If you’re familiar with the first Pac-Man Championship Edition, then you know how purposely chaotic the gameplay can get and how brutally difficult the modes are when the game is kicking on all cylinders. The goal in the original game is to get as many dots as you can, as fast as you can, while taking ‘care’ of tons of ghosts once in a while. The goal for all of this? Get the highest score possible and progress by any means necessary, while continually unlocking new levels along the way. Old school philosophy with new school methods. By the way, this sort of game design breeds really heavy competition between players, especially between married couples. My wife and I had many head-to-head battles with the first Pac-Man Championship Edition and were stoked when this was announced. We had imagined more intense battles, better levels and new ways to play. All expectations were met, which is a good thing, but there have been some changes that bred frustration. Tons of frustration. A google amount of frustration.
Let’s get this going.
Okay, let me just say that to call Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 an easy game would be like referring to the Dark Souls series as an easy play through (shut it, Eric, we know you’re good at it). In short, that would be insane. Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 takes all the elements of the original and changes them just slightly. For example, the speed of Pac-Man for the most part is ratcheted up to 11, even on normal mode. What this ultimately means is that Pac-Man is difficult to control most of the time and goes so fast that he can easily get lost on the screen. I’m not sure if the visual design of the game purposely lends to this issue, but there are times where your eyes just wander in the midst of pushing quickly through the levels. This causes you to move the wrong way or to quickly find yourself off the beaten-path in which the game wants you to stay on. Oh, yeah, staying on the pellet path, and there is a set path you have to guess and you peruse through this game, is essential for success. Once you go off that path, you’re heading towards a world of Pac-pain. Anyway, Pac-Man is difficult to control. Again, that might be by design, but it causes tons of frustration.
Related to Pac-Man’s sporadic control scheme is how that translates to ghost attacks. The antagonist in the game, as it was 36 years ago, are the ghost (Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde). They are dead set on getting after Pac-Man and stopping his progress any chance they can get. In the CE edition of Pac-Man, they do this by simply disrupting the path of Pac-Man or putting the fear of God in players by doing a close swipe of Pac-Man’s path in hopes the player is twitchy enough to accidentally pop of off the pellet path. For example, if you’re turning the corner and speeding down the pellet path towards a right turn downwards, the ghosts will do everything they can to cause you to juke onto another path by doing a close pass-by/ghost-by. Their purpose is to cause the gamer to become jittery and uncomfortable and make a mistake. In the same vein of the original game from 1980? Absolutely. Curse-causing dick move? You betcha.
When Pac-Man gets off his pellet path, there is a real chance he is going to bump into a ghost. In the original game, and pretty much every Pac-Man game made up to this point, touching a live ghost without a power pellet means instant death. Well, the good folks at Bandai Namco Studios have decided that such a tradition needs some change. Sure, touching a ghost will eventually make you die, but you have to piss off the ghost by touching it three times (three bumps) before it gets to that point. When you play this portion of the tutorial you will think to yourself, “Hey, avoiding it once was a tough situation. Thank GOD they allow for three bumps”. You will say this with relief, but soon realize after the game gets going that this is basically like touching the thing once. Pac-Man, when he is off the pellet path, will randomly and systematically bump into the ghosts rapidly (super rapidly, which is not a real phrase). The three touch rule was there to make it feel like it’s the normal way to play, but in hindsight the game is going so darn fast that it’s merely a chance to about face our Pac buddy. Once you hit the ghost three times, the ghost changes, though temporarily, to an infuriated hell beast that does everything it can to hunt you down. Oh, it’s faster than you in this state, did I mention that?
Some other items of interest were added to help slow down and avoid ghosts.
Hitting the square button the controller will stop Pac-Man dead in his tracks. This means that you can put the literal brakes on your progression if you think a ghost is going to hit you. This is both good and bad. The good is that you can potentially avoid a ghost. The bad is that you can inhibit your progression, thus pushing up the chance of meeting another ghost soon after you release the brake. Regardless, it’s an interesting option in the game and it makes sense, as well as alleviates some frustration. But it can cause a nice ripple effect with progression, thus putting more ghosts in your path.
If that option didn’t give you enough of a chance to survive, Bandai Namco Studios also threw in a new way to devour ghosts after chomping a power pellet. Once a power pellet is consumed, the ghosts get on a visible rail system (you can literally see a white line where they travel on) that allows them to methodically move in certain set directions. This means when Pac-Man is moving quickly all over the place that it’s sometimes difficult to make contact with the ghosts, even though the game shows you sort of where they are going. Also, you can’t simply run into a line of them anymore and start eating away. You have to chomp them from the head ghost in the line and only the head ghost. Any other ghost will repel Pac-Man and push him back. It’s incredibly difficult to do, depending on board size and speed of our Pac buddy, but it’s a new way of doing things.
