Ive honestly never liked Pac-Man. At all. Here I will take a page from all of the middle-aged mohawkers submitting guitar effects pedals reviews on Harmony Central, and say that Ive been playing guitar for 35 years, have owned Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, and SGs, used Bigsby tremolos and Gibson Vibrolas, have covered everything from AC/DC to Rage Against the Machine, and Ive never found a better fuzz pedal than the traditional Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, so trust me when I say that the Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff is a pansy-ass piece of shit.
Take all the guitar terms in the previous sentence, and replace them with the names of game consoles and software franchises.
Why dont I like Pac-Man? In the past, when I had to stand on a milk carton, I played it in pizza joints because my dad figured I loved it; I played it on Atari 2600 because it existed, and eventually, I played Ms. Pac-Man on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I cant say I hated Ms. Pac-Man I just didnt like it. It wasnt enough. It didnt have any balls, machismo, guts, or what have you. In later years leading right up until Pac-Man CE was released for Xbox Live Arcade, in fact Id identify that I just didnt like the way Pac-Man controlled. It felt too loose and weird, which just didnt totally mesh with how tight the game was conceptually.
If youd have asked me how to make a better Pac-Manning experience, I probably would have told you Id think about it and then get back to you later. That night, when you werent watching, I would have cut you off of my LiveJournal friends list, and then set my own journal to friends-only.
Its a hell of an IQ-test question: how do you make Pac-Man better? Its like asking me to list, off the top of my head, as many verbs that start with V as possible (Validate, verify, vindicate, et cetera). I couldnt think of any possible solutions, probably because Im not a genius game designer. Maybe I could be, I dont know, though like my mother always told me, I guess Im kind of lazy. Either way, its evokes ambiguously positive emotions that original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was reportedly responsible for the virtuosic Pac-Man CE it makes me feel good to know that it took him nearly 30 years to come up with all these ideas.
Was Namco ever trying, though, to make Pac-Man anything more than an icon? Judging by the quality of every game starring Pac-Man, it would seem that none of them were made for any more generous reason than to keep bumping his name to the top of the gamer subconscious, to keep telling people who play games that, hey, this company called Namco has an archetypically deep heritage, and theyre not afraid of it!
Theyve been plopping remakes and reissues of Pac-Man out on the lunchroom tray of humanity for the better part of this most recent decade. They never hesitate to flop the original game onto one of their six-game Museum volumes, you know, which generously use up about 1/3000th of their storage medium. As of this writing, in addition to Pac-Man CE, there are two other Pac-Mans on Xbox Live Arcade the original, and Ms. Pac-Man, both with six-dollar price tags, ugly borders and awesome online ranking leaderboards, which can only be accessed if you unlock the full version of the game.
(Really, for fucks sake, Microsoft, lets stop using the word unlock. Its not like were using keys to play these games nor even, in the gaming sense, are we using points or in-game currency. Using the word Unlock makes it seem like we can purchase the games using the Gamer Points we get from unlocking Achievements. Just use the word Purchase, please. Its bad enough that youve made your own currency with Microsoft Points, and its precisely because youve made your own currency with which to buy things that its ridiculous that you award another kind of Points to people who do retarded stuff in games, which in turn makes it more ridiculous that you use the same word (Unlock) to indicate the option to purchase an Xbox Live Arcade game as you use to indicate a player being awarded an Achievement.)
Anyway, yeah, who wants to pay 400 Microsoft Points to play the original Pac-Man, when you can just pick up Ridge Racer 6 from a bargain bin and play Pac-Man to your hearts content on the loading screen? When (not if) you get bored, you can just play Ridge Racer 6, which has nitro in it, which is awesome. However, it doesnt have slipstreaming in it, even though Ridge Racer 5 did, because they wanted to save slipstreaming for Ridge Racer 7, which is as marginal an upgrade as youre ever to see in videogames, though once youve played 7, 6 and its Pac-Man loading screen should seem utterly and horribly broken. After years of not upgrading the number in the series title, Namco sprung Ridge Racer 6, a statement of their staunch support of the Xbox 360, only to announce Ridge Racer 7 for the PlayStation 3 literally months later.
