super pac-man: saving the world one ghost at a time

in honor of pac-man joining the smash bros. roster, i thought i’d dust off my copy of the wii namco compilation, namco museum megamix (i’d played xevious a couple of years ago) and chow down on some tasty ghosts. that compilation doesn’t include ms. pac-man, which wasn’t actually developed by namco and thus, despite its enduring popularity, tends to be less acknowledged by them in general. so instead i ended up playing super pac-man (released to arcades in late 1982).

i’d heard of super pac-man, but its availability has been somewhat spotty over the years and it wasn’t until namco museum remix and namco museum megamix that it became more readily available. at its core the game is much the same as the original pac-man in that you’ll be chomping everything in sight and avoiding ghosts until you get a power pellet, at which point the tables turn and you try to chase them down to rack up points. super pac-man adds a new twist in that some munchables are locked behind doors, and you have to nab keys located in regular spots on the board in order to unlock them. a “super” pellet transforms ol’ pac into the eponymous “super pac-man” who not only becomes big and can “fly” over ghosts and burst through doors without a key, but he can also zoom around the board by holding down a button while steering as usual. there’s also a bonus level every four boards which is the same as a regular board except there are no ghosts, you have constant super power, and there’s a time limit.

i should preface my analysis of the game by saying that ms. pac-man was one of the games i made a beeline for at my local chuck e. cheese’s growing up and that i owned the original NES version of pac-man, and so although i’m not anywhere near a competitive player, i’m not a casual player either. i enjoyed the change of pace of super pac-man, and it was interesting to see how even though the board remains the same, the layout can feel quite different based on which doors are open and which are closed. the game becomes increasingly harder by making it so that keys open doors that are located far away from them, which does help add variety.

as someone who grew up playing pac-man and ms. pac-man the problem, though, is that this game doesn’t really let you get settled into a groove. in pac-man seeing the same board over and over again got a bit tiresome, but ms. pac-man has four boards which provides a good amount of variety. there’s no way of just looking at a board in super pac-man and knowing which doors the keys will unlock, which is good for variety but bad for getting into the zone. with more time i’m sure you could learn that board # X corresponds to configuration Y and i suppose eventually i would be able to adjust to having to spend every moment reacting on the fly, but in the end i just felt like the changes gave the game a new feel that just wasn’t as much fun. (compare to pac-man arrangement from 1996, which i quite enjoyed.) the wii remote controller worked fine, although the D-pad didn’t allow the really precise movements the game required: next time i’ll have to try using the nunchuk or wii classic controllers instead. last thing: as with other games on the compilation, the version of the game in namco museum megamix offers a stage select, which is great to have.

save the world with these super pac-man links:
– entry at wikipedia
– entry at strategywiki.org, includes a run-down of ports of the game
– table of games included in each of the various namco compilations
– apparently there was a pac-man board game by milton bradley. weird! the pac-man wikia has more info.

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pac-attack attacked

it feels like it’s been a little while since i’ve played a pac-man game. actually i’ve played a few off and on, but i haven’t sat down and “finished” one in a while. one game that i’ve come back to several times but finally sat down and spent a concentrated amount of time with was pac-attack, as it appears as part of pac-man collection for GBA (a SNES version was also released, and a version also appears as a bonus (in a remade version) in pac-man world 2 for gamecube and other platforms). this is the third game of that set of four that i’ve played, and of the four it’s the one that suffers least from being scaled down to the GBA’s tiny screen. unlike the other three games in the collection which are based on the classic maze-based pac-man gameplay, pac-attack is actually a tetris-esque puzzler and as a result doesn’t have to rely on a tiny zoomed-out perspective or a board divided across multiple screens.

