Pac-Attack - Review and Info

Gameplay Basics:

	You drop L-shaped pieces from the top of the well. Each piece is made up of ghosts, bricks, and occasionally Pac Man himself. To eliminate bricks, you just make an entire row of bricks only - Just like Tetris. To eliminate ghosts, however, you need to get PacMan to eat them. When Pac Man appears in a block, he will keep moving in the direction he is facing, eating any ghosts he hits. If he hits a wall, he will turn around. If he ends up on top of an empty space, or a ghost, he will eat his way downward.
The game ends when another piece can not be dropped into the well. You score points by eliminating long chains of ghosts, as illustrated above.
It's important to note that, like almost all good puzzle-fighting games, this game was first made in Japan with a different name. The original was a part of the "Cosmo Gang" series, called "Cosmo Gang The Puzzle". Cosmo Gang the Puzzle is essentially the same game, except that instead of Pac Man eating the bad guys, it's a magical moving arrow.

Strategies:

If you're trying to score high in 1-player mode, pick "Hyper". You start out with 2,000,000 points, which is more than you can possibly hope to accrue on any other setting. Even if you just kill yourself, you earn the #1 spot on the high score board.

Try to avoid placing blocks on top of ghosts. As long as a ghost has free space or another ghost above it, it can be destroyed just by dropping a Pac-Man in that column. But if a ghost has a brick on top of it, then you have to either destroy the brick, or get at the ghost from the side. You can see in the picture to the right that the upper-left-most ghost will be impossible to get rid of, until you place a few bricks near him for Pac-Man to walk across.

Build your big ghost-mazes backwards. First place the ghosts which pac-man will eat last, then finish with the ghosts that pac-man will eat first.

Review:

First of all, by far the worst thing about the game is its control. You can only rotate pieces counter-clockwise. There is no button to rotate pieces clockwise: A, B, and Y all rotate the current piece counter-clockwise. Very blatant flaw. Secondly, the "next piece" box does not update immediately - So when you get to the faster levels, sometimes the next box will not update until after you are almost done placing your piece. Lastly, and most annoyingly, about 1 out of 3 times when you hit the rotate button, it will rotate 180 degrees instead of only rotating 90 degrees like it should. This is a HUGE problem, and really makes the game more frustrating than fun to play. Imagine if in Tetris, every 3rd piece you placed ended up oriented in some strange unintended way. Hmph.

The 1-player mode is not bad, although it is unbelievable that the programmers award 2,000,000 points for merely picking "Hyper" difficulty. In some arcade games like "Tempest" and "Klax", bonuses like this are awarded for picking later levels to compensate for the number of points an expert player is missing by skipping earlier levels, but 2,000,000 is way too much.

The puzzle mode is rather enjoyable, but it's rather stupid of the programmers to assign random pieces for puzzles. This means that puzzles don't have just one solution, and it also means that puzzles are not always solvable, given the pieces the game assigns you. That is, on some puzzles, you have to play 4 or 5 times until the game gives you the pieces you need.

Graphics and music are great. The ghosts look very shiny and pretty, and they animate ambiently on occasion. Pac-Man is also very shiny, and the artwork on the backdrops looks nice, without distracting from the blocks in the foreground. The music is pretty catchy, and the ghosts turn into pairs of eyeballs when eaten, just like in the original Pac-Man games.

The 2-player mode is pretty fun, but it doesn't involve much skill. It has the same drawback as Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo and, to a lesser extent, Tetris Attack... Garbage which is sent to your opponent actually helps them send a counterattack back to you. So players who spend time and brain cells setting up huge chains of 20 or 25 ghosts are rewarded just as much as players who happen to have a lot of garbage sent to them. Hmph.

I recommend against buying this game. However, if you are a video game programmer or designer, this game might give you some good ideas. The whole maze concept is interesting, but it needs a new garbage system to make it a good multiplayer game.

Click on this little guy's picture to go back to the main puzzle fighting page. He isn't in Pac-Attack at all, come to think of it. I guess I'm just in a silly mood!

BACK... A picture of a fellow from "Cosmo Gang".