Theres a point to be made of this slipstream-talk, however muddy it might be: this is the sort of bullshit Namco does. More to the point: the Pac-Man loading screen of Ridge Racer 6 isnt even a loading screen. Its just there. From the second it pops up, it says at the bottom of the screen: Press the A button to begin Ridge Racer 6. Why do they even put Pac-Man there in the first place? One slightly morbid reason is that its a throwback to Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, which let you play Galaxian at the pre-game loading scene. Many Namco games since then have let you play a game at the loading screen, so maybe Ridge Racer 6 was slyly trying to stir up nostalgia in the kinds of people who give a shit. I wonder what happened to the guy who suggested the idea of putting a game in the loading screen. Hes probably 65 years old right now, with teeth the color of wooden shit, and just finished paying off the loan for his mid-size condominium in a boring neighborhood in Tokyo. Ive probably walked past his home a hundred times and never realized it. Probably some younger guy came up with the idea, and passed it on to the older guy out of respect so that the older guy could get a promotion, after which he would remember the younger guy and promote him some day. The younger guy probably never smoked a single cigarette until he was twenty-four years old.
Pac-Man is not just for loading screens no, hes also all over scoreboards in the Ridge Racer series, as well. Every time you hit a checkpoint, he pops up on your time display, chasing ghosts. This retro-gamer appeal is sprinkled into Namco games quite viciously, aiming to be the sort of thing some surreal-Dig-Dug-painting-owning poser on a UK games forum hears about and then says SOLD, maybe with some exclamation marks.
Also, a little Pac-Man badge appeared on Klonoas hat. Klonoa was Namcos would-be mascot, star of a bland 2.5D game released for the PlayStation; some people still think that game was Jesus, and it kind of sucks to be those people. Klonoa had potential, anyway, though Namco didnt care, and immediately resumed exhuming Pac-Mans iconic profile and propping his corpse up in the weirdest places.
At the same time, developers all over the place claimed to love the original Pac-Man and tightened-up Ms. Pac-Man. Shigeru Miyamoto said, in an interview, that without Pac-Man, there would have been no Donkey Kong, and I guess hes probably right. Donkey Kong is, subtly, about as inspired by Pac-Man as a game can get without also playing a lot like Pac-Man. The one game publisher in the world to understand the core of Pac-Man the least, ironically, has been Namco: since the success of the two canon games in the series, Namco has used and abused the character on numerous numbing occasions, such as the dull platformer Pac-Land, which no one likes unless they realize first that no one else likes it, or Pac-Man World, a 3D take on Pac-Land, where Pac-Man is now a sphere instead of a circle, which makes the fact that he has legs all the more freakish, and the fact that he has a speaking voice actually quite terrifying, and the fact that the stages lack actual design unforgivable. Recently, theres been Pac-Pix on the DS, a game less tangentially related to the original Pac-Man than Pac-Man World, though jarring all the same: you have to keep drawing pictures of Pac-Man, his mouth facing in the correct direction, so that he munches the perpetually spawning ghosts. Pac-Pix, while a tiny bit interesting, misses the core of Pac-Man the game is no longer about the hunted becomes the hunter dynamic, its just about drawing pictures big enough and quickly enough.
Arguably the most inspired of all the Pac-Man rehashes was Pac-Man VS, designed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This was back when Nintendo was pushing the feature to connect a Gameboy Advance to a Gamecube, and use the Gameboy Advance as a controller. This era also brought us the dismal Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (its as much a challenge to try to enjoy it alone as it is to find three people willing to play it at the same time) and the friendship-wrecking The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords.
It might be most accurate to say that, back in those days, Nintendo was forcing all developers to include some level of GBA-Gamecube connectivity in all games. Player two could use a GBA to control remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell, for example. Games like Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles were big-scale brainstorms. Pac-Man VS was a lot smaller-scale, and as such, Nintendo and Namco had no clue what to do with it. Ultimately, they just slopped it onto some discs that included other games. I guess that was about the best place for it.
Pac-Man VS isnt so much a game as a reason to scream. Essentially, its Pac-Man, where one player plays as Pac-Man and the other players play as the ghosts. Only the ghosts cant see the entire playing field. Pac-Man, however, can see the ghosts. The Pac-Man player plays with the Gameboy Advance. The other players control their ghosts on the television. If it doesnt brilliant, its because its subtle. You really have to play it to get it, and playing it is, as you might imagine, kind of a hard thing to arrange: there is no one-player mode.
Yet none of these games cut to the heart of Pac-Man, where the ghosts hunt you until you eat a Power Pellet, at which point the tables turn and the ghosts flee in terror, because now you can eat them. This is a really good dynamic, and its just been sitting there locked up in a clunky shell for decades, reissued time and time again as-is by its shrugging, money-hungry parents, or else being shot in the feet and told to dance in monsterpieces like Pac-Man World 2, with its elbow jabbing, LOLing bullshit cut-scenes wherein Pac-Man talks about constantly being hungry, and Ms. Pac-Man gives Pac-Man a birthday cake with a Power Pellet on top of it.