i haven’t played much of the other versions, but on the GBA the game looks great and not painfully small. lest you think it’s a mediocre tetris clone, let me be quick to say that the game is actually one of the better tetris-based puzzlers, and for me ranks closely behind the classics panel de pon (aka tetris attack) and puyo puyo. despite it being similarly addictive, the game isn’t nearly as immediately gratifying, and the pace of it feels slower, in part due to the fact it doesn’t really have any combo system. instead, the game provides three-character blocks which consist of all blocks or all ghosts, some combination of ghosts and blocks, or a pac-man plus two blocks, and its main objective is to line up a trail of ghosts and then unleash your pac-man to gobble them up and cause the subsequent falling blocks to form rows. since a block containing a pac-man comes regularly (every fifth block), when forming long chains of ghosts part of the task is to discard the pac-men you don’t need while not screwing up the big score you’re creating. also, it seems a bit counterintuitive, but eating a long chain of ghosts doesn’t seem to net you a lot of points; rather, your focus has to be on the blocks falling into place into rows after you’ve cleared the ghosts. this obscured objective definitely makes the game harder to get into. also, the strategy for placing the blocks is itself more like games such as pipe dreams where blocks have functions as end pieces or middle pieces (in this case, of a string of ghosts), and again, having to think about these uses of the blocks while positioning them does make the core gameplay more of an effort than most others.

still, once you absorb the nuances of the gameplay the game is quite fun. but even though the gameplay is solid and satisfyingly challenging, even after playing for many enjoyable hours the game just doesn’t quite reach the level of the greats. like games like wario woods, pac-attack is fun but the mechanics are just a bit too fussy. nevertheless, i enjoyed my time spent with it and feel my skillz definitely have room to grow. i achieved a high score just shy of 500,000 so i’ll definitely be picking it up again at some point to at least break that barrier.

attack of the pac-attack links!
– entry at wikipedia
– review of VC SNES version at nintendolife.com
– the game’s apparently actually based on a game called cosmo gang the puzzle. the game baku baku by sega that followed pac-attack by a few years features somewhat similar gameplay.

pac-man madness

it always amazes me how little time reviewers spend with some games; case in point: pac-man collection for the GBA. even though the release is a collection of previously released games, it seems to me that there’s still a fair amount one could say about the particular versions of the games presented. maybe it’s just me, though (definitely not an unlikely possibility, seeing as how i just recently mulled over the differences in gameplay resulting from the difference in well size (6×9 vs 6×12, respectively) in the GB and SNES versions of the same game, tetris attack.)

i’d played through and enjoyed the version of pac-man arrangement that appeared in the collection, and even at that time i’d had my doubts about another game in the collection, the 3D novelty pac-mania. nevertheless, i decided to give it a closer look, and although none of the reviews i’ve read about the GBA version say much beyond that it’s a 3D version of pac-man in which the man has the ability to jump, it soon became pretty clear to me that this game’s port to the GBA makes the game extremely frustrating.

first off, gamespot’s reviewer’s comment that “… the GBA’s screen is zoomed in a little more closely than that of the arcade version” is a complete understatement. like the GBA-ized pac-man arrangement, pac-mania pretty much cuts the size of the original screen in half. this made the former harder but certainly not unplayable, as you still had a pretty good sense of where the four ghosts were at all times and it was fairly easy to find any stray dots you had left behind. but since the original pac-mania was already set to a zoomed-in view so that you could only see about 1/4 or 1/5 of the board at a time, halving that means that in the GBA version you’re only seeing about 1/8 of the board at a time. this is a huge disadvantage, and you’ll find that you’re constantly running headfirst into ghosts.

the original game ameliorated the fact that you have a limited view of the board by making the ghosts’ movements more predictable and by laying out routes that the ghosts tend to follow. this certainly would have helped balance the original game, but it definitely wasn’t enough to compensate for the drastically smaller view in the GBA game. and besides, with the smaller view it’s much harder to even recognize the patterns in the first place. given more time i may have more fully mastered the details of the ghosts’ patterns, but by that time i was already frustrated by the other feature inherent in both versions of the game: the number of ghosts. in both versions of pac-mania the boards take longer to navigate than most other pac-man games (e.g. the original pac-man and ms. pac-man) just by the nature of it being in 3D, so to make things more challenging the game adds more ghosts than the usual four. the number of ghosts varies but it quickly ramps up to 6 or 7 and reaches its maximum of 9 at the 23rd (and final) stage. i can imagine that avoiding all those ghosts would have been barely manageable in the original version, but in the GBA version the number of ghosts makes things completely impossible: in these later stages there are ghosts everywhere running around at full tilt, and because you have no idea where they are poor pac-man is constantly getting tackled, sandwiched, and headbutted.

