Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX – 1/1 – Henry Arrambide

Common Occurrence. 

    Being born of the NES/SNES generation and starting there, developing a fuller palate during the N64/PSX generation, and then coming to gaming maturity (hahahahahahah good one) during the Xbox/PS2/GCN (never understood the GCN abbreviation)  generation, there are certain biases and stereotypes I’d probably be expected to carry – “New games are shit, OoT is the best game ever, jRPG’s are the best genre, Western Devs suck, all you kids play is Halo and CoD, grimdark sucks, Gears of War doesn’t have enough color, old games (pre-snes) are too ugly and don’t have storylines, there’s no point in playing Donkey Kong, Zelda created everything.” I think that’s enough.

    Well…all the kids are playing is Call of Duty. But you know what? Gears of War is great. Donkey Kong is great. Pre-snes games are fantastic because they aren’t trying to tell a story or be a movie, they’re trying to be games. Which brings me to Pac-Man.


    Pac-Man sucks. Inherently, before I really grew up and started thinking too hard about videogames, I just knew it. This game sucks. Let’s compare it to its contemporaries to really figure out why. I’ll use Donkey Kong. What a fun game. You play as Mario, scale levels, dodge obstacles, get the woman. The objectives are straightforward and on-screen, and you know what? Donkey Kong has some semblance of plotting and progression. Sure after you beat the screen where the big ape falls to his death the game resets and you’re at level one again, but the progress is felt. The score is held over. When I was a kid I’d plop DK in and just know what to do. There was an antagonist and obstacles and a clear goal. Additionally there was a score to chase, a points system which worked with the mechanics of the game, which kept the players invested in competition long after you beat the screen in which DK dies.  (Ya’ll should watch a little documentary called The King of Kong)

Pictured: Not fun.

    Pac-Man though? Well the characters were Pac-man and the Ghosts. Pac-Man can run from the ghosts, and with special pellets he could eat the ghosts. Alright then, there’s our game – kill the ghosts, right? Oh, no, clear the map.  Thus the dichotomy begins. Is Pac-Man a game in which you’re chasing the score or completing the map? Well, you got to clear the map to advance you see – while dodging the ghosts. Yet a huge mechanic of the game apparently was the hunter/hunted dynamic of the ghosts – you did this for score. But you didn’t need to do this to clear the map. Truth be told I always found it easier to just get the power pellets so the ghost would run away and use that time to consume pellets because, hey, it’s easier than eating the ghosts because they’ll just come back in their Non-Blue form and fuck up your style. What happens is the two simple objectives – obtaining high scores and advancing the maps – fall into direct competition with each other (even odder, Pac-man is one of the few old school arcade games where you can get a PERFECT score – so what the hell kind of competition is there then when it comes to score chasing?). I’m sure that the original Pac-man is genius on some level and I just “Don’t get it” (or hey, it was a profitable game and needed to be milked for 30+ years without changing because goddamn if we change it our cash cow is ruined), but the fact that Pac-Man Championship Edition DX throws out all this confusion and makes the game leaner, more direct, and most importantly THAT MUCH MORE ENJOYABLE, goes to show you there’s some merit to this argument.

    In Pac-Man CEDX, all those things are fixed – additionally Pac-Man who was once a frictionless ball running from ghosts on semi-unpredictable paths which made the game feel somewhat out of your control – is given a weight, along with a totally new treatment of ghosts, which gears the game towards skill in chasing a direct goal rather than some skill and luck helping you through a schizophrenic mess.

Pictured: Actual style not constructed by technological limitations.

    The confusion is gone. This is a strict score chase. You can’t ‘clear the map’ and advance a level – rather, the map is constantly shifting, changing, and new paths and pellets are popping up. You aren’t going through stationary boards trying to advance your level; you’re trying to survive an ever-changing labyrinth and get the most points. The ghosts are no longer obstacles in clearing the map but an ever-growing antagonistic force in the perpetual labyrinth that, when the time is right, can be flipped into a bigass chain of edible points. The Hunter-Hunted mechanic is made into something more than a gimmick that impedes your progress – there are in theory an infinite number of ghosts which can spawn in the maze (yes, rather than four ghosts spawning from a central box, sleeping ghosts are placed throughout the maze, new ones spawning with each shift of the player), and if you can learn how to manipulate these ghosts into giving chase and moving through the maze (ghost mechanics are totally reworked from the original game) how you want, a power pellet becomes a strategic victory in which you munch down twenty or so ghosts in a row, giving you huge score bonuses and a crunchy taste of victory.

    There. Problem solved. Pac-man is suddenly an infinitely replayable score-chase. It took 30 years for it to happen, but suddenly, bam, I’m playing it daily. In addition to these changes, ghost evasion is given this nice weight by the game going into a sort of slow-motion bullet-time effect whenever you’re in a tight spot. At first it seems like a cheap mechanic, but when you’re going at high speeds (as you keep playing, the more pellets you devour and ghosts you dodge makes the game go faster) it adds a tension (yeah, Pac-man becomes more intense than any cutscene-laden ‘epic’ story type game) when you can barely keep track of everything moving on screen only for everything to suddenly slow down as you spot Pac-man, cornered, and must think fast. Can you escape? Or do you bomb everything? Yeah, that’s right, bombs are in the game, the only button command. They destroy all active ghosts. It may seem cheap to someone seasoned in the classic Pac-man mechanics, but once you realize 1) Bombs destroy huge chains of ghosts, and therefore huge score possibilities, 2) the game speed is reduced when you bomb, slowing down your score-potential, and finally 3) sometimes there’s so many goddamn ghosts out there you just need to clear paths, they make PERFECT sense.  

I didn't even mention that aside from traditional score chasing, you can mess with a variety of fun gametypes...like playing a map IN THE DARK.

    So yeah. Great game. Right up there with Tetris for me now. Additionally the maps are pretty cool and the graphics are quite excellently trippy.  Only down side is probably the music. I end the review now and tell you to go play the game.