When Microsoft announced at their press conference at Tokyo Game Show 2006 that they would be holding the worlds first Pac-Man World Championship, I had to groan. First of all, hasnt some guy played a perfect game of Pac-Man? How can you have a world championship of something that someone out there is perfect at? Arent you just asking him and hundreds like him to show up and dominate? Sitting there at the press conference, I couldnt even begin to conceive of Pac-Man Championship Edition. Maybe it was because of how bullshitty the whole presentation of it was. Peter Moore stood up there with a little headset microphone on his cranium, looking like he was either Madonna singing Vogue live or a high-rolling coach of a Halo team on Xbox Live. When he said that they were planning this Pac-Man world championship with the help of original creator Toru Iwatani, he repeatedly mispronounced Mr. Iwatanis last name with such ferocity that I found it exceedingly hard to believe hed ever met the guy. He kept calling him Mistah Iwatawwy. Seriously, Mr. Moore, I see only one W in the mans last name, not sixteen of them.
EE-WAH-TAH-NEE.
For Gods sake.
Iwatani came out and gave a little speech. He talked about his plans to leave Namco in 2007 to become a lecturer on the subject of game design at Tokyo Polytechnic University. Listening to Iwatanis speech, I figured this Pac-Man World Championship thing was just a big corporate flog, and Iwatani was only called in, thanks to a modest-sized envelope of money, to temporarily increase the number of Japanese people on the stage, making for a friendlier photo op (or, shutter chance as they call it in katakana) with which to infiltrate the Japanese juvenile consciousness via many games news services. Seriously, Ive seen the notes on the PowerPoints they use to set these things up.
When Pac-Man: Championship Edition was announced and subsequently released, six whole days went by before I noticed and then downloaded the demo. Three days later, I played the demo, and purchased the full version after three play-throughs, making it the first thing I ever purchased with Microsoft Points.
Holy shit, this is a hell of a videogame. Toru Iwatani, before walking out of Namco, put his balls on the table, and holy shit, thats a lot of balls. Its like him flipping off decades of idiocy, and telling Namco to, seriously, fuck Pac-Man as a character.
Its basically Pac-Man with the aesthetic completed, and the dynamics mastered. Simply put: you cant ever completely clear the board. It constantly re-seeds. The whole thing starts with just a few dots and a power pellet on each side. Eat all the dots on the right side and a fruit will appear on the left side. Eat the fruit on the left side to re-seed fresh dots and power pellets on the right side. Eat all the dots on the left side to reveal a fruit on the right side. Eat the fruit on the right side to re-seed the dots and power pellets on the left side. Et cetera, to infinity. As you repeatedly refresh the board, the layout changes, subtly. This gives the game a flow that no Pac-Man had ever possessed the original is too stop-start to be nearly this much fun: eat all the dots to clear the stage, then start back at the middle of the maze with a completely fresh board of dots. Pac-Man CE nails the flow: the action never stops, and by staying alive, you start to feel like a hero. Every successful outwitting of ghosts, every eight-ghost combo scored, every time sparks shoot from Pac-Mans body as he grinds around a corner, you want to pump your fist.
The longer you stay alive, the faster Pac-Man moves, and the more points the dots are worth. Being hunted by ghosts and escaping would-be run-downs is such a glimmering, pure experience that no car-chase in any 3D videogame can touch its primal thrills of success. Power pellets let you eat ghosts, as always; when you eat a ghost, the game pauses for a second, as the controller thumps, letting you savor your big point score. Eat several ghosts in a row to score increasing points eat another power pellet before all four ghosts escape from the middle of the board, and you can find yourself lining up eight-ghost combos. If Pac-Man is fast enough and youre a bad enough dude, you can eat twelve, sixteen, twenty ghosts in a row.
At first, scoring big in this game feels like luck. Eventually, the skill involved is undeniable. Look up some replays on YouTube after your first shot at the game, and feel the doors unlocking in your brain. I force everyone who sits on my sofa to play this game at least once, and every time I watch intently, always picking up little idiosyncrasies that I myself either possess or dont possess. Every time, I learn a little something about my friend, the game, or ideally both.
