"The main gimmick gets in the way of enjoyment."

I would have gone in for pretty much any old sequel back during the Pac-Man craze. After Ms. Pac-Man's modest changes from the game where you run your little yellow circle about(varying mazes, mobile prizes to gobble, and that red bow on her head) Super Pac-Man heads in a different direction, with a new power-up and a system of keys to open gates. You still have four ghosts chasing you around, but there are some factors that make the game rather nasty if you are trying to get good at it. As a kid I just remembered whomping around with a giant Pac-Man for a bit and not being good anyway, and it provided as much fun in a couple minutes as other games I'd thrown a quarter at. But it won't keep serious players coming back too long.

In case you were under a rock(for the older generation) or glued to shooters on your X-Box(for the younger,) Pac-Man had a little yellow circle with an arc cut out that moved around a maze eating dots. Four ghosts started in a pen and chased you, and you also had a chance to eat a power pill and run after the ghosts when they were blue or grab a special treat under the ghost-pen. The object was to clear the board, and you got skits after so many levels. Ghosts eventually could outrun you when you ate dots.

Super Pac-Man adds a few features but really doesn't feel more substantial. First, it feels much smaller than Pac-Man. You have only thirty-one regular objects to eat up(about one-third of the field--this makes the game feel a bit empty, too,) although they are all behind locked doors. There's still a power pellet in each corner(locked away) but now you have two big pulsing green pellets that turn Pac-Man into a huge invincible circle. They also speed him up and allow him to bust through gates, and when he eats a power pellet on top of that he can run after the ghosts in a hurry.

Regular objects change each level, too, from apples to hamburgers and eggs to shoes and cake to coffee cups, a shamrock, and a gift box. The mazes look the same but key-gate combinations change every four levels. The monsters become faster as well so even Clyde, the pokey yellow one, goes faster than you do. You'll find you need to use the warp tunnels that let you switch sides or lure the ghosts just below the pen where they are to slow down your opponents, raid to eat some normal pellets, and try again. In fact this is the main strategy point for the levels as the pellets quickly take less time and the reward under the ghost pen is marginally random, like a slot machine--if the flipping images to the left and right match when you grab the star, you get a big bonus.

Super Pac-Man also allows for interesting pitfalls: you can run into dead ends in many ways(only open certain gates, or your super size runs out,) and there's a huge temptation to enter the ghosts' pen where they start. It can be a decent hiding place, and you can also raid it when you're hopped up with pills, but mostly it seems to be a way to sucker players who want an emotional way to get back at the ghosts into a foolhardy adventure.

Now there are some nice touches. The skits every four levels don't have the human interest of Ms. Pac-Man and the whole love affair, mostly focusing on Pac-Man becoming huge and running after ghosts that have turned blue. There's even a bonus level every so often, where you have a timed run to complete things. And the ghosts may occasionally freeze and wobble before chasing you a bit quicker, which can let you grab something or surprise anyone trailing a ghost deliberately. Ghosts often tease you too with their near-sightedness. If they're at a distance, they know which way to track you, but up close they sometimes act afraid of you, which is a nice lucky break when you think you're toast or sheer agony when you realize the ghost you ran into was about to turn away, and if you'd hedged a half second longer...

But the major factor in why I find the game to be obnoxious is the control. You still just use a joystick to move up/left/right/down. They were never going to bunk that. However, the maze itself has more turns and corridors and fewer bumpers of inaccessible space, and although you can pre-empt movements(i.e. indicate a turn before an intersection) there's less of a window to do so and more of a punishment if you don't. This gets worse when you have Super Pac-Man. While it's cool to be super-sized, you'll also have an annoying time steering him through all the intersections. To be fair, you can develop intuition(where's Pac-Man's center?) and there are times when the street-grid layout provides for some interesting fake-outs, notably when you run past the ghost to your side or, on the other side of a wall, fake one way and run the other to move a ghost totally off track. But when basic concerns render a new gadget unwieldy, it's not going to feel fair to the casual player.

The other problem is that it gets too familiar, too soon. Once I was able to see what all sixteen edibles were and enjoy the skits, and the game cycled back but with faster monsters, I realized how the ghosts used too-similar patterns, and how there wasn't enough excitement chasing after them. It was just about survival. Also the bonus levels, while nice, can all be solved the exact same way. The challenge is either too easy, once you know how to get a quick start, or too onerous(duck in tunnel/slow area, lose monsters, repeat until you get impatient and try to do too much before the next time you goad the monsters.) The initial wave of excitement from the new features soon wears off, and the main variety seems to be the random points you'll get for gobbling the star that appears in the center. The game's main twist, giant Pac-Man, lasts only a second in the later levels as well.

In Super Pac-Man, the music tunes from Pac-Man are sped up and so are the ghosts, and you'll find your excitement is burnt up similarly. It's entertaining to see a monstrous Pac-Man take out gates, and the fourth wave of gates presents an easy problem. But until then it's a bit too logical, and even the bonus scenes get stale fast. While I've seen more confusing Pac-Man efforts(Baby Pac-Man's pinball-combo effort was an example of throwing too much at the player) or lazier, blander ones(the much-ballyhooed Atari 2600 port) but Super Pac-Man seems to have more esoteric failings. After you've tried its innovations, it's a bit empty, and it's tough to play through the game to figure out why.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 04/06/01, Updated 07/23/03