Pac-Man Collection

"4 games! Yeah! No Ms. Pac-Man?! Collection? Bah!"

Intro
This game is good, although it feels like a lot of games are missing from the series. This collection features Pac-Man, Pac-Man Arrangement, Pac-Mania, and Pac-Attack. All games are good but still are not good alone.

Pac-Man 8/10
You might've noticed this one from my other review. Anyway, you, Pac Man, are a yellow ball who wants to munch on some dots. Pinky, Inky, Blinky, and Clyde, the ghosts, try to stop you. You have to eat all the dots in the maze without having the ghosts hunt you down. If you manage to do that, you advance to the next maze.

Also, in every maze, there are four power pellets. When you eat one, the Ghosts turn blue and run away from you. You can now eat them! Munch on as many as you can before they turn back to normal earn some cool bonus points. The ghosts go back to the home when eaten so they can be regenerated.

Also, a prize, like a fruit, often appears under the ghost home. Eat those for some very good bonus points.

If a ghost is on your tail, and it is catching up on you, you will be in luck. There are warp holes that warp you to one side of the maze to another, and it also slows down ghosts.

Every few mazes there is a cut scene. One shows Pac Man, big sized, hunting down a ghost.

This game is highly addictive, and will have you playing for hours! There's only one problem: the mazes are exactly the same! The only difference is when you chomp on the power pellet, the ghosts aren't vulnerable as long as in the previous levels. It's same blue outlined maze. It should be more like its companion, Ms. Pac Man, which has new mazes every cut scene. Still, that doesn't entirely stop Pac Man from being a good game.

What really gets at me is, they had to shrink down the game in order for it to fit on the GBA screen. You have two modes of playing: full screen where you can barely see anything, or scroll mode, where you can see lots, but you have to scroll. This goes for Pac-Man Arrangement as well.

Pac-Man Arrangement 9/10
This is Pac-Man, except with 22 different and colorful levels. The graphics have improved a lot, so that's good. Pac Man has eyes! Yeah!

If you've played Pac-Man before, you'll know exactly how to play, except there are some differences. First, the game is very colorful, from brown, to blue, to even rainbow! Second, the game has 22 levels. Now there are 5 ghosts instead of one. The 5th ghost, Kinky, can fuse with the other regular ones. If fused with Pinky, then she can hop across the maze with bunny ears on. If he fuses with Blinky, then Blinky can dash across one side of the maze to the other side with bullhorns on. With Inky, he can be in two places at one. Clyde gets the most annoying power: being able to make more Pac Dots in the maze. Only one thing stops this game from getting a 10. It's way too fast. If, say, ghosts are chasing you, you might accidentally nudge the control pad a small bit to the direction the ghosts are, thus being caught by a ghost.

Pac-Mania 9/10
It's a pretty fun game. It's Pac-Man, but in 3D. There are only 3 notable features: the mazes change every cut scene; it's a scrolling playing field; and Pac-Man can now jump! Your jumping power doesn't last very long, however. If you stay in a maze for too long, your jumping power decreases until you have no more power.

Pac-Attack 9/10
This is an interesting blend of Tetris and Pac-Man. You have to make lines with the blocks to clear, yes. But now there are ghosts that come with most clusters. They have come to “wreck the lines” as the manual has it. Eventually, in a cluster, Pac-Man will be there. You have to direct him to where the ghosts are, and then he'll eat them all up. The way to lose is, you accidentally trap a lot of ghosts in blocks, and you won't be able to get to them.

There is even an extra mode. It's called Puzzle Mode. It has 100 levels, most which are easy. The point of this is to clear all of the ghosts on the screen with the number of Pac-Men you have. Some ghosts might be hard to reach, and you could even have to make lines in order to get to the ghost.

Overall 7/10
What's wrong then? All those good qualities...you are very spoiled! Well, to tell the truth, in some cases, quantity can overpower quality. I mean really, is it a collection with 4 games? Namco is even coming out with a 50th Anniversary Arcade Collection. The package has 10 games. For an anniversary, that's unacceptable. Overall this is good, but it should've included these games as well: Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Pac and Pal, and Pac-Man Plus. Heck, I would've paid 50 bucks for that. So if you wanted, you could buy it, but until they mix those games into a collection, I'm not (and probably you too) buying anymore Pac-Man rehashes.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/27/05, Updated 07/01/05