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So I was chillin’ at a local Pokemon card game tournament (don’t judge) when my opponent
for the round stepped to my table. He wore a t-shirt featuring the iconic Pac-Man maze
we’ve all come to recognize throughout the years, but something was wrong; the right
side of the “screen” was a mess of sprite components, letters, numbers, colors, and
chaos. A majority of people looking at that shirt wouldn’t know what to make of it.
Perhaps the graphic designer fell over dead on his keyboard, all Terry Gilliam in Holy
Grail-like, and the printer didn’t pay attention to it at all. Perhaps it was some kind of
code. Perhaps this guy was trying to represent that he had a severed corpus colossum.
I gave him a knowing nod and said, “Nice kill screen.” His eyes brightened. He knew
that I knew. The unfortunate truth is, I only know because I’ve done research on the subject.
I’m actually pretty horrible at Pac-Man. But I was willing to bite the bullet for Pac-Man
Championship Edition, which, with a name like that, seems like it should be out of my range
by a longshot. The good news is, it really isn’t; the bad news is, it’s a wild deviation
from the Pac-Man of yore.
First off, clear your mind of any notion of “Clearing” a maze. That’s outmoded.
Pac-Man just doesn’t do that anymore. That’s been done for ever since the “perfect”
game of Pac-Man was recorded (3,333,360 points, NOW YOU KNOW), making it now a time-trial
to get to that score. (3 hours, 41 minutes, 22 seconds, NOW YOU KNOW MORE). So this Championship
Edition starts from that very concept; rather than having discrete mazes each with a beginning
and end, you have one maze and a time limit. Consume all of the pellets on one half of
the maze, and a fruit appears on the opposite side near the ghost box; grab it and the cleared
half is restocked.
Your standard Pac-Man elements return, power pellets, consumable ghosts, side chutes, the
whole spiel. You know how it works, it’s Pac-Man. Difference is, now you’re doing
it to see how quickly you can scarf down points, rather than how deep into the game you can
survive. Not to say survival is guaranteed, mind; you’ve still got a finite number of
lives, and the ghosts (along with everything else) are crazy fast. Chances are, you will
get caught trying to make a turn. Chances are, it will take you a while to get the hang
of this new paradigm. But when you do, you’ll find that it’s a very logical evolution,
at its core.
Speaking of evolution, man is this game shiny. Let’s be fair, Pac-Man was never really
the first candidate for high-def graphics, but if you’re going to be on the latest
generation of hardware, you might as well make the best of it. Adding to the experience
is a detailed numerical breakdown of your performance after each game, enumerating points
from pellets, fruit, and ghosts, as well as any achievements earned on that particular
run. It’s a brave new world for the little round yellow guy. But it’s nice to see a
classic idea adapting and improving in a new format. Even if iconic killscreens, suitable
for wearing on a shirt, are a thing of the past.