By
NGC_
posted September 8, 2005
Pac-Man's been around for ages, but now he's going around like never before. Balls to complicated action heroes with legs and arms - Pac-Man manages with nothing but his pokey little nose and a permanent grin on his face. Pac 'n' Roll is actually quite similar to Super Monkey Ball. It's less subtle, but just as exhausting as you roll Pac-Man by rubbing the stylus over him on the lower screen, like a track-ball. A dash move is activated by swiping at him with the stylus and letting your stroke
By
NGC_
posted April 14, 2005
Draw Pac-Man - the sharp angle of the mouth, then his round body - and he'll animate and move off in the direction you drew him facing. Guide him towards the roaming ghosts by drawing walls in front of him: the direction you draw the wall is the direction in which he travels.That's the simple premise behind this game, and it captivated the crowds when the DS was first playable at last year's E3. But there's more to Pac-Pix than that. It's much cleverer than we originally thought. Although
A true coin-op classic, Pac-Man ushered in the wave of non-shooting "cute" games in 1980 and gets credit as gaming's first pop-culture phenomenon. That's great, he's historically important - but do you still want to hang out with him?
Maybe not. Pac-Man is groundbreaking but ultimately pretty boring. As you race around gobbling dots, the maze never changes; only the speed of the monsters, the length of their vulnerability and the routes they take deviate between stages. The game also suffers
Pac-Man and Galaga Dimensions feature two highly recognizable gaming legends prominently on the front cover, but the new games inside feel nothing like the classics you know. It’s almost like a bait and switch of gaming, but it’s forgivable. Not only are the Dimensions games fairly entertaining with novel uses of 3DS technology, but the classics in their original and updated forms are available, too...
Pac-Man Championship Edition needed to be released for 400 points, not the 800 Namco's asking us for. In fact, better yet - Pac-Man Championship Edition needed to be released as some kind of expansion pack for the original Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man, both of which have been on the Xbox Live Arcade service for months
Party games are often where franchises go to either die or try to make an easy buck. Pac-Man Party doesn't seal Pac-Man's future as dead, but it sure makes us hope this isn't where he plans to stay...
You know a video game character has faded from relevance when its "intellectual property" spits out a rally racing game in frustration. For every Mario Kart there are piles of pitiful cash-in dreck that go from the development cradle directly to the bargain bin grave.
Pac-Man World Rally, surprisingly enough, bucks this trend to a certain degree, by somehow managing to salvage archaic ideas like dot-munching and power pellets into elements that don't seem entirely out of place. Each character
Another epic RTS/simulation hybrid covering the fight between the Allies and the Japanese in the Pacific during WWII comes nipping at the heels of Battlestations: Midway. Unlike its fun-but-slightly-dumbed-down arcadey cousin, the emphasis in Pacific Storm: Allies is on the astounding scale of the conflict, and on fiddly real-time strategy rather than shooting things to pieces in person.
The concept is great: a Total War-style strategic recreation of the war, with you controlling all building
For whatever base reason, there are few things in this world that are more purely hilarious than watching other human beings hurt themselves in spectacular ways. It's the reason we watch NASCAR crashes, gruesome skateboard wipeouts and reruns of Jackass. It's also the reason that PAIN, a downloadable PlayStation Network game about flinging yourself at high speeds against buildings, is so relentlessly entertaining.
The setup is simple: you've got one indestructible idiot, one giant slingshot
Cover me! Sweep room! Ruffle my hair! Tie my sodding shoelaces! The beasts from Painkiller - a staunchly straight-up FPS from Polish newbies People Can Fly - would delight in sucking your eyeballs slowly from their sockets if you even contemplated going all team-based on their asses.Such is the ferocity of the enemy assault, the whole concept of AI almost becomes irrelevant. And before anyone goes off blubbing to Tom Clancy, this is actually not a bad thing. As you're bum-rushed by a constant
