Game Reviews

Pac-Man

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Pac-Man
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It's clear that Apple wanted to get some famous gaming brands on board for its iPod gaming launch. Tetris and Pac-Man are about as big as they come and both have been a huge success on mobile phones, so it's logical to assume they'd be equally good for iPod owners.

Unfortunately, Pac-Man hasn't made the transition well. The problem isn't the game itself. This is the original Pac-Man in all its glory, complete with authentic graphics, sound effects and music. Yep, that start-of-level tune is in full effect, sending a shiver down the spine of anyone who mis-spent their youth on arcade machines.

For those of you who didn't, the idea is to guide Pac-Man through a range of mazes, gobbling dots while avoiding the ghosts, who kill you on touch – except when you find a power pellet, which gives you a limited amount of time to race after the ghosts, chomping them up for extra points.

It's simple, fiendishly addictive, and one of the most finely-weighted gameplay mechanisms in the history of gaming.

And this version of the game is bang-on, too. Namco hasn't tried to jazz Pac-Man up for the iPod age, which will come as a relief to fans. There are three modes of gameplay – Easy, Normal and Original – and if you were never an expert it's still as tough to outmanouevre those pesky ghosts. We've got nothing bad to say about the accuracy of the conversion, particularly as it includes all 256 levels from the original.

The problem is the controls. Pac-Man's need for sharp four-way movement just doesn't suit the iPod's scroll-wheel.

You have to brush the top, bottom, left and right bits of the scroll-wheel to move respective up, down, left and right. It's a bit awkward to do at the best of times, but it's even more fiddly if you're trying to quickly go in the opposite direction.

In a game so reliant on timing and fast reactions, this is a huge flaw, and we're not just saying that because we kept dying. We tried the game on our friendly neighbourhood Pac-Man expert, and he got as annoyed as us – if not more so. All that finely-weight gameplay we blathered on about above goes out of the window if you're struggling with the controls.

For that reason, Pac-Man on iPod is a disappointment. However much the graphics and sounds tweak at your rose-tinted memories, the experience itself just leaves you feeling frustrated.

Pac-Man

The game itself is a note-perfect conversion, but the controls will have you gnashing your teeth for all the wrong reasons
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Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)