Pac-Man Championship Edition DX Review

If, a few years ago, you’d told me that one of my favourite Xbox LIVE Arcade titles would be a re-imagining of Pac-Man, I’d probably have laughed in your face. If this didn’t deter you – if you insisted – I’d have tried to set you on fire. I’d have been wrong to do so, and not just from a moral standpoint: Pac-Man Championship Edition was a fantastic little game. It took gameplay so ingrained into the gamer psyche that it’s become rote and boring, and twisted it just enough that it became something new and unique.
And blimey, but Namco Bandai has surprised me again. Not just in the sense that Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is a better game – which it is – but that I had absolutely no idea it was coming out. Am I out of the loop, all of a sudden?
Championship Edition (the first game) kept the traditional format of Pac-Man, and if you really need me to explain that then you’re clearly new to both gaming and pop culture. Click this, please, and educate yourself. Championship Edition’s stroke of genius was to divide the maze into two halves. Eating the dots on one half spawned a fruit; eating the fruit re-arranged the corridors of the completed half, and put a load more pellets in. Setting up the order in which these halves came gave Namco Bandai the ability to make the mazes flow, letting you proceed naturally from one side of the screen to the other, grabbing fruit along the way to refresh the mazes. And you weren’t going endlessly – it was all about the highest score you could attain within tight time limits.
DX tweaks the formula further, providing an experience that caters perfectly to both casual players and hardcore score-seekers. This time there are nine courses, each with a wide variety of individual “levels” ranging from the first game’s Score Attack modes (giving you 5-10 minutes to rack up the highest score you could) through Time Attack (collect a predetermined amount of fruit within a tight time limit) and Ghost Combo (eat as many ghosts before the power pellet wears off.) It’s a damn sight more than the first game’s six courses, each of which contained a relatively paltry single game mode.
But more courses do not a better game make. No, the things that really make DX stand out from its predecessor are the further tweaks made to the traditional formula, and these stem from one major twist: more ghosts.
In addition to typical Pac-Man ghosts, which either attempt to follow you or cut you off, DX adds in sleeper ghosts which line the mazes and block off paths. Travelling past one puts it into an awake state; if a ghost chasing you passes by an awake ghost, it starts following on behind them. The end result is that, by the time you’ve picked up a few fruit and gone through a few boards, you’ve got a great fat conga line of ghosts following you.
More ghosts following behind means more points when you finally get a power pellet and can devour the whole lot in one go, and this is where the essence of the Ghost Combo mode lies, although – despite how cathartic it is to devour 30 ghosts in five seconds – it’s probably the weakest game mode on offer as infinite lives and weight time limits mean there’s no tension. Equally obviously, playing ghost conga isn’t without its own quirks: get a load following you and you’re almost playing a game of Snake. You’ve got a tail of ghosts behind you, and if you try to loop back on yourself too quickly, you’ll run into the back-end. This is where the other unique twists come in.
{PAGE TITLE=Pac-Man Championship Edition DX Review Page 2}
When you’re about to run into a ghost the game goes into slow-motion, giving you a chance to either correct your course or use one of the new bomb items, which blast nearby ghosts back to their safe area in the middle. It might sound like these features make the game too easy, but really, they make it more accessible to gamers of any skill. The game speeds up gradually as you score points, but dying or using bombs slows the speed down. A slower Pac-Man means less time to get points, but less chance of getting overwhelmed – so, the players who die the most or use the most bombs are playing a slower and slightly easier variant, while those who never use the crutches and don’t die are playing at hyperspeed. Think of it as a clever auto-difficulty system with the highest end going so fast it’s almost impossible to react in time.
The boards themselves are surprisingly individual. “Championship” eschews sleeper ghosts and instead acts, essentially, as the original Championship Edition game did. “Darkness” only lights up small areas around Pac-Man and the ghosts, with the maze largely in the dark. “Highway” gives you plenty of turnings to make your escape – or for ghosts to cut in front of you and trap you – while “Half” is essentially a puzzle mode, forcing you to pick the right route each time. Each has a unique twist, and everybody will have their own favourites.
But for all of this, DX really comes down to one thing: lines. As I stated earlier, getting high scores demands that you work out the best route to take at any given time. You need to be grabbing all the pellets and waking up all of the ghosts as efficiently as possible, and the perfect route to do this might criss-cross between the two halves of the board. Finding this line and sticking to it is key, but you’ll inevitably cock it up. The game might start moving too fast and you miss a turning, you might decide to save your ghost conga line for the next power pellet, or a roaming ghost might force you to use a bomb. Getting things back on track and not succumbing to the chaos is the real challenge.
And that’s where it all lies. For all the talk of mechanics, Pac-Man Championship Edition isn’t about rote memorisation; it’s about playing by the seat of your pants, no matter your individual skill level. Namco Bandai has proven, for a second time, that even the oldest and most well-known game designs can be revitalised and made exciting.
There’s a timeless pseudo-retro presentation that could well stem from a Rez-inspired nightmare; there’s a solid amount of challenge no matter your skill; there’s a good amount of content and a constant sense of progression; and there’s the ever-important one-more-go feel because your failures and deaths are down to your own hubris rather than unfair game mechanics. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX will be the sort of thing you’ll pop on whenever you get five minutes, and it’s perfect for that – assuming you can put it down after just one or two rounds. That, really, is the biggest challenge the game has to offer, and acknowledging that challenge is the biggest praise I can give it.