Pac-Mania is a game that both looks great and plays great. The very large mazes have a great pseudo 3D look, and they are no longer confined to a single screen. The scrolling mazes add to the tension because you never know what’s around the next corner. I also like how each maze gets an identity. That’s not just some maze, that’s Block Town! Let’s go save Block Town everybody! That’s ghost eating with a purpose.
The second biggest change is the ability to jump. So how do that balance the difficulty now that gravity is mere suggestion? With a whole buncha ghosts. There are ghosts everywhere in these mazes, and they are entertainingly relentless. They can’t always be jumped over because they often travel in packs, or travel in opposite directions, or come around a blind corner. Even better the increased ghosts means that the top combo bonus for eating them is now 7650 points. So many points all at once! I get excited every time it happens. It’s one of the best achievements in classic arcade gaming. It’s like separating two Qix spikes.
As you can tell I really like Pac-Mania, and it’s taking over the top spot in my first ranking. It’s another game from Namco Museum Vol. 5, but unlike Metro-Cross it’s easy to track down in several compilations on multiple platforms. There’s even a fairly rare Tengen version on NES. I’ve even been lucky enough to play it in an arcade. What I’m saying is that you should find a version of it and check it out. It’s the best of the Namco made Pac-Man games. Now I know that I only have two games, but I am excited about the first edition of the Ironclad List of Correctness. If the universe only had these two games you should play them in this order:
1. Pac-Mania (1987)
2. Metro-Cross (1985)
Next time: I’m tired of all these dashes. Let’s see how it goes with quotation marks.
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