• PAC-MAN™ CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION 2
  

  8 hours playtime

  14 of 18 achievements

This is like the original Pac-Man, but with a few notable changes: 1) the dots only go in a winding line around the maze rather than the maze being completely full of dots (follow it to the left and you’re “less likely” to run into the ghosts), 2) eating all the dots is optional; you just have to eat enough until the now-mandatory fruit appears, 3) Power Pellets can show up instead of the fruit, and likewise, they’re now mandatory as well (along with eating the ghosts afterward). To compensate, the fruit never disappears and the power pellets’ time is greatly extended. Another difference is the addition of green mini-ghosts that won’t hurt you, but will chain to the main ghosts when you get near them, effectively increasing the ghosts’ hitboxes. To compensate, touching the ghosts doesn’t kill you outright; you just bounce off them until they jump out of the maze (letting you get past where they were blocking you) before they fall back down and become harmful for a few seconds (without the mini-ghosts) before reverting back to normal.

The game has an adventure mode, but you have to play the score attack mode enough to unlock it. There are different level sets you can pick from, but they don’t play much different from each other. The main differences are between the difficulties: easy just has one normal ghost; the others are outlines that will never jump out of the maze to become harmful (you can only bounce off of them repeatedly, which can be especially annoying if they happen to be blocking the bounce pad you wanted to use). Regular mode has all four ghosts in their regular forms instead of the outline, which you’d think would let you beat levels faster, but now you have to chase four ghosts during power pellet mode instead of just one, and since their movements are random, you’ll actually end up spending more time trying to corner them (they can even break off from the “ghosts lines” which the game tells you are the only routes they’ll travel). Expert mode has the ghosts jump out of the maze after just one hit, which–again–sounds like it’d just improve the game’s flow instead of make things harder, but not only do extra lives not drop, but all fruits and power pellets appear in a bubble, which runs away from you when you approach it; in other words, you have to try to catch the goal while the ghosts are constantly, unpredictably getting in your way, so there’s actually a good chance you’ll get game over before your time runs out and your score is tallied.

And when you finally unlock adventure mode, you’ll realize it just copies the levels and objectives from score attack, often having the same mazes and objectives across multiple “levels.” There are some minor quality-of-life changes (like how in the “eat X amount of fruit” levels, the dots disappear as soon as the fruit appears so you don’t get distracted by the uneaten dots and run out of time), but it’s clear this mode was an afterthought. Even the difficulty system has problems: as far as I can tell, the only difference between them is the number of lives you have and the amount of time you have, but rather than make it adaptive like so many other games I’ve played (e.g. die too much, lose a star), you have to select it at the beginning. This means that if you pick a lower difficulty but beat it within the higher difficulty’s time limit and life restriction, you still only get the lower difficulty’s star(s). What makes this especially frustrating is that you can never be sure which would be best to pick; the regular levels can be beaten on Pro difficulty just fine, but the ones where you have to eat the four ghosts have such a low time limit on Pro difficulty (combined with the ghosts’ erratic movements on any difficulty) that it’s effectively luck whether or not you win in time.

However, the worst part is that you need to get a certain amount of stars to unlock later levels. At first, this isn’t too bad since the star requirement is equal to just one per level (meaning you could beat all previous levels on Normal difficulty or skip some if you beat others on Hard or Pro), but the final level requires ALL the stars to unlock. This means you have to beat all the levels (that already recycle content from score attack and each other) under a time limit that effectively makes many of them luck-based, just to unlock one more level which almost certainly also reuses mazes from score attack. That’s where I draw the line. Even if I really enjoyed the rest of the game, nothing ruins the experience like being forced to redo levels you’ve beaten and do them “better” just for basic progression, whether it’s something like this or whether it’s like those old late-80s/early-90s games that don’t have unlimited continues.

Overall, I don’t think I can recommend this one. The score attack mode is okay, I guess, but it’s not really my kinda thing, and adventure mode is just chock full of recycled content and unfair time limits, not to mention the sudden spike in required stars at the end. If you already have it or can get it for free, maybe give it a try, but don’t buy it.