WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA!
Now there’s a sound that every gamer should know by now, along with just about everyone else. Whether you grew up in the glorious days of the arcades or the advent of the modern console, this sound has endured across the years and become an indelible part of our culture. Which, when you think about it is high praise indeed for a videogame. It’s probably safe to say that you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who have no clue who Namco Bandai’s little yellow pill eating machine is.
Now, some thirty years after its initial release in 1980, Pac-Man has become a staple of the videogaming landscape with new titles and re-releases and ports of his classic exploits just about everywhere.
Enter the latest retro compilation featuring Pac-Man, Pac-Man Museum+. A direct follow up on 2014’s Pac-Man Museum, Pac-Man Museum+ plus packages fourteen titles from across the years into one package.
So what are we getting here?
The title list includes Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Battle Royale (for four players), Pac-Man Arrangement, Pac-Man Arrangement CS Ver., Pac-Land, Pac-Pal, Pac Attack (Tetris with Pac-Man), Pac In Time, Pac-Man Championship, Pac ‘n Roll Remix, Pac-Man 256 and Pac Motos. So that’s quite a bit of Pac for your buck, especially if you haven’t dipped much into the various collections released over the years.
Is it a great collection though? Well, your mileage may vary depending on your tastes and, possibly, when in your life you may have encountered some of these. Some of these are infinitely playable while others are mere curiosities and examples of how Namco have, over the years, sought to reinvent its character. A couple will leave you scratching your head but, as with all compilations, some games will just get more of your time than others.
The game’s presentation
One aspect I do love is the game’s presentation. You take control of Pac-Man in your very own arcade, replete with various arcade machines and decorations. This Hub is customisable too with more arcade cabinets for you to plop down, decorations to line up and wallpaper to coat the walls in. The initial cabinet layout is limited to a few titles which you can run up to and pop some coins in to play. The options button will bring up a side menu of all the titles available, though some are locked behind you having to play another game in the series twice.
Certain games have CRT filters while all of them have a brief history of the title. One aspect I did love about the games that debuted in Arcades is that, on the right and left side of the game screen when playing, are the games how to play instructions much as you’d find them printed on the sides of the actual arcade cabinets back in the day. For those who need it, worldwide Leaderboards are here as well.
Along with earning more coins by playing the games, there are mini achievements for each game and unlockables in the form of music, wallpapers, cabinets and more decorations. A nice little touch for the more you play, is that ghosts will come to visit your arcade and stick around. There’s a jukebox that you can listen to unlocked tunes with and a Gashapon vending machine to buy various Pac-Man and pals figures.
Traditional Pac-Man games suffer from input lag
There is one caveat to this package though. A fair amount of the older, traditional Pac-Man games suffer from input lag and imprecise controls. I found that I had to press in the direction I wanted to go well before I came to a corner or junction. Sometimes the games didn’t recognise the input or simply sent me off in the wrong direction. Now I haven’t played a Pac-Man game in ages, but I do remember the controls being spot-on tight, especially as the more stages you cleared, the faster the game got. And you needed to make twitch reactions to stay alive. More often than not, the faster the games got, the more imprecise or laggy the controls felt and plenty of times I found myself zooming into a ghost’s maw instead of taking the turn I’d intended to. I’m not sure if this is because of the emulation and recompiling that’s been done for this package – the game is running on Unity – but it did spoil some of my fun on the older titles.
Overall, though, it’s a pretty solid package. Pac-Man remains as timeless as ever and Pac-Man Championship Edition is a fantastically trippy looking update of said timeless game. There are some titles you’ll probably just play once, or twice to unlock others, but there are definitely some you’ll return to again and again. If you don’t have any of Pac-Man’s previous collections, then this is a pretty good one to invest in. And it will be even better if the developers solve that control niggle.
Publisher: BNE Entertainment
Developer: Now Production
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows
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