Nostagia only goes so far
Pac-Man Collection was one of my favorite cartridges on the Game Boy Advance. I love Pac-Man, and I love classic compilation cartridges. Although I owned many of the more "unique" games for the system, and even indeed, the comparable Namco Museum, Pac-Man Collection likely spent more time in my GBA than any other game outside of Pokémon Ruby way back when I was seriously into that franchise.
There's a lot to love on the cartridge. Standard Pac-Man is here, obviously, and gives the option to play in fullscreen or a scrolling view, allowing players to choose which fits their playstyle better.
Pac-Mania is also included, which is a fair addition. My two favorites on the cartridge however, are Pac-Attack and Pac-Man Arrangement.
Pac-Attack is an underrated game; a unique Tetris variant that makes full use of its Pac-Man branding. The music is super awesome, too, and the GBA version's tunes are my personal favorite of any version outside of the original arcade. Pac-Attack has been on about a dozen platforms, but other than direct emulation, no other version has gotten the music to sound anything other than poo.
Pac-Man Collection was my introduction to Pac-Man Arrangement, and with its clever spins on the traditional Pac-Man formula, it makes for a very solid gameplay experience. It hits many notes that later clones and editions of the series fail to pick up on, such as power-ups (for both Pac and the ghosts), level-specific eccentricities, and a unique boss fight.
So if this game is so full of heartwarming memories, why such a low score? Well for one, it's a 13-year old port of a collection of ports, meaning nothing on here is even close to arcade-perfect, no matter how much charm these adaptations may hold. The even bigger issue, is that a much larger collection of arcade-perfect emulations in the form of Pac-Man Museum was on its way to the Wii U at one point, and was canceled, leaving us with this instead. As much as I love Collection, I'd much rather have had what Museum has to offer on the console instead. With the advent of Pac-Man being playable in Super Smash Bros., you'd think that the character'd be better treated on the console. Instead his announcement in Smash was accompanied with this and the Famicom version of Pac-Land - five less-than-perfect ports of games that are all available in better incarnations in a package that was actually canceled for this platform. In fact, as of this writing there is still no way to play any of the arcade Pac-Man games outside of Wii discs.
So it may seem a bit petty to some, but the main reason Collection gets a lower mark on the Wii U, is that it is nothing but the cold shadow of what we should have gotten.