My wife, bless her, surprised me by buying the Namco Museum for the Gameboy Advanced. This includes my favorite arcade game of all time, Galaga. But I'm disappointed in the conversion. The game play, graphics, and sound are a totally faithful reproduction. But instead of keeping the scores at the top and the extra ships at the bottom, they've given up the entire righthand quarter of the screen to displaying that information. That means the game play is smooshed into the remaining 3/4ths of the already small GBA screen, and it's so tiny - the individual shots are almost invisible.
I think the motivation might have been to preserve the aspect ratio of the original game screen. But dammit, who's doing QA and playtesting on this stuff? Did not one person get a chance to say "dudes, that's unplayable" at any point in the process?
On the plus side, the conversion of Dig Dug is quite good.
