Pac-Man Collection

"Portable Pac-Man times 4… what could go wrong?"

Namco Museum for the Game Boy Advance was conspicuously missing one key title: Pac-Man! But just as quickly as that was realized, it was announced by Namco that there would be an entire collection of Pac-Man games for the platform, including for the first time, Pac-Man Arrangement, which had only ever appeared on the second Namco Classic Collection arcade game. For retro-gaming fans everywhere, this was huge news, and yet Pac-Man Collection, developed by Mass Media, is quite the mixed bag.

In addition to the original Pac-Man and Pac-Man Arrangement, this game also includes Pac-Mania and Pac-Attack. The menu, complete with music featuring bits and pieces of all the music from each game, prompts you to pick from one of the four games. Additionally, you can opt to play original Pac-Man in either full-screen (the entire maze shrinks to appear on the screen all at once) or close-up (zooms in, and the screen scrolls around to show what’s ahead).

Game by game, we start with the star attraction…

Pac-Man Arrangement

Wow, what a way to do Pac-Man! The basic concept of eating dots and bonus fruits while avoiding the ghosts in a maze from a top-down view remains unchanged, but now there are all kinds of new wrinkles added to the mix. First is a 5th ghost, a glasses-wearing fellow named Kinky. He’ll emerge from the ghost pen already blue and scared, but if he catches up to one of the other ghosts, he merges with them to form a super ghost! Twice the size of the other ghosts, these giants are worth twice as much if you can manage to eat them while energized by a power pill. In addition to each stage being it’s own individual maze, the game continually adds new elements of gameplay, such as dash points that allow you a one-time burst of speed to zoom right by the ghosts, and bonus pills that can increase your speed, create a mirror image of you to eat more dots, or just send the ghosts cowering in the pen for a while. The game also allows you to continue once you’ve lost all your lives. Add in colorful graphics, excellent animation (I’ve never seen Pac-Man eating with such a fervor), and catchy music. This is an amazing update of Pac-Man, and is worth the price of admission alone.

Pac-Man

Ah, the original that launched an empire. Nothing here seems to have changed from the original maze-based gameplay at first, and the graphics are completely faithful to the arcade original (except for the weird looking eyes in the full-screen mode). But there’s a couple of stickling points to be found here. First, Pac-Man’s trademark “wakka-wakka” sounds a little different for some reason, and I’m not sure why Mass Media couldn’t quite emulate that sound correctly. Then there’s something else… there’s a path I usually follow when I play this on the PSOne Namco Museum, where I start by going up the right side and clearing out a portion of the top area, then going back down the left. On that version of the game, unless I get really careless, no ghost catches me. When I first tried this very same path on this version of the game, Blinky (the red ghost) caught me up at the top! That’s never happened before this point, and the version on the PSOne Namco Museum is emulated right from the arcade roms. So I guess in this translation, the ghosts either don't quite follow the original patterns, or they're just a little faster. These inconsistencies don’t quite add up in my head, but they're hardly what I would call real complaints, and there is still a very enjoyable Pac-Man experience to be found in this translation.

Pac-Mania

Yet another eat-stuff-and-don’t-get-eaten game, only this time from a psuedo-3D perspective. And now, Pac-Man has gained a little control over the gravity of his situation, being able to bounce right over those pesky ghosts. Add in more ghosts, a few different mazes, and a slew of new bonus items to the mix, and you have almost a whole new game. This one isn’t quite recreated 100% accurately as well. The graphics are all there, the gameplay is as I remember it, but the music isn’t all there. There’s entire sections of the stage songs that have been cut, and I’m not exactly sure why that is. As someone who loved Pac-Mania in the arcades and on the PSOne’s Namco Museum 5, this is a bit of a shame, but I’ll get over it.

However, this next game is probably my biggest problem with the collection...

Pac-Attack

I guess Namco thought it would be a good idea to include a game that didn’t follow the standard Pac-Man formula. This is actually a Tetris-style puzzle game, with blocks, ghosts and the occasional Pac-Man falling down and filling up the screen. Get an entire row of blocks from one end to the other, and they vanish. The only way to get rid of the ghosts is to have the big yellow guy eat them. Eating ghosts fills up a wand on the left. Once it’s full, a fairy will come down and eliminate all the ghosts for up to 6 rows of space. You can either play Arcade mode, where the blocks don’t stop coming down until there’s no room for them to drop, or Puzzle mode, where you have to get rid of all the ghosts with only a certain number of Pac-Men. The graphics are standard for puzzle games, and the music isn’t bad, either. Honestly, this game isn’t terrible, but compared to dozens of other puzzle games, it doesn’t have very much at all going for it. It’s inclusion over Super Pac-Man or Pac-Land is kind of disappointing.

This collection could have been more, but as it is it’s definitely not bad, either. Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Arrangement and original Pac-Man are all worth your while, and even Pac-Attack can be decent every once in a long while. By now you can find this one for cheap, too, so if you have a GBA and like the old games of the original arcade boom period, grab this one.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/21/03, Updated 04/21/03