Pac-Man: Championship Edition

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.