Once again I find myself engrossed with a certain circular character and his rabid insistence on eating ’til he pops. Or perhaps just until the ghosts spook him to an early grave, this is. It’s time to review Namco’s Pac-Man.
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Created by Namco in 1980, I still find it staggering that a company made such a mint off what is basically a yellow circle eating smaller white circles. And that’s not to mention the merchandise sold and the series upon series of cartoons; from the original show to a newer one that started in 2013, Pac-Man seems to have a never ending amount of potential. With him being involved in more than thirty licensed spin-offs and countless clones, it’s no wonder that the character is one of the most recognisable in video games and indeed media in general.
When I first played Pac-Man, I didn’t think it’d have held me as much as it did and my first play wasn’t exactly filled with the same passion I have for it nowadays. In fact, I didn’t really like it much! I was a child who grew up with titles for the Amiga 500: Lemmings, Valhalla, Zool, Putty and Superfrog to name a few. I also didn’t have a SNES so I missed out on a lot of the best original games, such as Space Invaders, Pong and the likes. Once I became a teenager who realised his life would revolve around games in some way shape or form, I picked Pac-Man back up and haven’t put it down since.
In terms of a plot, there isn’t really much of one. You basically have your little yellow hockey-puck called Pac-Man who has one goal in life: eat as many Pac-Dots as he possibly can. But while he is on his quest to fill himself, he has to avoid the bad guys: the ghosts! These are characters who have the super names of Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, and the four beings have one goal in their lives: to catch our yellow hero.
It’s not truly a compelling story but you get to use a little bit of imagination! You could always picture that Pac-Man is a superhero who needs the large Power Pellets to defeat the evil-doing ghosts. Power Pellets are the larger dots which he eats, giving him the ability to become bigger (although in the original title this doesn’t show up on screen). Once he’s transformed, he’s able to gobble up the ghosts who are terrified of the much larger Pac-Man – so scared they turn blue!
You usually play the game by using an analogue stick. Pac-Man propels himself forwards without any extra intervention from you: you simply have to control which way he goes next. This does mean you can wriggle the control back and forth to have him switch about on the spot should you need to. To beat a level of the game, you need to eat all of the Pac-Dots and Power Pellets. Every time a ghost hits you without you eating a Power Pellet, you lose a life with Pac-Man screaming so loudly and in such agony that you feel his intense pain and suffering… don’t you feel bad now?! Oh I am sorry readers, let me take a deep breath a moment. I always get worked up when hearing about Pac-Man deaths.
Whenever you eat a Pac-Dot, you get ten points. Whenever you eat a Power Pellet, you get fifty points. Whenever you eat a ghost, you get points that scale up: 200, 400, 800, 1200. You must get all four in a row to get the full 1,200 pointer for eating ghosts. That means, every time you manage to eat all four ghosts, you get a whopping 2,600 points! You get your first extra life at 10,000 points, then at 30,000. It doesn’t go up by the same amount of points each time, but you do keep getting extra lives which will become vital later in the game. As you progress in levels the ghosts become faster, the points for eating fruits gets much higher and the ghosts eventually even become immune to Power Pellet effects! Spooky, scary ghosts they are!
There’s not much to say about the graphics and sounds, but you need to register this game for the time it was made when there was some major limitations in technology. Pac-Man looked and sounded fantastic at its release. First of all, the graphics are simple yet effective. It’s simply a yellow circle which opens a triangular mouth, then goes around eating small white dots. A larger white dot indicates the Power Pellets and the ghosts are of different colours: red, blue, pink and orange (Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde respectively).
The sounds are really simple yet very effective too, although I am sure many people could get annoyed with the constant ‘wakka wakka’ noises. As Pac-Man eats a Pac-Dot, you get that famous sound. Whenever the ghosts are retreating from you thanks to eating a Power Pellet, you hear the sounds of scared retreating ghosts. As you go around you hear a constant whirring noise, which indicates the ghosts are around and you can distinctly tell when they are going back to their home in the centre.
This game was truly different but at the time it was released, basically every title was truly different. It possibly started off the maze game genre, which isn’t really that greatly received now-a-days but it was brilliant fun back in the day. Pac-Man stands against the test of time quite happily as it’s a simple yet fun time waster which you can annoy friends with by saying ‘Look at my score! I’m better at Pac-Man than you!’ (Here’s a tip: Never say that to your friends.) But it suffers one problem in terms of the gameplay; although there is some difference in how the ghosts react and the speed of the game, there is just one map which you play over and over again. Until you reach that level…
The pictures in this article were taken courtesy of Web Pac-Man, which is a free to play online version of the game. It’s not quite the original but it’s not bad at all. Pac-Man will always be one of my all time favourite games and even though I’ve not rated the title highly in many aspects, the gameplay is brilliant and the replay value is phenomenal. I’d recommend playing if you’ve not yet for some reason because you must be one of the few people on Earth who has not.
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GROUNDBREAKING
DO THAT HIP NEW GAME, PONG NEXT!
jki<3u
Man, Pong iz well wiked liek, I thnk it rks lol! My PC not gud enuf 4 dat gfx, init?!
1080p 60fps intense multiplayer battles and score tracking
“Move over Call of Duty, this is the new standard to which all games are judged.” -IGN
“Pong helped me identify myself as transgender with old men in ballons fetish.” -Kotaku
“Ever realize that this is a game about two shafts smacking a ball?” -Destructoid
… Maybe I SHOULD be the guy to review Pong on 1001-Up? Guys: Move over, I’m gonna review Pong!