Pac-Man is now available on the Xbox live arcade and the Playstation store for 10 dollars.
As you may have known or not, you play as the yellow guy with a big mouth, who goes to the mazes eating dots and ghosts, that is the essence of Pac-Man. This game however, takes the Pac-Man you know and love and puts in a blender, throws in some fruit and glow sticks and then turns it up to 11.
There’s a number of substantial changes that checks up the original game formula and make this game unique. First of all, this game is very colorful, all the colors known to men and often at the same time are present in the game, but aside from that, there are some new gameplay elements that change the game dramatically. Like most Pac-Man games, you have to score as many points as possible, while avoiding the ghosts, but you wont get that many points eating the dots, you’ll have to eat the ghosts too. Besides the usual suspects that patrol the area, the game introduces sleeping ghosts, seen as green and with little Zs coming out of their mouths. To wake them up, move past them disturbing their slumber, which makes them angry ghosts. Once they are awake, they form a ghost train which will try to kill Pac-Man for waking them up. To escape them, navigate through the maze, until you find a power up and then eat the train for maximum damage and points.
The more you eat, the faster the game gets, there are 50 levels of speed and things can ramp up pretty fast. Luckily, Pac-Man has a few tricks which help him survive, one of which is bombs. Similar to Geometry Wars, if you’re about to “bite the dust”, you can pull up the trigger and release a bomb, that sends the moving ghosts to their little box in the middle. You have a limited amount of bombs, so you have to ration them carefully, but it’s always better to use a bomb to save your life and avoid the time penalty caused by death.
One of the coolest features is the way that camera goes into slow motion that zooms in every time you’re close to a ghost. Things can get very fast and this bullet time effect gives you a fighting chance.
There are 8 different courses and each of them offers a number of different modes.
You can completely customize the game to suit your taste. You can choose the difficulty, the layout, the color, the graphical style and even the background music. There are also leaderboards, so you can measure your score versus the world and a cool thing about this is that you can watch a replay of the top players of the leaderboards, to study their patterns and pick up some tips.
Overall, it’s a great game to have on your harddrive and if you just want to kill some time, it easily worth 10 bucks.
