Chaduke’s Blog

I grew up playing the first coin-op video games.  PacMan was one that held my attention for quite a while and its popularity remains to the present day.  I’ve been playing the latest edition PacMan CE on my Xbox360 thru Xbox Live Arcade. 

It was designed by Toru Iwatani, designer of the original PacMan back in 1980.  He claims this will be his final game, but at age 52 he’s now going to teach game creation at Tokyo Polytechnic Institute. 

 I’m pretty impressed with what has been done with PacMan CE.  The action is very fast paced compared to the original.  It still has the same feel as far as avoiding the ghosts, eating the power pills and eating the ghosts, but it all happens much faster and more often.  The challenge now is not seeing how long you can repeatedly clear the same level over and over again without making a mistake, its more about trying to handle the speed.  The more points you make, the faster PacMan moves and the faster the ghosts move.  It can get ridiculously fast after a while. 

There’s numerous other differences that you can read about from the links, so I wont elaborate further. My only small complaint is the outside border of the screen. Its constantly moving in such a way that makes a “tunnel” type effect and it can make you dizzy after a while, and I have to specifically make an effort to avoid looking at it.