Pac-Man: Championship Edition

Moby ID: 28473
Xbox 360 Specs

Description official descriptions

Pac-Man: Championship Edition is a sequel, by the same developer Tōru Iwatani, done in the style of the original classic. As before, you are Pac-Man and you are in a maze with dots, power pellets and hosts. The object is to eat the dots and avoid the ghosts, unless you eat a power pellet, which gives you the ability to eat the ghosts for a few seconds.

What's new here is many different mazes and modes. This is designed from the ground up as a console game, so some arcade traditions are lost. The object is no longer to try to survive/get a high score without losing quarters, but to get a high score in a set time limit. You do still have a set number of lives, which makes your time end early if you lose all them.

Unlike the original or its prodigy, Championship Edition isn't broken into distinct levels. Once you clear one side of the maze, a fruit appears on the other side. Eating the fruit regenerates the empty half with new walls, dots, power pellets, etc and increases the game speed.

The iPhone version of the game adds two additional modes. In "Mission Mode", you must clear a specific goal set by the game at the beginning of play (such as eating two apples, or eating eight ghosts consecutively). In "Challenge Mode", you must aim to achieve the top score for each course, but this time the ghosts have been sped up so that they are initially much faster.

The look is a bright neon which evokes the classic Pac-Man but takes advantage of nearly 30 years of increased computer power.

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  • Namco Bandai Games Inc.
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Average score: 82% (based on 27 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 12 ratings with 1 reviews)

A Classic Game Properly Updated.

The Good
The concept is simple: Guide a little yellow ball around a screen, eating dots and avoiding ghosts for a high score. This has been the concept of what Pac-Man is for over 25 years now. It's twitch gaming at its most pure and it captured a generation of gamers. And the "Championship Edition" understands this and does it right.

After seeing the designer, it's not hard to understand why. Toru Iwatani masterminded this game, and being the "father" of Pac-Man, who better to know this game than him. There's no jumping, no crazy power-ups, no bosses, no techno soundtracks or hypnotic trance backgrounds.... There's not even cut-scenes in this one. It's pure dot munching. That's it. You vs. the game.

That's not to say it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Pac-Man only eats a few dots on each side at a time, grabs a fruit on the other side, and half the maze begins to transform while you're playing. You don't notice it at first, but it dawns on you that you're clearing levels without pausing or thinking about it. It's now longer how to best play it safe to get the highest score possible, you have to do it as fast as you can because not only are you facing the ghosts, you're facing a timer.

As you play, the silent beat goes from light thumps to a full loud beat that lets your know you're running out of time, and the ghosts become faster than ever. You're not unmatched, though. Round corners fast enough, and Pac-Man picks up speed to go just as fast or faster himself.

Graphically, it looks like the old arcade game. The sprites are the same, and so are the items from 20+ years ago. Yet everything looks like it has a bit of gloss to it with a nice shading of color. Simple, but catchy in a pop-art sort of way, which again, works for this.

Leaderboards makes this game a quest to see how good you can become against all other players, and you'll find yourself coming back for more and more, swearing to yourself that "one more play" will bring you that high score. Sound familiar? That was the snare of the original Pac-Man, something no other console version has really managed to do. Especially not this well.

The Bad
It's a shame the game only lasts 5-10 minutes a session. I would have liked a "free" mode to let you just keep going, but perhaps that's part of the appeal. Part of the pressure to do as good as you possibly can in a short amount of time.

Playing this update makes you realize how bad the majority of other arcade updates really are, because they fail in capturing the essence of what made said game so great in the first place. This one comes along and does it so well. This game could have existed in an arcade. It's almost criminal that it exists for only one system.

Some people may have issue with the $10 USD price Xbox Live asks for as it's more expensive than a lot of other titles. Just keep in mind that this is an original title by the man who actually created Pac-Man in the first place when all those other sequels and updates weren't from him.

The Bottom Line
I have always been a Pac-Man fan. From the days of being young enough where I had to stand in a chair to get comfortable enough to hold the joystick and see the screen, so the little yellow ball and I go way back. And it's fair to say that this little guy is what sent me down the path of gaming to never return.

It's a wonderful title that reminds you of the purity of gaming. It pushes the addicting factor, and it meshes in the spirit of competitiveness that every gaming generation has craved, from the old arcade wranglers, to the achievement hungry gamers of now.

As Iwatani's "retirement" game, it's a wonderful good-bye present that simultaneously reminds you of why you fell in love with the yellow ball in the first place, and proof that the man's still got it. If you're a gamer, and you have a 360, you need this game. As for myself, it was a recent reminder of why I still love video games as much as I do.

Highly recommended.

Xbox 360 · by Guy Chapman (1748) · 2007

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Xbox 360 version of Pac-Man Champ Ed appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Ace of Sevens.

PlayStation 3 added by Kartanym. PS Vita added by Alaka. PSP, bada, Roku, Android, BREW added by Kabushi. iPhone added by Ben K. BlackBerry added by LepricahnsGold.

Additional contributors: FatherJack.

Game added June 14, 2007. Last modified January 28, 2024.