(And if you have an Evercade, there are two Namco collections for that, as well, with another 22 ports of console titles between them.)

That’s 33 Museum titles available right now if you’re a Switch owner, 22 if you have anything else that’s current. There are actually two other Namco Museum titles available on the Switch, and these are also on Xbox One/Series S|X, Playstation 4 and 5, and Steam as well: the two-volume Namco Museum Archives, which are compilations of Famicom games either developed or published by Namco. There’s the aforementioned Namco Museum of this generation, of course, with Namco Museum on the Switch providing 12 classics in one place: there are the usual suspects like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaga, but some others that don’t always end up in these compilations like Rolling Thunder or Galaga ‘88 are included as well, and it marks Tank Force’s first-ever Namco Museum release. There’s a rich history here, much of it happening in Japan instead of internationally, obscuring it and its influence from the west, and, in one of the rare cases of digital distribution working out in everyone’s favor, more of that history is available internationally now than has ever been before. Namco-which goes by Bandai Namco these days, a couple of decades into that merger-is far more than the usual Namco Museum suspects, more than Pac-Man, and more than Galaga. What’s worth talking about all these years later, though, is just how good those games still are, at a time when you can play quite a few of them-even more than the standard Namco Museum release from each console generation since the original Playstation has typically included. They’ve been around in this industry long enough to have acquired the Japanese division of Atari before acquisitions of Atari divisions were a common (and confusing) occurrence: you don’t start making games that pre-date Space Invaders and stick around for nearly 50 years afterward if you’re not doing something right. “Namco makes good videogames” isn’t much of a take, and it certainly isn’t news to anyone who pays attention to games.

Tank force - videogame by namco free