At this point, you'll probably be muttering about chunky old-style 4-way joysticks and shouting at the joypad. The price of staying alive is the constantly rising gameplay speed, and once you start getting into the realms of 40 and above, the battle to keep Pac-Man on course becomes an increasingly futile one. As controversial as these fundamental changes undoubtedly sound, they keep the game flowing in a completely thrilling way. The game even gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card by slowing the action down to a crawl if you're in imminent danger of crashing into a ghost. It does come with a small penalty, though, dialling the game's speed down a notch and therefore slightly reducing your ability to rack up a leaderboard-troubling score.ġ5 minutes of our time in Pac-Man's company. With a simple tap of the trigger, you'll not only avoid losing a life, but save the associated time penalty that comes with being out of action for a few precious seconds. Some ghosts will even top up your time bar, so eking out your feast becomes a strategic balancing act as you weave your way along the most effective route to score-based glory.Īnother interesting tweak comes in Pac-Man's new ability to bomb all his pursuers back to the centre of the maze. The payback is that you can turn the tables in spectacular style, chowing down on literally dozens of them and clocking up a massive score in the process. If Pac-Man moves past them, they wake up and give chase, allowing you to build up a huge, snaking conga line of ghosts if you can hold off from eating a power pill for long enough. The most obvious change, initially, is the presence of stationary green ghosts, snoozing at various points around the maze. Remember how the original Pac-Man Championship Edition turned everyone into bug-eyed crazies for about four months of 2007? Remember how it got people into Pac-Man that didn't even like the flappy-jawed yellow blob? Well, this DX edition has the audacity to improve everything we loved about the first one tenfold, and not even warn us about it in advance.Īs usual, it's all about clocking the best possible high score, but Namco Bandai gets around the repetition by not only upping the maze count from two to nine, but also by layering on new mechanics and new modes that twist the formula in a frantic and relentlessly exciting new direction. The lively electronic soundtrack builds in intensity as the game timer ticks down and always gets me leaning forward in my chair.Well this certainly caught us by surprise. You can select from a variety of maze skins and character designs for each game, running from the 3D Pac-Mania characters to pixilated retro sprites. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX also looks and sounds great. You can comb through the leaderboards for extensive data on all the many maps and modes, but there are other really nice touches: your current ranking is displayed right on the title screen, the Course Select screen, and again within the menu for each maze. Like I said, it's all about the high score, and Championship Edition DX provides many friendly ways to see how you rank against the competition. When you first dive into Championship Edition DX, only the standard Championship II course is unlocked, but each round you play usually unlocks a new maze or mode. Each maze also has many game options such as Score Attack, Time Trials, and Ghost Combos (see how many ghosts you can eat with one Power Pellet). Dungeon, on the other hand, has long, cramped corridors. For example, Spiral has several coils that are easy to get trapped in. DX has nine mazes, most of which are new creations that offer a lot of variety. While the first Championship Edition was super fun, there were only a couple of mazes and modes. This is also a key technique in getting those high scores. Finally grabbing that Power Pellet and devouring a hundred ghosts in a row is one of the most satisfying things I've done in a game this year. Hold off on eating a Power Pellet long enough and you may find dozens of ghosts trailing behind you in a long conga line. You'll see the spirits sleeping around a maze, and as Pac-Man whizzes by they'll wake up and give chase. Pac-Man now has many more ghosts to contend with.
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