Arcade Game Series: Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man

Clearing down the backlog of purchased games isn’t getting easier so it was time to focus on some quicker games despite their elevated difficulty. As the Pac-Man games are essentially the same, I played them both, back to back.

The premise of Pac-Man is simple. Collect the pellets, avoid the ghosts, get the best score possible. Ms Pac-Man is the same in premise, only the level layout changes every couple of levels just to mix it up.

In terms of what the Xbox One versions give you, the most notable addition is that you can restart from any level you’ve previously beaten. This is relatively pointless though if playing for a high score as the later levels are harder and you get no benefit from power pellets once you get to a certain point. I also found the Xbox One menu layout and button configuration to be clunky. This seems to be the case will all older re-releases.

Apparently, Pac-Man is supposed to be easy because the ghosts all move in a predetermined pattern but I couldn’t figure this out during my hours of gameplay so I gave up trying. I guess some people just have than knack.

Achievements – 2,000 Points – 40 Achievements

Each game carries 20 achievements and they are more or less for doing the same things in both games. A lot of achievements are awarded for eating the different kinds of fruit available and for clearing up to a certain Round. All of these are made easy with the level select function.

Things start to get tricky after this though. Both games have a requirement to what is essentially play a perfect game where you eat all fruits and 16 ghosts in the same round. There is another trick to getting this one though. You can save the game state and reload it if you fail by deleting the game save from the console and loading it back from the cloud. This is essentially the trick to use for any ‘do this thing without dying’ achievement.

I’ve read a lot of online bile about this save scumming method as a lot of people seem to consider this cheating. That’s a load of utter tosh as anything that game allows you to do is not cheating, end of. At the end of the day you actually have to complete this task and whether you do it in small stages or one go doesn’t really matter. Getting someone else to do it for you, using save downloads from other people (something you can’t do on the Xbox One) or hacking the hardware to gain advantage, is cheating. It’s not exactly a difficult line to see.

Ms Pac-Man is the same list with one exception. You have to clear two levels in a row without dying without using the warp tunnels. It’s actually easier than the main Pac-Man game in this regard.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Arcade Game Series: Pac-Man is a solid arcade game that offers nostalgia and sticks to its routes. It’s fairly enjoyable with a challenging achievement list to boot. At £3.19 each, they are pretty good value too.