So final answer: Pac-Man CE has essentially made Pac-Man into a videogame Im likely to enjoy for the rest of my life, and it gives Toru Iwatani good enough reason to lecture about videogame design. Maybe he has a whole lecture based around how and why it took him thirty years to wonder, If the ghosts refresh constantly, why do the stages reset to zero every time? Cheers, Mr. Iwatani, for having the guts to go back and complete what your company and your public had never doubted was a masterpiece.
There are a couple of other modes apart from Championship Mode in Pac-Man CE, including one where the power pellets dont refresh, and ones with longer wraparound escape tunnels where you can seriously get screwed by clever ghosts. Some people have complained about a lack of variety in the modes, or moaned about the lack of an endless mode, and I guess the latter complaint is kind of valid. It would be hella cool to see how long people could last, though I think the designers probably feared that the game might devolve into extreme, Tetris-Grand-Master-esque freakish speed, or else because they were getting conscientious, and didnt want people losing their whole lives to this game. At any rate, the Championship Mode is pretty finely tuned as-is: get as high a score as you can in five minutes. I think thats good enough. Its good enough, even, for Japanese arcades: I could totally see this game working in Japanese arcades. Twitch masters would eat it up figuratively. If they managed to hook it up to the internet, said twitch masters could even participate in the international leaderboards.
Then again, why pay 100 yen per play if you can just play the demo of this game for free? You dont even need to pay for the game. All you really get out of paying for it is the ability to put your score up on the international leaderboards, which is kind of boring. I mean, I dont suspect Ill ever be not tied for 10,000th place, if you know what I mean. As willing as I am to admit that this game is a masterpiece by default, Im not exactly jumping at the chance to spend my life playing it. Id much rather continue cycling guitar scales (this week its the Spanish Gypsy Scale) in the dark when I should be sleeping, if you know what I mean.
When I do play this game, though, I find the Xbox 360 controller sorely lacking either the D-pad or the analog stick is too wishy-washy about rounding corners. I wish I could play it with a joystick, though I never bought a joystick for the 360. I wish I could just get a Sanwa ball-type stick and one button (the Start button), and hack my own exclusive controller for this game, though the Xbox 360 is too complicated to work with. Damn it. Theres always the Hori Dead of Alive 4 stick, still clogging select Japanese retailers ever since that game tanked, hard. I could get one of those, I guess, though the prospect of another monolithic Hori joystick in my house and of the tacky plastic-like boobs engraved into said special-edition stick kind of turns me off. As it stands, the Xbox 360 controller is Pac-Man CEs biggest fault, though I really cant dock its score for that.
The second-biggest flaw would have to do with the cheesy American glazed-over aesthetic. The glimmering rainbow colors of the playing field are a bit much. I mean, its high-definition enough, though I personally would probably prefer it more if the cute neon texture of the borders just stayed one solid color, and maybe changed just once every time both sides of the board re-seed. As it is now, it gives me a bit of a headache. Theres too much jumpy flashing going on, like the producers were trying to overcompensate for something. Leave it the hell alone, man! Its Pac-Man. Next thing you know, theyll release a patch that gives Pac-Man legs and eyes and a fucking snifter of brandy.
Also, the music is pretty terrible. It sounds something like whats playing in any given club in Berlin the moment a hip German teenager first contemplates acting on the insecurity that his penis is smaller than that of other guys. Its cute how it builds to a swell in the five minutes allotted for play-time, though really, its not even good techno. Its like the record the DJ puts on when the club manager tells him they need to sell some drinks right now.
I know, I can use the Xbox 360s excellent custom soundtracks feature, though isnt that kind of cheating? It sounds almost like game companies are giving up, refusing to budget good music, and hoping that the player has good enough taste in music to make up for their games faults. As Ill no doubt say again, ideally, a game should have music good enough to make me not want to use a custom soundtrack.
Even so, its convenient that a game of Pac-Man CE lasts only five minutes. There are many songs that are exactly five minutes in length, like David Bowies Space Oddity (off the Scary Monsters album). The Stone Roses This is The One is also precisely five minutes. Nirvanas Smells Like Teen Spirit is 5:01, though that last second doesnt really have too much going on.
After dipping deep into my memory banks, I recall that Big Bikes by Kyuss is 5:01, and would probably be really awesome to listen to while playing this game. It even has an awesome little false stop with twenty-two seconds to go, and then with nineteen seconds left it comes back, at double-time. That would be pretty badass for the closing seconds, rushing to kill just a couple more ghosts, to push the score up over your record.
I can think of a couple more songs off the top of my head, though I keep getting tempted to just check iTunes and sort all songs by length. In the face of this strong temptation to cheat, Im just going to go ahead and quit writing this.
