iPhone Review: Pac-Man Championship Edition

Developer/Publisher: Namco Mobile
Genre: Arcade
Price: $2.99 (Launch Price)
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: The exceptional console version has been given a great port to the iPhone.
Pros: Same great addictive gameplay, now portable; still does a great job of freshening up the Pac-Man series; best control options of any Pac-Man game on the iPhone
Cons: DLC available at launch is kind of a slap in the face of users buying right away; game seems to be slightly scaled

Sometimes dreams do come true. Nine months ago, I wrote this:

Arcade gaming’s philosophy of short repeatable bursts of gameplay meshes well with great iPhone games, so Pac-Man CE would be a natural for the system.

Namco’s baby is beautiful. Pac-Man Championship Edition is on the iPhone for real, and I couldn’t be happier. Well, I probably could be, but I’m not going to complain about getting this at all.

Pac-Man Championship Edition, for those that have never played it (shame on you), is basically the same core game as Pac-Man – you’re in a maze, there are ghosts, pellets to eat, power pellets with which to eat the ghosts chasing after you, and of course, eating such items as oranges, pretzels, keys, and Galaxians. Where the game differs is the way that the game has become far more dynamic. The maze is essentially split into two parts – when all the dots on one side are eaten, a fruit pops up on the other side that you must eat to refresh the dots on that side, which also changes the maze on that side around. Also, as opposed to the original games when you were essentially limited to eating 4 ghosts at a time, you can now combo up to 8 ghosts as long as you keep eating power pellets, and once you reach the maximum 3200 points per ghost eaten, you can keep going, getting 3200 each time. Also, your games have a time limit, as opposed to infinitely playing until you die. These sound like minor cosmetic changes, but you need to actually play the game – this version of Pac-Man has a flow and intensity to it that classic Pac-Man games never had. It’s a surprisingly different experience.

The experience of the console version has been brought to the iPhone spectacularly. The game plays just as its big brother did, and as I got into the game, I forgot that I was playing a shrunken-down iPhone version. Controls for previous Pac-Man games on the iPhone have been an issue, but Pac-Man Championship Edition has the best controls of any Pac-Man game on the system. There are 4 different control schemes – there are twin d-pads on the left and right side of the screen. The d-pads are fairly large, so they provide decent enough control, and having two makes tight turns easier as you can use two different thumbs to execute them. The second scheme is fairly unique, in that it uses large directional buttons – smaller ones in the corners for left and right, a large one for turning down, and pretty much all the screen real estate up top for turning up. This is what I’ve found to be the best and most responsive control scheme, and have had the best results. The last 2 options are both swipe control schemes – the only difference between the two seems to be aesthetics, as one is meant for your thumbs and displays two joysticks for you to swipe over, and the other is meant for pointer finger usage, showing one joystick in the bottom center of the screen. However, swiping anywhere on the screen will work. I found the swipe controls to be the least accurate, as the motion required to pull it off reduces your reaction time versus just pushing an on-screen button to turn.

The iPhone version of Pac-Man Championship Edition is different from the console version in the manner that you have different modes to play – the Championship mode is largely the same as the original, where you’re trying to get the highest score in the time limit given, but now you unlock new maze sets by surviving the full length of time in a maze. The Challenge mode gives you a set of, well, challenges, but as it is, it largely serves as a tutorial to teach you the mechanics and to get you to test out the control schemes. What is interesting is that Namco is offering the ability to unlock 10 more Championship mazes, and 100 more missions (presumably ones that are actual missions rather than just glorified tutorials), and a Challenge Mode that is otherwise unavailable in the base release. These are available for $3.99, which kind of stings for having to pay right away to unlock more content, especially basically having to pay for the Challenge mode, but I would wager that you could skip out on the DLC if you didn’t want to pay for it and still get plenty of value for the game as it is. Replayability and high scores are the name of the game here, not just completionism.

Also, not really a complaint, but kind of a visual quirk that I noticed is that the game seems scaled from a different resolution onto the iPhone screen – it doesn’t seem as crisp as if the graphics were native. It’s not a complaint, as when the game is going, you won’t have time to notice things like the odd pixel shape of the pellets, but it was just something interesting worth noting.

There’s not much more I can say about Pac-Man Championship Edition other than that this game is exactly what I could have hoped it to be from a gameplay standpoint. While the DLC off the bat is annoying, the core game is intact and fantastic, and on sale at launch for $2.99 – a very fair price for a great game. If you like Pac-Man but have needed something new to freshen things up, buy this. If you liked the console version and need a portable version? Well, here you go.