At what point does a game cease getting by on nostalgia alone and then must rely on its gameplay merits? With Xbox Live Arcade, Nintendo's Virtual Console, and the numerous "Best Of" and "Greatest Hits" compilations on the market and infecting consoles, oftentimes we find ourselves experiencing a game we once held dear to our hearts, only to find our love for it waning as we've grown up, and with the advancements in technology, see how archaic some games were in its infancy. Namco has released their latest compilation for the Nintendo DS – Namco Museum DS – and it's the same games you've probably experienced countless times before…only portable.

Here are all the games you'll get for your purchase: Pac-Man, Galaga, DigDug II, Xevious, The Tower of Druaga, Mappy, Galaxian, and Pac-Man Vs. Many of the games you'll probably have played before with the most obvious choices going to Pac-Man, Galaga, Galaxian, and maybe Xevious and/or DigDug II (though I'm personally more familiar with DigDug). The games are preserved perfectly, which means nothing at all was done to them – the games have the same graphics, sound, controls, and any faults that were already present when they originally came out.

The problem is that these are all games that have been reissued numerous times and we've seen over and over in this same form for years and years. There have been no adjustments to make the graphics any better, there are no new sounds, and the small DS screen doesn't help matters when many of the pixels are already so small to begin with. If you're used to playing these games in the arcade or at least on your television screen at home, prepare yourself for some eyestrain.

Out of all the games collected in the package, the ones I found myself playing more than the others were the games I'd frankly never heard of before, which were The Tower of Druaga and Mappy, and the one I hadn't ever played much of, which in this case was DigDug II. When compared to the other games in the package I wouldn't go so far as to say The Tower of Druaga or Mappy are better games, it's just that they haven't worn out their welcome on me yet since their unfamiliarity makes them at least new to me and so it's easier to play them and stay with them for a bit when I haven't been subjugated to them countless times before already.

The newest game of the bunch is Pac-Man Vs, which has you and your friends playing a competitive game of Pac-Man where one of you is Pac-Man and the others are the ghosts trying to hunt him down. The mode is a nice change of pace when compared to the regular Pac-Man that's on the cartridge, but the problem comes from the hardware needed to play Pac-Man Vs. For starters the game isn't single player at all, so there's a good chance the game will never get played. The second thing is that for the minimum of two or maximum of four players to play Pac-Man Vs, each player needs a DS and a copy of the game. Needing a DS to play the game is understandable, but a copy of Namco Museum DS for all the players? Surely something could've been done so all the players could play on one cartridge.

What ultimately upsets us is that there is almost no touch screen controls at all, which is unfathomable considering the system was made to use the touch screen. Given the age of the games why couldn't an option for touch controls been implemented, such as using your stylus to drag Pac-Man through the mazes or scroll your Galaga or Galaxian ship left and right. No, instead, you can only use your control pad and face buttons to move and perform shots and attacks. Most of the time you'll only ever use the touch screen to access the menus.

An example of something cool done with the touch screen is in the DIP switches, which are interactive motherboards that recreate the sensation of tearing open an arcade cabinet and fiddling around with the guts to tweak the gameplay. By choosing to go and mess around with the DIP switches, you can do things like give yourself more lives, pick at what bonus level you get an extra life, and similar small but subtle changes that can affect normal gameplay. It's a cool idea, but I'd much rather have had touch screen controls for the actual games.

If you're a diehard fan of these games and you've always wanted to play them on the go, Namco Museum DS is just the package you need. If you're tired of seeing Pac-Man and other games paraded out year after year with no changes to the gameplay or cosmetically, then Namco Museum DS isn't about to change your mind on that subject.

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