I got my Japanese edition of the Namco Museum Battle Collection for the PSP. Fuckin’. Rules.

Well, as much as an 8-bit game can on a high end killer screen hand-held gaming device can. The majority of the games are in English, in spite of it being a Japanese game: that’s a nicety, for me. Even so, X and O seem to be flip-flopped, compared to US games. Also, I can’t figure out how to get WiFi to work, but I’m guessing that it only supports Ad-Hoc mode, rather than Infrastructure, so that’s OK too.

The good stuff: all of the games appear to be running the original ROM’s, so game play should be the same as the original arcade games. They also include options, like difficulty, lives, etc. The killer feature is that you can rotate the screen for game play. When you do that, the joystick rotates too… the key think for this is that you can play Pac-Man, turned on it’s side, using either the analog controller or the D-Pad. The screen can also scale – almost the same options as an HD widescreen – depending on what ya like to see.

I’ve yet to play most of the remix’d games, but I checked out Galaga’s update… played pretty good. At least it held my attention for a while.

High scores are saved to the Memory Stick. When you leave a game and return to the menu, it’s a slow fade, which is a classy touch.

Over all, I like this enough that I’m either going to learn enough Japanese to navigate the advanced menu options or I’m picking up the English version, when it hits next week, and keep the Japanese as a keepsake [of my own stupidity].

I’m simply that impressed with it.