"Super Pac-Man vs. Lex Blinky!! What? You mean this isn’t a superhero parody?"

By the year 1982, Pac-Man Fever was in full effect, and Namco was working on a sequel that would add new gameplay elements to the instant classic. No, it wouldn’t be Ms. Pac-Man, that’s a whole different story that will be told on another day. The game would actually be Super Pac-Man, which turned more than a few things around inside the big yellow dude’s world.

You’re still in the maze, hunting around for sustenance while avoiding that ravenous quartet of ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. You can make the ghosts turn and run out of fear of you eating them by chomping down on an energizer pill. The first ghost is worth 200 points, then 400, 800 and finally 1,600. Pac-Man can also evade the ghosts by escaping through a warp tunnel that lets him out on the other side of the maze. If the ghosts go through it, they’re noticeably slowed down.

That’s all familiar to anybody who has played the original Pac-Man, but all similarities end there. Now, to get the yummy stuff, Pac-Man has to eat keys to open the doors concealing the treats. And what treats they are! Pac-Man’s diet has diversified itself considerably from mere dots and the occasional fruit snack. Now, he can have apples, corn on the cob, donuts, hamburgers, eggs sunny-side up and even more than that. Each food-stuff has it’s own value, too, typically going up by 10 points with each level until a certain point. So what does this mean for the bonus? After eating a certain amount of items on the screen, a little mini-slot machine game will run in the center of the field. Eat the star, and get the two objects between the star to exactly match, and you get big points. Eat the star, and don’t get the objects to match, and you get 200 points for your trouble at least.

Then there are those two giant green energizer pills just under the ghost pen. They present the most radical change to gameplay from Pac-Man to Super Pac-Man. Eat one up, and you’re flying! Yes, that’s right, that double-sized Pac-Man graphic is supposed to represent him up above the maze and ghosts, and thus being closer to the player’s view point. The elongated ghosts are supposed to represent them looking smaller by comparison I guess. Super Pac-Man also has super strength, able to now eat those doors right off their hinges to get at the food inside, and also has twice the speed of an ordinary Pac-Man. He can go even faster than that by pressing the super-speed button, another new wrinkle to the game. Apparently, eating a regular energizer pill will extend the length of time of this transformation, and allows you to use this enhanced speed to get at those ghosts all the faster.

There’s three other gameplay notes and quirks that need to be mentioned. The first is, for the first time, Pac-Man can enter the ghost’s pen and amble around. Not too smart if there’s a ghost in there, for certain. The second is that sometimes those ghosts will stop ever so briefly and their eyes will go bonkers. Maybe they’re starting to get a little stir crazy from being cooped up in that maze? Lastly, a few stages are bonus stages, where Pac-Man has permanent super abilities and is racing against a bonus timer to eat everything in the maze.

Graphics-wise, this really isn’t much of a step up from its predecessor. Pac-Man and the ghosts look exactly the same as they did before, but if it ain’t broke, why fix it? There is, however, new graphics for the foods Pac-Man eats, and they’re a definite step up or so in detail from what he was munching on in his first outing. The biggest failing point of the graphics, though, is that the attempt at making it look like Pac-Man is flying just looks weird from the perspective that Namco attempted. It actually makes him seem more like the Pac-credible Hulk more than Super Pac-Man, sans green pigmentation.

The first thing you’ll notice about the sound is the xylophone-sounding remix of the original Pac-Man theme, which is a cute touch. The trademark “wakka-wakka” and roaming ghost sounds remain here, updated a little with what I can only guess to be a new sound board. New music for ending a stage and receiving a one-up is also present, and are improvements over what had come before for sure.

All told, Super Pac-Man is a pretty good game, but some things about it, namely the graphics, don’t really work. And at that, it’s not really that big a departure from the original Pac-Man. Neither, though, were most of the other follow-ups, but somehow Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Mania turn out to be something more. So, in other words, the world would not wait for the likes of Solomon Clyde or the Para-Pinky.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/26/03, Updated 04/26/03