This is somewhat tough to review, since I have to review three things at once. The games selected, the emulation of said games, and the overall presentation.

First, the games.

Pac-man: Everyone knows this game, you can find knockoffs of it on every platform ever. Your little yellow disc-man basically eat little pellets in a maze while colored ghosts with different attack patterns chase him. His only respite is the power pellet, which will temporarily let him eat the ghosts for a short period of time.
This is about as complicated as the games here get, and it's pretty fun, the characters are endearing, it's impossible to hate the ghosts, even though they're out to kill you. Occasionally you get a little scene between levels where cute things happen.

Rally-X: This also takes place in a maze, you're a little blue car being chased by red cars, and your goal is to get all the flags before your fuel runs out while avoiding the other cars. Your only defense is releasing gas clouds to slow down the other cars, but doing this consumes even more fuel. There are also the occasional rocks scattered here and there that you also have to avoid.
This is like a much faster-paced Pac-man, basically, pretty fun.

New Rally-X: Same as above, but with new graphics and music.

Bosconian: This is kind of hard to describe, basically you're a spaceship, and your goal is to destroy these green satellites by shooting their core, while avoiding enemy ships, as well as space debris. It gets pretty dull really quickly.

Pole Position: It's pretty much the grandaddy of racing games in general, you have to make it from start to finish within the time-limit without crashing into other cars, signs, or going off-road. It's alright for what it is.

Galaga: This game took what made Space Invaders special and tweaked the living heck out of it until it became something much more refined, and still very fun.
You play as a spaceship, and you shoot formations of alien ships with unique flight patterns. The really neat gimmick here is the Galaga ship. It'll capture your ship with a tractor beam if you don't shoot it fast enough. After you send out your next ship, when the Galaga swoops down to attack, it'll use your old ship's bullets for double-firing at you. If you time your shots right, you can destroy it and recapture your ship, and then have both of the two ships fuse into one, so you now have a wider firing range. This also makes your ship a much bigger target, so there's a huge risk/reward factor here.

Bosconian and Pole Position are the only real duds here, but they're still passable as extras. While it's great that they included both versions of Rally-X, it would've been nice to see Pac-man Plus or something like that for Pac-man.

Now, the emulation.

Each game is emulated faithfully, even allowing you to mess with the little DIP switches, and showing the warmup sequences before the games start playing normally.

The only big issue is that you can't quit in the middle of a game. You can pause, of course, but if you wanna switch games, you either have to lose the game you're currently playing and press Triangle to exit, or just reset the system. This is a major pain when you wanna try all the different games available.

Lastly, the presentation.

It really does try to present itself as a virtual museum, which you can walk around and view memorabilia and read facts surrounding the games. Problem is, the walking portion is very plain, there's nothing you can interact with beyond the exhibits, which themselves take a while to load, and most of them are presented one at a time, rather than a more convenient slide-show. Each game has a little 3D room with either a cabinet or sit-down version of the game in question that you click on to start the game. All this can thankfully be skipped by simply selecting the Games option at the title screen.


Overall, if you already have a means to play the games on this collection, then the extras aren't really worth it.