Pac-Man 256

Another UHH catch up completion here in Pac-Man 256. The game takes the original concept of Pac-Man and has you running up the screen away from a wall of death and against a collection of ghosts coming at you from the other direction. Instead of just power-pellets Pac Man also has a wealth of other power ups to help him, however in order to get these, they need to be unlocked through picking up pellets to ‘level up’ and make them available.

The goal of the game is simply to outscore everyone else. During my brief time playing it, I guarantee that my score performance leaves a lot to be desired and I had to work hard/get lucky to get past a lot of my friend’s scores. I did feel that a good run depended more on luck than any kind of skill for the most part. There would be points where red ghosts, which move as fast as Pac-Man, would surround me from all sides and give me no room for escape. This was the cause of most of my deaths when I had a good run going.

Musically, it applies the traditional Pac-Man theme with a more modern, dance-like twist, in order to be down with the kids. The most annoying thing about it though, is the sound effects. Traditional Pac-Man chomping noises that get progressively louder and more annoying the bigger your chain of pellets gets up to maximum of 256. It’s not so much of a problem when you are playing but anyone else in the room would be driven crazy by it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

The solutions to some of these achievements have courted some controversy as they make a massive difference to the completion time for the game. More on these later.

The majority of the achievements come easily enough just through playing the game. There are cumulative achievements for eating 2,048 Pac-Dots (regular pellets), scoring a 256 chain of pellets, eating 64 ghosts while being powered by power-pellets and eating 64 pieces of fruit, which show up randomly in the game. There is another achievement for playing a local multiplayer game too.

After this, things get a little more time consuming. Firstly, there are the missions that come up and you need to complete 16 of these. They encompass things like eating ghosts, eating specific types of fruit and killing ghosts using specific types of power up. A lot of these are fully dependent on what the game drops which drags this out a bit.

The next pain-in-the-ass one, and debatably the biggest pain in the ass, is for eating 16 ghosts in one power-pellet chain. You can keep picking up power pellets to keep your ghost-eating powers but again, its up to the game as to whether you get another power pellet to keep your chain going and if you actually get 16 ghosts show up to be eaten in the first place. It took a lot of games of trying for this before I eventually got it and I felt very lucky to have done so.

Now on to the controversy – the power ups. The first one is simple. You need to upgrade a power up to the maximum level and do this you need to collect coins in the game. You get coins randomly on the map, from completing missions and random free gifts from the game. The coins you get do not help you achieve one maximum power up very quickly either.

You also need to unlock all the power ups and get them all to the max level and this is where the time really comes into it. At this point you have two choices. Play the game over and over again for about 20 or so hours… or abuse a glitch with the achievement tracking and cloud saving to get progress towards these achievements, unlocking them in no where near the same amount of time.

Doing this is not in breach of any terms and conditions of services however, some people consider it cheating and were quite rude to those that found out about it. If anything, this highlights how certain individuals chose to be upset by things that don’t affect them – something I found quite ridiculous.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Pac-Man 256 is another arcade reimagining that does exactly what you would expect it to. It’s a repeatable arcade game where you compete with yourself to get better. The achievement list is straightforward, if not a little grindy, and it retails at £3.99 so is great value for money to boot.