Jonathan - I have no idea how much the demo gives you, but the full game feels very much like the “e-sports”, skill-based climb for more points that the original Pac Man CE did. The rules have changed, but it’s still a game about very quickly building a strategy for the path you’ll take and trying to execute it at an ever-quickening pace.
It would seem at first that the bombs and super-long train of ghosts, not to mention bullet-time, are all gimmicks to make the game more sensational and less skill-based. In practice, it’s anything but. The long train of ghosts starts to get in your way if you don’t take the time to gobble them up, and the bombs and bullet time keep you alive but also keep the pace up. It’s the same feel as the first game, made more relentless.
Having played the demo before buying it I can see why Jonathan wasn’t thrilled with it. As it’s hard to see how you can use everything for a high score.
With that said the full game was great, I’m seeing high score potential with purposely waking the ghosts and using the pellet filled ghosts to keep your invincibility up. My biggest problem is that when I hit 50 speed I’ve lost sight of Pac-man several times, I think my first shot at the 5 minute game on the first board I beat everyone’s score on my friend’s list.
I’m really, really glad I jumped on this, because if I’d just played the demo I’d never have gotten it. The game really needs its full time show off what makes it great, especially the careful balancing act between ghost eating/stringing. I’m not sure I’d really call it Pac-Man still, I’d even venture the game was developed as a new puzzle-action game, and the license was used to give it a fair chance in the wild.
Doesn’t matter, really. Whatever it is, it’s great, the kind that leaves you playing for an hour on accident when you went in for a ten minute round. The wide level/mode variety only adds to the greatness, but the new score attack stands quite well on its own.
I don’t know about that. I found myself cursing the d-pad a lot when playing the original, to the point where I usually ended up using an arcade stick. The analog stick works okay in terms of accuracy, but still doesn’t feel right.
Since a lot of people seem to like it, I bought the full version and played the 5 minute mode on every level up through Dungeon.
I still feel the same way about the game. (Dungeon, especially, is just silly).
If nobody agrees that this game feels like pandering, then I have to ask what would an excessively pandering version of Pac-Man play like? In what ways would it be different from this?
On the analog vs dpad thing – I played with the analog stick, and when the game speed got up around 40, I found myself slipping and missing intersections all the time (especially on levels with lots of tiny squares like Manhattan). The game probably would play better at high speeds with a good dpad (though not, of course, the 360’s notorious dpad).
I grew up with Atari joyticks and NES dpads in my hands, before graduating to a mouse/kb for the next couple decades. It isn’t until recently I started screwing around with thumbsticks, so admittedly my skills with them probably suck compared to the folks who grew up with thumbsticks.
Although my own experience with thumbsticks starts to suffer around speed 40, it is probably just as likely that my experience with dpads is all that’s making the difference.
FWIW, the dpad on the special edition Xbox controller is really good:
I haven’t played any mainly dpad controlled games with it but in normal use I have yet to miss hit on a directional command paging through friends or menus or assigning attribute points. It is super accurate.
I mean that it feels like Power Fantasy Pac Man. I oversaturated on power fantasy in games a long, long time ago; I don’t need any more.
On top of that… clearly there is a skill range to this game: you can be good or you can be not good. But the game is tuned so that even if you are not doing particularly well, you feel like you are kicking butt.
There are many subtler dimensions to it, but like pornography, it’s difficult to define in a clear way.
Another way to say it is that I feel like this is an emotionally regressive game design. Some part of me recoils in horror from the mental state the game is attempting to set up.
One person’s regressive emotional state is another person’s “fun”. I get what you’re saying, Johnathan, but the over-the-top nature of DX is funny to me, similar to that burst of “Ode To Joy” when you clear a Peggle level.
I played DX for about an hour last night. At least a couple of times, I had a super-weird experience where I was playing so fast and planning so far ahead that I completely lost track of where my little Pac-dude actually was. It’s like Zen gaming, where you stop thinking consciously about what you’re doing and just do it. As an experience, it’s incredibly similar to playing music, where your muscle memory takes over and you stop concentrating on the act of playing.
That’s pretty damn interesting to me. Do I want to have that experience every time I play a game? Obviously not. But as a flavour of gaming, I do not see how it’s regressive in any way.
Yea, I was doing the same thing, and the whole time I kept thinking “Use the force, Luke.”
I like the huge trails of ghosts you can (and should) build up while running through the maps, it’s adds an element to the game that is similar to those old ‘snake’ type games, the ones where you control a snake, and run around collecting a block, and every time you do your snake gains an additional segment, eventually leading to a situation where you keep getting in the way of yourself. Basically you’re no longer controller a pac-man, you’re controlling a pac-snake.
As for those who don’t like the new direction, the gameplay is different than old school pac man, but after thirty years of old school pacman and ms pacman, I don’t mind a new mix on an old formula. Besides, it’s not like they took down Ms Pacman or anything (which was always better than vanilla pacman anyway) – if people wanna play it, it’s still there.
The game just instills pure joy. There’s something about the combination of trippy nightclub music and lightshows with combos exploding and chains going off and sparkly shit warping in at literally every second that makes you feel like you’re inside some kind of totally immersive classic gaming/audio-visual sensory experience. I’m not explaining it very well but it is the pure distilled essence of blissed-out fun.
This will wind up in my top 5 for the year easily.
I just ran through some of the other boards and my brain is already putting together optimal routes to get all the ghost to follow me while still collecting all the pellets as quickly as possible. I’ve switched to the 360 D Pad for now as I find that I mess up less at 50 speed with it then I do with the analog stick.
I wish MS would send me 800 points that they’re going to send me already so that I can get this. Someone in the other Pacman thread mentioned that they got their 800 points, so it can’t be long now.
I thought it was just me getting old. I’m looking at the right hand of the screen to plot where Pac will go once he crosses over the tunnel and then I’m confused when he doesn’t show up. Instead, I look back to the left to see him dry humping a wall while a team of ghosts are ready to abuse him like an Operation Tailhook scandal.
All I can say is…buy it anyway. You’ll use that other 800 points later, and this is just so great. It hits pure zen moments at high speeds, thanks to the surprisingly high readability provided by the ghost train. I think I’m much more aware of them than I am of Pac-Man, but that’s probably for the best. And stacking the train properly until I get that magical power pellet, oh god, so good.
