Three years ago, Pac-Man Championship Edition took the classic Pac-Man formula and reinvigorated it with a new look, changing mazes, a ticking clock and a new emphasis on skillfully eating lots of ghosts in sequence to rack up huge points. But where Championship Edition felt like an evolution of Pac-Man, the new Championship Edition DX feels more like a reinvention. It introduces a number of elements that fundamentally change how Pac-Man is played, without losing any of the timeless appeal of speeding around mazes, gobbling up dots, and chomping ghosts. On the contrary, DX only makes the entire Pac-Man experience more thrilling and addictive than ever.
Even with the help of this slow motion, though, you may still find yourself on collision courses with ghosts that offer no chance for escape. That's when your bombs come in handy. You have a limited number of bombs that, when used, bounce all the ghosts on your trail back to the ghost house. Like the slow motion, the option to use a bomb is better than dying, but it comes at a cost. The downside of using one is that it cuts any point multiplier you've built up from eating dots in half, and it prevents you from waking up any additional sleeping ghosts for a short time. (Dying eliminates your multiplier and slows down the game's speed.) Both of these tools are integrated into the action in a way that makes them very useful, without taking the challenge and excitement out of the game.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is the very definition of a game that's easy to learn and tough to master, but getting better doesn't feel like an uphill struggle. Gobbling pellets and chomping down ghosts is a great pleasure, thanks to the inherent appeal of the Pac-Man formula and to the very tight and responsive controls. So you find yourself absorbed and wanting to play again and again. And as you do, you naturally start playing smarter and earning higher scores as the patterns become clearer and you get into a groove. The imposed time limit means that, quite literally, every second counts, encouraging you to strive for perfection and avoid mistakes that cost you even a moment. In this endeavor, it's very easy to lose track of the hours as you play, whether you're aiming to knock friends down a peg on the leaderboards or just striving for a new personal best. And getting better and setting new high scores carries with it a feeling of accomplishment that then spurs you on to play still more and continue improving your performance.
Unfortunately, while numerous games like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 and Pinball FX 2 have integrated friends' leaderboards in ways that fan the flames of competition, the leaderboards in DX are one step removed from the game itself. If you want to see just how you're doing compared to other players, you need to back out of the mode-select menu and enter a separate leaderboard menu where you have to select the specific mode and maze for the scores you want to view. And if you select the filter to view your friends' scores, your own score isn't listed among them. The leaderboards do have one great feature: viewable replays for all of the highest scoring players. If you want to know how the best of the best are getting those amazing scores, you can see how they did it. But it's surprising that a game that's all about high scores makes you go through a few unnecessary steps just to see how your score measures up.
New look. Same great Pac-Man Championship Edition DX.
The hottest competition is in the game's first and best mode, called Score Attack (five minutes). But DX offers plenty of opportunities for a change of pace. As you play, you unlock a 10-minute Score Attack mode, as well as a number of time trials that score you not on how many dots and ghosts you eat but on how rapidly you clear the mazes. In addition, you unlock a total of 10 mazes, so you won't soon get bored of retreading the same patterns over and over again. DX also gives you a number of ways to change the look of Pac-Man, with some options carrying on the attractive neonlike appearance of the original Championship Edition, and others that cast Pac-Man and the ghosts as three-dimensional characters in mazes made of building blocks, in a nod to the look of 1987's Pac-Mania. You're also given a number of musical selections, and thankfully, the original CE's excellent ambient track that subtly builds up as time runs out is among them.
Three difficulty levels mean that players of any skill level can start at a speed they're comfortable with, offering a terrific experience to both those driven by a competitive desire to dominate on the leaderboards and those just looking for a fun and accessible game with a retro arcade feel. The new elements fuse so seamlessly with the familiar ones that DX immediately feels like a thrilling new game and a timeless classic at once. Thirty years after Pac-Man first became an arcade sensation, it's exhilarating to see new concepts introduced that make the whole experience of playing completely fresh and compulsively playable all over again. The original arcade superstar is back, and this is one of his best performances yet.
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