This is the most awesomely frustrating game. I got my high score on my first play through and haven’t come within 100,000 points of it in an hour.
It will be out next week on PSN.
If you guys haven’t yet try a table other than Championship 2. Some of them, like Spiral and Dungeon, actually change routes when the pellets and ghosts refresh and make things extra crazy.
My only complaint so far is that the achievements were really easy. I had all of them in about 2 hours of play.
I’m not sure that I would go so far as to say that the game is deliberately “pandering” for sales and approval, but I do agree with Jonathan that something is a little bit off in the mix with Pac-Man CE DX.
The main thing that’s missing for me so far is tension. In any iteration of Pac-Man that I’ve ever played, the fundamental gravity that drives every action in the game is a struggle for survival: the ghosts are always in pursuit – though some ghosts, admittedly, were smarter about it than others – and that constant threat drives each decision made throughout the traversal of the maze. Even when ghost chaining was introduced for score chasing purposes in Pac-Man CE, the dynamic of power between Pac-Man and the ghosts was still relatively the same; you were effectively on the defensive until you picked up those power pellets…and the how/when of those pickups created much of the drama in every playthrough.
In Pac-Man CE DX, that struggle for survival is completely gone. In fact, thanks to the bullet-time and bomb capability, I would argue that it will take a momentous lapse in reflexes and/or judgment to result in a single death for many players. (Useless anecdotal evidence: I’m no Pac-Man fiend, but I’ve yet to lose a life in any of my score attacks on Expert thus far.) That previous element of tension that made Pac-Man CE – and, to a lesser extent, the original Pac-Man – timeless is effectively gone here and, in its stead, the score chase is further emphasized and reinforced through some zany, over-the-top ghost chaining.
And now that score is at the forefront, many of the strategic aspects of Pac-Man CE DX – the proper path through the maze being the first and foremost – are now reliant upon memorization. So much so, in fact, that I keep finding myself feeling the same way as I did when I played Galaga Legions, which was this team’s first follow-up to Pac-Man CE. Galaga Legions was a weird, interesting kind of tower-defense SHMUP that required near-perfect placement of little satellite ships to turn back huge waves of alien bug ships. Those huge waves granted Galaga Legions the same sense of spectacle as those long chains of ghosts in Pac-Man CE DX but, even though the flight path of those enemy waves were foreshadowed to the player, the player was still left with little room for improvisation, especially if they were chasing score.
The key difference between Galaga Legions and Pac-Man CE DX’s reliance on memorization is the application of setback punishment. Galaga Legions is content to let those alien ships smear you without even flinching; in fact, the lack of bombs makes Legions more punishing in this aspect than many other “bullet hell” entries in the SHMUP genre. Pac-Man CE DX, on the other hand, loathes to ever take the player out of the immediate moment. You can steer Pac-Man directly into a ghost, hesitate for a moment in bullet-time, and still get away unscathed, having only been troubled with a couple of seconds off your playthrough. Those rare moments where you have to panic bomb – another SHMUP game mechanic – can potentially enhance your possibilities for chaining, since the bomb bottles up all of those ghosts into a line near the middle of the map.
In SHMUP discussion, there’s a lot of talk about playing for score vs. playing for survival, with the idea that many of the best games in the genre – DoDonPachi, Mars Matrix, etc. – can effectively accommodate both. While Pac-Man CE was much more fluid and accommodating to multiple play-styles, Pac-Man CE DX pushes all of its chips into the center of the table on score chase and undermines every potentially punitive element of its gameplay to such a degree that a player can’t help but be pushed into calling that bet.
It’s not a bad plan – after all, if you have a single kernel of competitive interest in your gaming DNA, this game is going to grab it and run with it. But how long can that last? And, if you’re not somebody who’s interested in devising the One True Path through the maze, how long will the spectacle of snorting one huge line of ghosts after another keep you interested?
I have not played the game yet, but let me just say that “snorting one huge line of ghosts after another” is some hilarious imagery. Pac-Man: coke fiend.
For the life of me, I can’t seem to get over 2 million on the 10 min variant of Highway. I know others have been able to do this pretty easily, but the highest I can get is about 1,700,000 or 1,800,000. Anyone have any tips?
I think one of my major issues is that once the speed gets close to 50, I have a very hard time taking good paths, so end up missing a lot of ghosts to add to my trail.
Ah, finally got it. It just took getting a bit more comfortable with navigating the maze at such a high speed.
Finally broke a million in 5-minute score attack on Championship II last night. I feel young again!
Yea no shit, this was a huge accomplishment for me, and I felt exactly the same way. This game is like viagra, for my thumb.
It was actually really nerve-wracking because I was closing in on a million with only about 20 seconds left on the clock and there was no high-scoring stuff on the board at the time. In the end I just barely made it with 1,034,000!
Trying to figure out how the top scorers are putting up nearly DOUBLE that score. Are they running perfect patterns?
The game allows you to watch replay videos of people on the leaderboard, it is interesting to watch the vids of the guys in the top ten. They are insane.
For the most part, yea, they’re running flawless patterns, and a couple guys are mixing things up a bit and skip a few outlying ghosts on certain patterns in an effort to just re-pop heavily populated patterns faster.
I think the guy who is #1 or 2 right now died once and used one bomb (both of which slow you down a bit and significantly decrease your collection points for basic pellets), and he was still able to pull off 1.9~2mil.
Currently I’m getting gummed up on one specific pattern set that shows up for me about 3.5 minutes into the game, where the pellets spread out a bit and a few stray ghosts spawned from the center start wandering around, I keep boxing myself in, or find myself forced to repeatedly loop around and around to get to stray pellets. The pros get through this section by picking off lone ghosts (holding power pellets) one by one while they run around clearing pellets, but I end up running into them right after the time runs out.
Wow that’s amazing. Usually if I die or use a bomb I just restart because I figure it’s fucked my multiplier too much to get a really decent score.
It happened around 4min, and he already about about 1.6-1.7mil in the bag. I think he’s #3 now, because there were a couple 2mil players up there when I looked this morning. If I was close to my xbox I’d tell you his name, but he’s been in the top 5 since release.
My favorite maze so far is highway. I’m getting to the point where I can just flow through it knowing exactly where to go. It is a nice maze to learn the game on too since there are so many options if you get cornered.
Overall on that maze I’m ranked about 175/15,000.
I cracked the top 75 on Dungeon! 1,774,060, good enough for 67th.
I got all two hundred achievement points the first night I had it. For the rest of that night, I couldn’t stop walking, planning, thinking, and generally doing everything in circles. Reflective circles. It kind of almost killed me, because I had a hard time fitting my whole snack I have to eat before bed to avoid a seizure into the routine.
I think that means it’s good. I like it pretty hard. Just have to be careful when I play it.
As of last night, I’m ranked 58 on Spiral. WOO!
Soooo much pacman. This is burned into my retinas:
iTunes has the soundtrack:
YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE PAC-MAN
I’m up to 22nd on Dungeon with 1,853,990. It’s a great board for high scores with multiple screens full of ghosts.
My wife of all people noticed the ad for this when we fired up the ps3 tonight to watch a movie and wanted to check it out.
An hour later, both my kids were giggling like crazy watching my constant near death encounters. This is awesome!
Even though my wife chickened out of playing it once she saw how fast it can get, it’s rare to have a fun little game that can entertain everyone at once.
I refuse to even look at the leader boards though, as I assume it will suck me into it’s obsessive tractor beam of death.