Mini Review – Pac-Man: CE DX
Arcade
My franchise will go on.
Rich
Despite being old enough to remember Pac-Man’s heyday, I’ve never been sold on it. While the first couple of levels are fun enough, it soon descends into unfairness with power-pills that last a split second and ghostly pricks of the highest order. Add to that Namco’s constant remarketing of that supposed classic and it’s enough to put anyone but Billy Mitchell off of the pizza-faced junkie.
2007’s Championship Edition changed all that. A game that took the game away from pattern memorisation and into a fun, reflex-based arena. The updated visuals matched the modernised gameplay perfectly and I still fire it up now for the occasional leaderboard refresh, so it was with some excitement that I waited for Championship Edition DX to arrive.
This town is coming like a ghost town.
Instead of the expected same gameplay/more levels route, Namco have actually changed the core mechanics behind the game, turning it back towards Pac-Man‘s memory-based roots but thankfully it does it with enough class that the results are almost as spectular as they were three years ago. You still have to eat pellets and items to refresh each half of the constantly-changing maze, but now you also have to awaken ghosts by passing them closely. Doing this puts the ghost on your tail and the big scores come from collecting a whole mob of the spectral sons of bitches and then turning on them when you get a power-pill.
CE DX‘s real triumph comes from the sheer number of ghosts that come after you and the lovely mix of mazes, modes and graphic styles on offer. Leaderboards are present for everything meaningful combination of the above (although irritatingly, the main dashboard leaderboard is based on cumulative score, not Championship II mode) which means you and your friend list should be in for some epic battles. The damp squib achievements (maxable within the hour) are a shame but aside from that, this is satisfyingly different from the previous game and very nearly as good.
8/10