Some Namco licenses have been abused over the years, leading to non-Namco developers and publishers producing some games you may have heard of but are (or were?) not official Namco properties.
Namco also functioned as the occasional publisher for other established company's works as part of very fun business time deals by very fun business time men in suits.
Here we shall rank these Namco-adjacent games!
(Developed by GCC for Midway under licensed by Namco, probably) Not only the best game on this list forever, one of the best arcade games ever.
(Developed by Midway, home console ports by Atari Inc.) A sub-set of Pac-Man Plus tweaks and giant horizontally scrolling mazes distinguish this game. The gulf between Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man is quite large.
(Original by Data East, FC conversion by Sakata SAS and published by Namco in Japan) BurgerTime is one of the best Data East titles, faint praise that it may be. This conversion is quite good but the addition of more enemies on the field make it notably harder than the arcade version.
(Developed by Midway) Feels like a bunch of hacky garbage but the underlying framework is still basic Pac-Man so it can only be so bad.
(Developed by Midway) Play a stripped down, slow version of Pac-Man in order to play a dodgy pinball table to influence the maze the the slow Pac-Man kind of fun in this disparate feeling mess.
(Developed by Binary Design, published by Mastertronic under license by Namco) The Spectrum and Amstrad versions are deeply flawed but basically sound games. The Commodore 64 version is the actual worst game on this list.
(Developed by Midway) Cursed territory, absolute abomination.
