, which is like an old-fashioned term for cop, almost like saying a copper.

And so he’s on the tail of these cats. Cats, they are burglars, I guess, so you have to recover stolen items. It’s a platform game, but you can’t control your jumping. You’re basically jumping down onto trampolines, and then you can select which floor you land on. Pretty much self-explanatory when you play it the first time.

There are doors on these levels. When you open the doors, you can kind of knock the cats backwards, or if you open them forwards, you can kind of push them forwards. There’s also some doors that make like a weird sound wave that kind of knocks a whole bunch of cats out. I’ve played Mappy so much, I’ve never realized how hard it would be to try to explain it to someone.

So you don’t see the whole screen at the same time in Mappy, it scrolls around. Well, here’s where the problem is with this version of Mappy. I’ve played the arcade version of Mappy, I’ve played the NES version of Mappy, and this version just is not playable. I just can’t get very far in it, and the problem is the scrolling.

Okay, on the arcade version of Mappy, you can see from the bottom floor to the top floor. You can see the full height, and then the screen will kind of scroll left and right, but you can still see far enough that you can make a decision, Am I going to jump on this platform and get killed? I know it’s clear because I can see what’s on the other side, but on this one, you can only see half of the platform you’re jumping to, so you don’t even know if there’s a cat on the other side of it.

So if you’re being chased by another cat, and you think this is a safe way out, you might be walking into a trap, and this happens over and over again. Eventually your luck just runs out, because so many times you have to take a leap of faith and just hope that there’s not a cat on the other side of the platform you’re jumping on.

You also can’t see if doors are open sometimes, it’s so hard to play. Maybe that’s why they never released it as a separate game. I mean, there must be a reason, because all the other ones came out as separate games. It’s almost like it was an experiment. You know, I could go on and tell you about all the strategies and stuff you can do in this game, but you shouldn’t play this.

Go play real Mappy on something else, because this is just not enjoyable. In fact, if you play this, you might get the wrong impression about Mappy. That would be tragic. And finally we get Namco Classic. You’re not going to hear me review a lot of sports games, and normally I would not have reviewed a golf game, because there are a few things I hate more than golf.

So bear that in mind, maybe you’re going to love this. To me, I found this to be a pretty mediocre golf game. It came out in late 1991, Japan only. Now this is the only game so far that you need some Japanese to navigate. You have a choice of stroke, play, or tournament. In tournament you’re playing against other computer players to try to get the best score.

Stroke play is just, well, don’t make me explain golf stuff. I don’t know what it is. It’s like normal mode. There’s some terrible background music that you can turn off, and you can put your name in. Once you put your name in, you can set your handicap, and then you have to choose which clubs you want.

I had to ask my wife about this. I was like, what’s the strongest one? One wood, apparently, is the driver. So you want to get, I don’t know, I just got three of the wood ones, a bunch of iron ones, and I think the putting one, and the, what is it, like a sand wedge? And a pitching wedge. Those ones you want to get.

Anyway, um, you can kind of aim where you want to hit on the ball, you can point where you want to shoot, and then you have to, it’s one of those, you know, the typical kind of timing shot where there’s a little pendulum swinging back and forth. You hit once to go, and then you hit it again, and try to line it up with where your ball is.

Ugh, this is torture. Here’s what I don’t like about this game. You don’t really get to see the full course. You can’t really see where you’re aiming. You know, they show you the course at the beginning of it, but if you don’t, if you weren’t paying attention, you know, most of these golf games that I’ve played, you can kind of see the whole course before you make your shot.

You can zoom in and out. There’s no zooming. And another irritating part is, when you finally get on the green, you know, most of these games, even old games, it would zoom in on the putting green, so you can kind of get more accurate. This one, no, no, you’re still zoomed out at the full amount, as if you were doing the first drive.

So you’re really shooting a couple of pixels at a couple of pixels, like the final hole. Even when you get it, you feel like, well, I could have been off by a meter. It just seems really dumb. There’s some slope to the putting green, too. There’s like little arrows showing where there’s a contour to it, but because it’s so small, you don’t feel that subtlety.

Bottom line is, it sucks. I’m sure you can get a much better golf game. So that’s it, Namco Collection. By the way, it’s also listed as Namco Gallery sometimes. I’m not sure what it is. I’m not going to say Namco Collection. It’s the only way you can play Mappy, but Mappy’s terrible. And you can play Galaga and Galaxian on a separate cartridge.

Battle City’s really cool, so… The thing is, I didn’t pay much for this thing. It really wasn’t that expensive. If you are going to go out of your way and pay a lot of money for it, don’t. You might as well just get Battle City on its own. Maybe get Galaga Galaxian if you want. Those are games that are better played on other systems anyway.

Really, the only thing that’s worth it is Battle City. There are also two other Namco Collections, which I’ve purchased and I’ll be reviewing at a later date. To find this thing, look for dmg-angj-jpn. dmg-angj-jpn. One of my local retro video game stores, I live in Nagoya, Japan, and there’s a local store, and they have, at the front of the store, they have these grab-bag things.

It’s a pack of games that are solo-wrapped together, so you can’t see what’s in the middle. You can just see the games on the end. And they go for six bucks for the whole thing, and it’s so tempting. You see, all the two ones on the end are good, maybe the ones in the middle are going to be good. Now, sometimes I’ve found some really great games that way. Some of the ones I’m reviewing are ones I found in these packs, but more often than not, you get stupid sports games, Tamagotchi again, or this wonderful gem called Card Game.

Card Game was made by Coconuts. You know, it’s quality: Coconuts. The cover looks really cool. I’ll give it that. It’s got this great cover with these, you’ve got a Joker, and a Jack, and a King, and a Queen, and the King looks really cool in these, like, anime-style winking. Great cover. That’s the only good thing I can say about this game. This is for people who don’t have any other games, I guess. It comes with Poker, it comes with Blackjack, it comes with a game called USA Page One, and Fortune Teller. Doesn’t that sound appealing?

It’s not really a great poker, as far as I can tell. I’m not a big poker fan, but I can know the basics. It’s okay. The music is very irritating. And then there’s Blackjack, which is, I mean, how much fun is Blackjack? Not that fun, I guess. Maybe you really like it. To me, it’s like playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, or flipping a coin. And then this game called USA Page One, I just don’t have the patience to figure out.

Maybe that’s a wonderful, wonderful card game. I just couldn’t figure it out. It’s just too boring. And then you have Fortune Teller, which tells you your fortune. At the beginning, there’s a pause, so it’s like wait, and then you hit the button. And that time, I guess, scrambles the pseudo-random chip in there, and it tells you your stupid fortune. What a bunch of crap.

Okay, and here’s the other thing, is when you lose, when you lose at Blackjack or any of these games, this guy comes out, pulling his eyelids down, and sticking his tongue out saying, I got you, which is infuriating. Or if you win, a cute little blonde lady tells you you won. So it’s kind of sexist. She’s got bunny ears too, did I mention?

Sexist bunny ears. This is not recommended for any creature, living or dead. This is a terrible, terrible game. I’m sorry, but avoid card game. DMG, CGA, if you’re trying to look it up, and you know, if you keep buying those mystery packs, you’re going to get card game someday. Yuck!