By Michael Lowell

December 2, 2010

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX
PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (reviewed on PlayStation 3)
Developed and Published: Namco Bandai
Released: September 17, 2010 (Xbox 360), September 23, 2010 (PlayStation 3)

Five years after Pac-Man won the internet in 1980, Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov unleashed Tetris on the godless communists and beyond.  Of course, there was that slight issue of Pajitnov going for over a decade without making a dime from his landmark creation.  You know, Soviet government and all.  By the time he got the rights to his child back, he had a small problem: How do you sell Tetris all over again?  Everybody who wanted Tetris already had Tetris.  Crazy answer: The Tetris Company’s licensees dumbed down Tetris.

The original versions of Tetris were rather unforgiving.  A single mistake was bad enough.  Stack that mistake against a ruthless random tetromino generator and death could come very quickly.  The fear of losing isn’t what makes Tetris fun.  Clearing the playing field is.  So goodbye to random tetrominoes and hello to pieces that could be placed in a reserve capacity, manuevered indefinitely, and maneuvered in ways that defied common sense physics.  And developers side-stepped any complaints of the reduced difficulty by changing the rules of engagement.  “It’s not about scoring as many points before you hit the top of the screen.  It’s about clearing lines as quickly as possible.  Period.”

Namco has clearly learned from the evolution of Tetris.  2007′s Pac-Man Championship Edition was the first leap forward.  And now, 2010′s Pac-Man is the affirmation.  To cliche the hell out of this situation, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is bigger, faster, stronger.

Taking a nod from its Golden Age roots, Namco does the right thing and doesn’t complicate the situation.  It’s totally Pac-Man.  This round, the playing field is split in two.  Clearing all the dots on one half of the playing field will spawn fruit or another consumable on the opposite side.  Eating the fruit will transform half of the playing field into a new layout, complete with sleeping ghosts that will join into a train of death as you alert them.  Play your cards right, and they’ll grow longer and longer until you can inflict genocide with a power pellet.  Keep eating everything in your path until the time is up.  High score or fastest time wins.  Plays simple, but good luck mastering it.

What’s incredible is how DX is more faithful to the 1980 original than 1981′s superior Ms. Pac-Man.  You could conquer Pac-Man’s pattern-drivien artificial intelligence by adhering to a series of pre-set paths.  Ms. Pac-Man set a long-standing high point for the maze genre by pushing smarter ghosts into the mix.  Under optimal circumstances, the progression and paths in DX never change.  If you follow the path, you’ll get the high score.  You won’t have to worry much about evading ghosts, as their artificial intelligence is also pattern-driven.  But the game’s frenetic pace demands you’ll have to work your way out of some tough situations.  And once you take a substandard route, all bets are off.  Pattern memorization becomes secondary.  (Take note, modern video game industry.  This is how you do tightly-scripted single-player campaigns.)

If you’ve ever played a turbo-activated version of Ms. Pac-Man, you know what you’re getting into.  It’s fast.  Really fucking fast.  Sensory overload is in full-force.  DX almost feels analogous to a puzzle game, where your brain is firing as rapidly as your fingers.  You have to keep an eye on patrolling ghosts, you have to keep an eye on the evolution of the board, and you have to quickly determine the quickest path of action.  Good luck doing all of this while managing the finesse to navigate Pac when he’s going all jetplane through the maze.  And should you manage the quality feat of mastering one playing field and its alternative game modes, you have eight more boards to conquer.  Retro gaming had a rather unseemly habit of testing a narrow range of skills (namely pattern memorization and reflexes) and it’s rather wonderful to see one of its classic creations boast a decidedly-modern challenge level.

It all works because this brand of Pac-Man isn’t about cheating death.  The game’s most devout fans learned how to do that very early on.  It’s about effiency.  It’s about getting a high score as quickly as possible.  That may sound very obvious, but it’s central to how the game functions.  Take death.  You die.  The punishment isn’t losing a life.  You get plenty of those.  The punishment is shaving several seconds off your playthrough as Pac respawns in the place where he died.  Take bombs.  They reset all of the ghosts in the playing field and return them to the middle of the board.  You can score as many as a dozen bombs in a single game.  Does it dumb the product down?  Hardly.  Like death, bombs also cost you valuable seconds.  Sleeping ghosts won’t make chase unless the train is following behind you.  And if you complete a section without earning their anger, they’re gone for good.  That’s a lot of points to give up.

In a game where optimal routes and optimal timing are everything, a couple of wasted seconds are the difference between a high score and nothing special.  Namco has parlayed the exceptionally accessible Pac-Man game model into a neon-lit monster that demands the player cannot take a second off.  Downtime is dead.  The tension of losing your last life has been replaced with the tension of shaving seconds off your previous run.  And the already-wonderful world of Pac-Man is better off because of it.

Yeah.  Game of the Year shit goin’ down in the maze, y’all.

5 out of 5

(Games rated five-out-of-five are events.  Among the best the year offered.  If you can’t put aside a couple bucks for this, give up gaming.  It’s not going to please you.)

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