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Aussie Ben

Time for Another Pac-Man

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Well, downloaded the trial version of Pac-Man Championship. Then I got hooked and got the full version and before I knew it it was 11:30pm. This version of Pac-Man is a lot more hectic, which I like. Each different mode is timed (either five mins or ten) - you have a limit to get a high score. The basic rules are that you're in a widescreen maze, and you need to clear the screen of pellets.

The maze is divided into left and right halves where the pellets are allocated. If you grab all the pellets for one side of the maze, a fruit will spawn in on the opposite side of the ghost lair. For example - if you finish your last pellet on the right, the cherry will appear to the left of the lair. When you grab the fruit, all the pellets are replenished on the initial side (in the example given, the right pellets). They don't always all reappear, meaning that you might need to aim for specific areas.

You can now chain the power pellets, too. If you grab a pellet and gobble up all four ghosts, you can grab another pellet while the music's still playing and eat all four ghosts again, earning even more points. You can keep doing this for as long as you keep eating pellets, but the ghost score maxes out at 3200. Lives are much easier to earn than the initial game, but of course, this means that it's much easier to die, as well. If you keep grabbing those fruits and don't die, the speed increases quite a bit. Once you die, the speed goes down a level or two to allow you to get back in the groove. There's even a neat trick where you can hold the Control Stick or D-Pad in the direction you want to turn before you take the turn - doing this will shower sparks and give you a burst of speed. Quite handy to get away from those ghosts!

There are some interesting new mazes - one is a large layout of pretty much nothing but horizontal lines which wrap around. Another is the regular maze in the dark, but you can see the pellets and the ghosts - it gets quite tough! And the coolest one I saw was a very basic maze with few turns. In this maze, it gradually constructs and becomes more complex the more fruit you gobble up.

I never EVER thought I'd write this much about Pac-Man. I liked the original but wasn't a huge fan of it - this game, however, is a really nice package. Well done Namco.

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Same here. Just tonight I started playing to see how it was, and now I have the full version too. All credit to Namco here, as I liked the original Pac Man but never really saw the addictive quality of it. I can see losing a lot of time to this one though. The guys who did the Double Dragon remake would be wise to pay attention. This is how to put an old franchise on a new console. It takes what could have been just a tired retread of an archaic game and adds enough twists to it (not to mention the psychedelic neon mazes) to make it worth buying and enjoying.

Maybe I just need to practice for a while, but my scores kinda feel like they suck right now. My only defence is that the only Pac Man I'd ever played before was in the form of little internet Flash versions of it. :gaming:

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Pac-Man Championship Edition DX Nitro+ Blasterz Xrd HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue is super satisfying but I have only played about an hour and I'm not sure what if any strategies I should be employing. The fun is that I'm flying by the seat of my pants (not unlike the original Pac-Man) but it feels like maybe there's more nuance to getting a high score than that, especially on the shorter time trials where the optimal route feels very obvious I'm not sure how I could do them faster.

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On 1/3/2018 at 11:44 AM, Patrick R said:

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX Nitro+ Blasterz Xrd HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue is super satisfying but I have only played about an hour and I'm not sure what if any strategies I should be employing. The fun is that I'm flying by the seat of my pants (not unlike the original Pac-Man) but it feels like maybe there's more nuance to getting a high score than that, especially on the shorter time trials where the optimal route feels very obvious I'm not sure how I could do them faster.

10 hours into the game later I see. Oh I see so clear. This game is awesome. Clearing out all the trials for the first time was a very satisfying, if simple, but now I'm at the point where I'm running the same challenge over and over again to shave less than a second off my time. 

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