8 Bizarre Pac-Man Games That Deserve A Look
This Wakka's for all of us
We’ve all played Pac-Man, every single last blessed one of us. We’ve guided him around the maze, eaten the dots and the fruit (for ruffage), avoided or gobbled the ghosts, and bumped our heads to that rich “wakka wakka” groove. Pac-Man has an intoxicating gameplay loop – for a few minutes anyway. I love the game, but I can only play for a few rounds before I grow bored or lose all my lives.
Namco knows this - or at least I think they do. For the last four decades, Namco themselves along with many outside developers have tweaked the Pac-Man formula ever so slightly to maintain interest in the character and franchise.
Some of these tweaks, like the iconic Ms. Pac-Man or the slightly more recent Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, expand on the original dot-eating formula in new and exciting ways. For example, the latter takes Pac-Man and the ghosts to the club, and may I say, it’s about time.
We’re not talking about Pac-Man’s universally beloved or even highly regarded entries on this list, though. The Pac-Man games on this list are occasionally brilliant, but often confusing and misguided iterations that possibly shouldn’t exist. Possibly. Such remarks are subjective, but… you’ll see what I mean as we venture through Big Pac’s strange catalog.
SUPER PAC-MAN (ARCADE, 1982)
Forget the dots, Pac-Man is a growing boy - er, man - er, medium-sized pizza with a slice missing. Instead of all the yellow pellets, Pac grabs keys which open doors where food and other miscellaneous items reside. Eat everything, including the pink pellets that will turn Pac-Man into Super Pac-Man. Capes? I think not. When Pac-Man noshes on a pink pellet, he grows large and can Pac-Smash through the doors and the ghosts, no problem. Just like in the original Pac-Man, though, the ghosts never die because, ya know… they’re already dead.
PAC & PAL (ARCADE, 1983)
The doors and fruit are back, but this time, Pac-Man’s brought a new friend. Her name is Miru and she’s… kind of a backstabber? She collects items that give you points, and if you don’t intercept them quickly, she’ll place them in a box where they’ll disappear forever. The ghosts don’t hurt her because she’s kind of helping them, I suppose. There are cards here also, but they act like keys. Wakka Wakka over the cards to open the doors to collect the fruit (and other random objects). Pellets turn Pac large and blue and also give him a frequency beam?! Yeah, this one’s proper nuts. Pac & Pal never released in America in arcade form, but you can find it on one of the many, many Pac-Man compilations.
PROFESSOR PAC-MAN (ARCADE, 1984)
In 1984, Namco, drunk on hubris, decided that a quiz game featuring a snooty, older Pac-Man, but with none of the maze-centric gameplay of previous versions, would be… a hit? A quirky experiment? The mind, she is boggled. Answer the questions quickly before Pac-Man eats all the dots at the top of the screen and time runs out. You win points and absolutely no bragging rights because nobody cares about Professor Pac-Man. That’s not just me being ornery, either. Out of the 400 arcade units produced for North America, 300 were returned to the manufacturer. Throw a quiz game in a bar and maybe it will do well, but in arcades? And right during the video game crash? A serious intoxicated stumble.
PAC-MAN 2: THE NEW ADVENTURES (SNES, GEN, 1994)
No list of bizarre Pac-Man games is complete without Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, an outlandish, surreal, and frustrating point-and-click adventure game. You don’t control Pac-Man here, at least not in the conventional sense. Instead, you use a slingshot to guide him around his world, help him solve puzzles, and cause untold amounts of mischief. The best part? Hitting Pac-Man in the face, either to wake him up or make him angry. Unfortunately, as with many point-and-click adventures of this era, solutions to puzzles are often obtuse. Combine this with awkward controls and the very frequent wrestling with Pac-Man via the slingshot to get him to move where you want him to go, and you have an all-around maddening experience. A sequel that aims for bonkers originality, while flying gloriously off a cliff.
PAC-IN-TIME (SNES, 1995)
Pac-Man gets thrust backwards in time to his 1970s disco duck days in Pac-In-Time, a unique puzzle platformer that initially feels weird to play but becomes surprisingly addictive after a few stages. Like all worthy Pac-Man games, the goal here is to search the level and find all the pellets to open the exits. These levels are moderately expansive, though, so superpowers are needed. Powers like the rope, an ingenious concept that allows Pac-Man to dangle from high areas and swing back and forth to access hard-to-reach dots and secret locations. The game’s mechanics are admittedly quirky and awkward, but unlike the other games on this list so far, Pac-In-Time keeps you coming back.
