Namco has been drip-feeding ports of its original games onto Xbox Live Arcade for the last few years, as well as the odd remake of the more well-known titles. Those games, like Pac-Man and Dig Dug, as well as thoughtful rehashes like Galaga Legions and the Shigeru Miyamoto-designed Pac-Man Championship Edition are all included on this disc, which is pretty good value in itself if you’ve not bought any of them previously.

But the £30 price tag demands a greater breadth of quality than a dozen Live Arcade games, and this is what the ‘Museum’ section of the disc is for. Unfortunately, after Namco already released its most celebrated (and, thus, quality) titles on Live, what remains is, to be polite, rather eclectic, showing Namco scraping the barrel to supply titles that were already dwelling at the bottom of the keg in the Eighties. Pac & Pal is a particular standout in the ‘WTF’ department, taking place in the familiar Pac-Man map but removing the dots, inserting cards to flip, items like magic wands to collect and implementing a little green ‘Pal’ to run off with your items necessitating you hunting it down to steal them back and finish the level. It just doesn’t work, and lacks the immediacy of the original Pac experience.

It starts to feel like Namco, not content with the profits it continues to make on its Live releases, threw this package together to further exploit them, and shovelled the rest in to justify the price tag.

But assuming you’re happy with the games on offer, how does the whole thing knit together as a workable collection? It’s not bad, but we have our niggles. For a start, the load times are excruciatingly long, and it makes absolutely no sense. Bosconian, as a computer program, weighs in at about 37KB. The 360 has 512MB of onboard RAM, which means it could accommodate 13.5 million copies of the game in its memory before it broke a sweat – the whole disc could load instantly after you switch it on.

So why, instead, does every game load separately every time you play it, and why so damn slowly? A two-minute wait to play a game of King & Balloon, only to discover that it’s crap, is really beyond a joke.

The other issue we have – and don’t shoot us down, as we’re not purists – is that you have no control over the credits Museum puts into each game. Most of the time you’ll get one go (with, admittedly, a toggleable number of lives up to five) and then it’s game over. That means that you’ll never get to see later stages or enjoy the full experience unless you’re willing to put in countless hours – which was fine in 1982, but these days you might find your interest swayed a little by the GTAs of this world.

Finally, we don’t understand why there are no Achievements on the Museum games. Achievement whoring in Sega Mega Drive Collection was a brilliant hook, and its omittance here feels criminal.

The bottom line with Namco Museum is if you’re familiar with and enthusiastic about old arcade games, what you see is what you get. However, anyone expecting a sufficient layer of contemporary appeal in this package may emerge disappointed.