Giant Bomb Review
77 CommentsPac-Man Championship Edition DX Review
5- XBLM
by Ryan Davis on
This is the fastest, loudest, most overwhelming, most viscerally pleasurable Pac-Man experience available on the market today without a prescription.
As Championship Edition was a modern evolution of the original Pac-Man, DX expands specifically on the work done by CE, creating an experience that’s anchored by a lot of the classic Pac-Man sights and sounds and the fundamental gameplay concepts, but whose resemblance to the old quarter-chomper is rapidly slipping away. Like Pac-Man, you are constantly nagivating a series of mazes, eating up dots and using Power Pellets to turn the tables on the marauding ghosts. Like Pac-Man Championship Edition, the widescreen mazes are split into left and right sides, with different maze patterns appearing on one side as you clear out all of the dots and Power Pellets on the other, giving the whole game a relentless sense of momentum, and putting more of a focus on high scores than simple survival. In addition to loading the game up with a well-considered number of visual styles that recall or reimagine past incarnations of the Pac-Man, as well as a good fistful of new mazes that feature varying balances of straightaways and tight corners, DX introduces three key gameplay concepts, the total sum of which is an experience that feels fresh precisely because it still feels so familiar.
As your score rises, so does the speed of the game, which is where the other two DX additions come into play. While the maze layouts are decidedly circuitous, the dot patterns are laid out into very deliberate paths, and high scores almost always hinge on how closely you can keep to that track. The increased speed, plus the rogue ghosts that still patrol the maze, as well as the increasing danger of running into your own ghost train as it grows longer and longer, all conspire to throw you off. It’s manageable up to a certain point, but the speed eventually just makes it overwhelming. When you’re close to having an unfortunate encounter with a ghost, the game will effectively go into bullet-time and zoom in on your position, giving you time to choose an alternate path, or elect to trigger a bomb, which momentarily bumps all of the active ghosts on the maze back into their central holding pen and lowers the game speed slightly, giving you time and room to breathe.
The only thing I really wish Pac-Man Championship Edition DX had was just more. More mazes, more modes, more ways for me to subjugate ghosts and rub my high scores in my friends’ stupid, stupid faces. It’s not that this package feels particularly anemic, it’s just that what’s here is so damn good, I wish it didn’t have to end.
