Unfinished

People of my generation probably cannot appreciate the simplicity of Pacman. They're all too busy with their explosions and their guns and questioning the sexuality of 12 year old boys who sound like girls to care for the elegance of how you dodged that ghost to grab the fruit or earning number 9 spot on your local arcade machine back in your heyday. Right grandpa? Pacman Super Crazy Ultra Deluxe Edition v2.0 Turbo retains it's core gameplay from way back when but builds upon it in a way that makes the game so much more than simply dodging ghosts and wracking up points. The DX edition now adds sleeping ghosts, which appear handily along your course right next to, or not too far from the pills you pick up. As you stroll (eat?) past them, they will wake up and follow you like you're the pied piper of ghost town. Build up enough behind you and pick up a power up and you suddenly have a huge chain of points behind you. This implements an incredible risk-reward mechanic to Pacman that instantly heightens the tension of your quest for pills. Do you let the line get long enough so that you can build a high combo, but can easily squash you should you make one minuscule fault? Or do you play the short game, playing it safe with a few ghosts here and there alongside your pills and fruit? Obtaining these ghosts allow you to build up the speed of Pacman, giving you more opportunity to either get the points faster or to run into trouble, dependent on your reaction time and pre-planning. After nomming the line of ghosts behind you, you can often lose the rhythm you build up from simply going for the pills and fruit, especially at the higher speeds. Thankfully, Pacman has taken a leaf out of Neo's book and gains a super slo-mo effect before hitting a ghost that may have simply ended your game there. A prompt will also offer you the chance to use one of your bombs, knocking all of the ghosts following you or roaming around back into the centre square; incredibly useful to keep the game flowing and less stop-start, but they will reduce your speed and should you not get yourself on the right track in time, you may find yourself giving the bomb button a good too many pushes than you'd like. There are 3 main modes to Pacman: Score Attack is, unsurprisingly, the mode which sees you trying to earn a high score within a specified time limit, Time trial consists of the player meeting a certain criteria, mostly eating X amount of fruit before the time runs out and finally Ghost Combo demands you stay continually powered up and eat as many ghosts as possible. I found myself having the most fun in the score attack modes. Time trial mode's goal is simply to eat the fruit, meaning the newly introduced sleeping ghosts can be simply ignored and are largely pointless in most cases. Ghost Combo's goal is to do the opposite. You have infinite lives and the only point of the mode is to build the highest possible combo, meaning the fruit and pills are largely worthless aside from getting you more ghosts. The combination of both modes in score attack means your brain needs to be constantly switching from one mode to the other, focusing on building that chain of ghosts while trying to maintain the constant supply of points is arguably more tense and exciting. Graphically, the game is as intense as the gameplay it offers. The game offers you 8 different visual styles, each with a host of colours to choose from. There are also 6 different versions of Pacman from down the years, each with their accompanying style of Ghost for you to choose from, should you have a favourite. The in-game visuals are also extremely vibrant. To the point that you may question if you're in Charlie Sheen's bathroom (Yes, we're jumping on the Charlie Sheen bandwagon too!). The flashing points indicators, although small, can be blinding at times and at the higher speeds can often cause you to completely track of your pill-gobbling chum leading to an untimely death at the hand of a sleeping ghost you didn't even know you were headed for. In closing, Pacman brings to the table the whole host of gameplay you loved from when the world was black and white, but adds a little something new for the current generation that won't lose any of your beloved nostalgia.