PAC-MAN VR (???, 1996)
Remember those Virtual Reality displays a lot of malls had in the mid-1990s? For five bucks or thereabouts, you could strap on a heavy helmet and be thrust into a “Reboot”-esque vision of the future. Pac-Man VR was featured at some of these kiosks, a first-person, Pac-Man inhabiting version of the original 1980 maze game. It was neat, it was gimmicky, but there really wasn’t much to it. Collect the dots, avoid the ghosts, and marvel at the not-so-virtual-reality of spending your food court money on an ephemeral experience.1
PAC-PIX (DS, 2005)
Early DS games often went overboard with the then-innovative stylus and touch-screen elements, and Pac-Pix is no different. Each stage begins with you drawing a Pac-Man, then guiding him around the stage with the stylus to devour ghosts. Occasionally, different gimmicks emerge, like the ability to shoot arrows at ghosts on the DS’ top screen or the ability to unlock gates so you can eat Pac-Man’s precious fruit. You can also draw up to three Pac-Men on screen at a time, which makes the proceedings nice and chaotic. If you like hand cramps and one-of-a-kind premises that were never repeated again for obvious reasons, Pac-Pix is definitely a game you can play.
PAC-‘N-ROLL (DS, 2005)
Another DS experiment, but Pac-‘n-Roll actually works. Use the stylus to roll Pac around in a top-down 3D environment, gather up the pellets, avoid the ghosts, and open doors to reach new areas. Pac’s graduated from fruit to chocolate here, except unlike boring fruit, the chocolate gives Pac special abilities. Knight Chocolate weighs Pac down and lets him walk underwater, while Wing Chocolate lets Pac hover a little bit. Just two types of power-up chocolate, milk and dark, none of this cherry hazelnut garbage. Also, Pac-Man’s fat smiling head on the bottom screen makes me happy. Pac-‘N-Roll is deeper and better than Pac-Pix, and it still sort of retains the OG Pac formula, just in a limited 3D setting. That all outrageous Pac-Man concepts were this inspired.
What is your favorite weird/bizarre/confusing Pac-Man title? Or maybe just your favorite *good* Pac-Man game? Show the world’s oldest gaming mascot some love in the comments below!
*images courtesy of Steam Community, Nintendo, Kotaku, Alchetron, Eurogamer, and Nintendo World Report
Man, remember when a good-sized fast food lunch cost five dollars? I bet Pac-Man remembers.
Oh man, this might be the first time I remembered Super Pac-Man existed since approximately 1989. No one talks about this game. And IIRC I never played it; it was another game I saw in an arcade, thought looked cool, but didn't have the quarters.
As an aside, that's a whole experience from my childhood that I wonder how many people can relate to -- having a parent drop me off at, or take me to, an arcade in the twilight years of the golden age of arcades, late 80s, early 90s. And giving me at most $1, but often just a quarter or two that they had jingling around. Even in those days, newer games usually cost $0.50 to play, though oldies like Galaga or Pac-Man might still be $0.25.
I suppose guys a few years older than me might have had more change to spare for the arcades. And those a few years younger (which includes you) probably have fewer memories of arcades in their heyday.
Also, when I say "arcade" -- there were arcade machines at a lot of random places in that time period, like restaurants, or even at the entrance to a K-Mart or Wal-Mart. Even our local Dairy Queen kept one around! So all that said, I had an extremely low ratio of "arcade games played" to "arcade games looked at longingly as I bemoaned my quarter-less pockets".
But speaking of arcade games in random places:
>Remember those Virtual Reality displays a lot of malls had in the mid-1990s?
No, I don't! I never heard of this. I don't think we had it anywhere that I lived or frequently visited. But I'm intrigued to know about what other games were in this format.
I’ve watched someone play through the point-and-click one and was glad I never played it myself, haha.
I don’t know how it came to be in our house, but I grew up with PacMania on the NES. It’s one of those funny-shaped black carts by Tengen that feels a little wrong when all your others are the uniform grey squared-off official games. But the slanty/pointy shape of it was also cool, like sports cars from the 80s. Or rocket ships.
Anyways, it follows the original formula, but is an isometric view and you can jump. To my elementary-school brain it was more fun and challenging than the original, as it got up to some serious speeds and looked way cooler. The challenge of it kept me coming back, trying time and time again to beat it.
Then, after a long period of attempts (read: months) I finally did it! …or did I? After getting past the “last” level, it starts a second loop, but the first level has all the ramped-up mechanics that you built up to throughout your initial playthrough! *eyes wide and jaw dropped emoji* I remember my mind being blown by this new extreme difficulty. I don’t think I ever cleared a second loop (and I didn’t make it to the second loop very often), but I remember enjoying the challenge.
Perhaps if our house didn’t have a 1-hour time limit on playing games for a day I would have achieved more, haha. That game is about the extent of my Pac Man experience (outside of occasionally playing the original), but it was a key part of my gaming upbringing.