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JASON MAHONY Can't get enough super sugar crisp...Unless I get to punch in on some video punks!! View all articles | Contact author

 Does the Xbox Live Arcade really need three versions of Pac Man? God love it and all, but we could reel off a gigantic list of other games we'd rather see dusted down and squeezed down our in-pipe instead. Or so you might imagine, at least.

Making it up as they go along: mazes sometimes change dynamically as soon as you clear the dots.
As you might have read in the recent news announcement, the game boasts a total of six 'modes', though what they amount to are simple score-based maze challenges set around a time limit. As usual, the premise is to guide your little pill munching fiend around gobbling the dots and avoiding the attention of Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. No change there, then.

What's interesting isn't the high-def, widescreen reworking (thanks for that), but how Namco has subtly tinkered with some of the basic elements of the game so that it's no longer just about clearing one maze after another. Essentially what you've got now are two halves of one big widescreen maze, and once you've gobbled up the dots dished out on one half, a fruit appears next to the ghost pen on the opposite side. Gobble the tasty fruit treat and dots will once again fill up on the other side, forcing you into a testing mercy dash into often dangerous territory.

Talking about my generation
More often than not, you won't have an entire maze of dots to clear, but a few well-chosen paths of dots to munch - often with a lone tempting power pill to aim for to give you the occasional ghost gobbling edge, and other times with a disproportionate number of power pills but few dots surrounding them.

After all this dot munching you even get a nice stats graph analysing your performance.
With the emphasis firmly on getting a high score within a strict (but ample) time limit, it's no longer just an endless maze-clearing exercise. It's specifically this bite-sized, furiously intense goal that goads you towards using the power pills strategically via the new ghost-chain scoring system. The new dynamic really adds to the real risk/reward element, and makes you play the game in a completely different way.

Back in the olden days, 'classic' Pac-Man's ghost-chomping adventures always topped out at 1600 points after you'd munched all four of your pursuers in a row. But now, if you collect another power pill before the effects wear off, you can build up that tally to a maximum of 3200 points. Keep it up and you'll very quickly improve your score and clock up bonus lives for every 20,000 points - helping you through the round, and ensuring you have a better chance of survival when the game starts getting crazily fast.

 

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