unfortunately those weren’t my only complaints. the game includes two types of ghosts that jump, one green and one dark blue, but oftentimes in the midst of the frenzied gameplay the dark blue one looks too similar to the regular blue one and the purple one. this may also be more manageable with a bigger (and better-lit) screen than the GBA’s. another drawback is that there are only 4 boards, and one of those is the regular classic pac-man board. also there are two powerups, one that works as a short power pellet (but with added points) and one that gives a speed boost, but they show up relatively rarely and it’s too hard to get back to the center of the board to collect them, so the majority of the time it’s just not worth the effort. on the plus side, though, the game offers unlimited continues, and as with the other games in the collection it lets you change some settings, one of the more useful being that you can choose to end the game after 11 rounds instead of 23.

all in all not a great gaming experience, unfortunately. i don’t doubt that playing a full-screen version will definitely be a big improvement (there’s also an NES version that i’ll have to check out at some point), but even then i don’t see this as becoming a great favorite. the game was a nice change of pace, though, for the series, and i’m still as big a pac-man fan as ever. i’m betting that my next pac-man game will be a much more enjoyable experience.

wakka wakka wakka: manic pac-mania links:
– great FAQ at gamefaqs
– entry at wikipedia
– japanese site with pictures of sprites, comparison of the english vs japanese versions, and a link to this site, which has maps
– linked to this before, but still worth noting: the best pac-man clones and spinoffs, at racketboy.com
– a random sketch on youtube: “Lily Tomlin and Her Struggles with Pac Man Addiction”

pac-man artfully arranged

i’ve had pac-man collection on the GBA for quite some time now, and it’s an enjoyable, albeit somewhat flawed, lot. i’ve been a fan of the ol’ yellow hockey puck ever since the chuck e. cheese ms. pac-man days, and i had the original NES version of pac-man as well (w/ patterns, it should be noted, that are quite diff. from the arcade version). anyway, you can read about the games included in craig harris’s good review at ign.com. after playing through all four for a while, i focused on the first, the 1996 re-make pac-man arrangement, featuring 22 different boards, plus a “boss” stage. the game itself is a great sequel, as it features power-up pills, jump (i.e. teleport) and dash abilities, and “super ghosts” w/ various powers to annoy you. all the additions work extremely well in expanding the gameplay w/out straying too far from the original experience. as w/ other games w/ unlimited continues it’s not too hard to beat the game, but it’s rather more challenging to get to the final stage on one continue. figuring out patterns will def. help, but your regular pac-man strategy is what you’ll find yourself relying on.

the GBA version is limited by having to split the screen and scroll up and down to move from the top to the bottom, and no doubt the adjustment makes the game harder. but all in all it’s not too much of a problem to keep track of where the ghosts generally are at all times. i found it hard to play on the small GBA screen, and the DS directional pad was way too stiff for me, but using the gamecube game boy adapter and the d-pad on the gamecube controller proved to be the best combination for me. at some point i’ll pick up the namco collection that includes it, but w/ the exception of not having the split screen i doubt it’ll offer much of a new experience.

i’m looking forward to delving into the other 3 games in this set to a greater depth, though. i found the split-screen version of the orig. pac-man included hard to play, and the full-screen version is impossible on the tiny GBA screen and awkward using the cube adapter. as you’d expect the full-screen mode is very strangely calibrated and doesn’t feel very natural to play, although i suppose you could get adjusted to it. “pac-attack”, the tetris pac-man game, was quite fun, and i have def. plans to play through the puzzle mode (although you should note that in puzzle mode to make the order of the pieces the same for each board you have to manually change the setting. in the instructions it says to do this: “… highlight Puzzle, hold right on the Control Pad, and press the A Button”). still not sure how the 3-d “pac-mania” is going to fare, but i’ll try to keep an open mind.

and a thought to leave you with today, as namco says at the end of pac-man arr: “the game is never really over. someone … somewhere … is being chased by monsters!”

some pac-links:
– pac-man arrangement on wikipedia
– racketboy.com: rundown of the best pac-man clones and spinoffs
– codes for pac attack