Let me just add, I’m an advocate for changing things up in a video game sometimes. I think that a long standing series can get stale when the same gameplay design is used over and over again. Addition by subtraction and such is a good way to think about a series that might be getting a bit long in the tooth. Having said that, sometimes that line of thought can ruin an experience. Up to this point Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is somewhere in the middle, depending solely on the amount of patience you have at your disposal with it. It has some new items that change the dynamic of the gameplay, but some of it might be unnecessarily bad for the gameplay. The ghost line is one of these things, but at least it tries to change things up.
Anyway, other things worth noting with this game are how the levels are designed and the modes are put together. Starting with modes, let’s get right into them.
Modes for Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 are broken up into three initial parts. They are:
Tutorial – This will be the beginning of your experience with Pac-Man Championship Edition 2. You are forced to play a basic tutorial mode that teaches you everything about the game. Halfway through it the tutorial will ask you if you want to depart and play the real game, which in true gamer fashion you certainly will. BUT, and I don’t often say this about any tutorial in a game, it’s worth your time to fully complete it. It will show you things, such as the brake and the ability to pick up speed when turning corners, that will help you do well in the other modes. It’s simply not a throwaway.
Adventure – The adventure mode features boss levels. It’s broken into 10 individual levels with their own formula of design and personality. Once you get beyond those levels, you’re given a final boss level to complete. The boss level consists of gathering fruit, power pellets and extra lives in hopes of taking down a boss at the end that is made up of 50+ ghosts. The adventure mode is a neat goal oriented mode that feels like you are accomplishing something, even though it’s just a set of levels leading up to one different level. It gets difficult quick and the amount of different types of levels and gameplay run rampant through it.
Score Attack – It’s exactly what you think it is. You play the game until you either lose all your lives or you run out of time. The point is to try to score as much as possible within the given time limit. This is the mode I would also call ‘Marriage Counseling’ because the nastiest comments between a couple typically come out during this mode. It’s brilliant and it has already served as a decision maker for a lot of family decisions in the first Pac-Man Championship Edition.
As I’m continually playing through this game, I’m positive at some point there will be unlockable material, but this is what it has to offer right now and it’s enough. There is more than a few hours of content at your disposal and even more so when you play against another player.
As for the actual design of the levels, they’re creative, abundant and diverse. Some levels will be huge with lots of twists and turns. Others will be uncomfortably tight, preventing you from getting you too far away from ghosts. Some will be wide, some will be a bit flat — there’s a figurative cornucopia of different types of levels with specific purposes attached to them.
In addition to the design, the levels also feature different types of ghosts. Some of the ghosts are activated by passing them, much like the first game, while others tend to just get in your way. There usage of ghosts in this game is impressive and methodical.
As for the rewards, there are different types of fruit available to acquire, depending on level difficulty. The usual suspect of fruit are there for the majority of the game. When you’re playing the extreme difficulty the fruit have bubbles around them and run away from you. The fleeing fruit make the level design stand out, as more turns in a level can delay you getting the fruit and progressing, while also leaving you open for ghost attacks. Opposite of that is a flatter level with longer hallways that will have you easily snagging the fruit. The design is incredibly creative, though it can play against you at times depending on the internal elements included.
With that said, the main issue with this game is the upped difficulty in comparison to the first title. The controls are purposely simplistic, thus purposely tough in the heat of battle, which will absolutely drive you bonkers. For example, when you’re going after multiple line of ghosts the directional pad will be your best bet in taking out said lines. If you try using the thumbstick, you’re going to be feeling enraged probably within the first five minutes of the game. The directional pad will drive your fingers nuts because you will intensely press them so hard (believe me, it happens) and will not give you much flexibility when Pac-Man is at his speed zenith. It’s incredibly frustrating at times. In addition, and this was already mentioned above, the problem of visuals getting in the way of path progression will add another layer of frustration to the experience.
The game doesn’t hide its frustrating intentions. It wants to frustrate you with the controls and loves frustrating you with the unpredictable AI from the ghosts. It will push you to the brink of wanting to throw a controller through a wall. Again, I’m going to write it up as part of the actual design of the product, much like the Dark Souls series, which tests your skills as a player. A very frustrated player.
Having said all this, I think the changes and the upped ante of difficulty fit perfectly within the scheme of things. Everything that Bandai Namco Studios did with the title makes sense. It was either make another replication of the same game, maybe with new level designs, or change up the gameplay design completely and push the player to their limits. Regardless of my feelings during gameplay sessions, and all the F bombs dropped in the process, I would prefer the latter. Bandai Namco Studios delivered on that and people shouldn’t be surprised with the results. They are calculated and methodical results.
