Developed by: Hipster Whale
Genre: Endless runner, arcade
Game System: iOS, Android
Price: Free
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Halloween is almost upon us, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, it probably already is upon us by the time you read this. The time of horror, the time of spooky scary skeletons and all things ghostly. As such, I have prepared a review of one of the most terrifying video game ghost stories of all time:PAC-MAN! What could be scarier than a bunch of brightly colored ghosts chasing you around a dark maze? …What do you mean a new Slender Man horror game was just released on the Wii U? Well who cares about “relevant” games? We’re getting old-school up in here!
Developed by the same people who brought us the popular mobile game Crossy Road, Pac-Man 256is a version of the classic Pac-Man video game with some twists, made to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the game. If you don’t know what Pac-Man is,
you play as Pac-Man (as surprising as that is), a yellow circle person who runs around a maze with no exit eating dots and running away from technicolor ghosts, and eating giant dots will let him eat the ghosts. I wish I could come up with ideas this crazy.
This game keeps that classic gameplay, but like every good sequel it also comes with some new additions. First of all, there are tons of new power-ups that you unlock after eating a certain amount of dots, which all help you defeat the ghosts and get a better score. Some of these include one that has Pac-Man shoot a giant laser from his mouth that will incinerate every ghost in his path, one that makes all the ghosts around Pac-Man explode when he touches one, and one that creates a tornado that chases ghosts around the maze. Most of them involve killing ghosts…honestly. Some say Peter, Raymond, and Egon were the original Ghostbusters, they’re all wrong. It was Pac-Man!
You can upgrade these power-ups in exchange for coins, which are placed in different spots around the maze and can also randomly spawn anywhere on the screen. Another new gameplay element is the dot counter. Unlike the original Pac-Man, there are some parts of the maze that don’t have dots on them. In this game whenever you eat a dot, a number appears next to Pac-Man that says how many dots he’s eaten in a row. If the counter gets to 256, all the ghosts on screen die. Oh, so that must be why the game is called Pac-Man 256, right? Well, that’s not completely true…
You see, the original Pac-Man was meant to go on forever, but a glitch stopped this from happening. The level counter was stored as an 8-bit integer, and as such it can’t go higher that 255. If you managed to get to level 256, the right half of the maze explodes into a wall of random graphics and text, which also removes 113 of the dots needed to get to the next level. This time around, the glitch isn’t content with waiting for players to go through all those boards. Now it’s actively trying to consume the entire maze, and it’s taking you down with it! It almost makes Slender Man sound friendly in comparison. See, this was a better choice for the Halloween article!
I’m not joking when I say this thing is scary, the developers made sure of that. After a certain amount of time the glitch will start slowly rising from the bottom of the maze. The farther up the screen it is, the more corrupted the screen gets and the louder the garbled noise becomes. It is legitimately terrifying. This… thing is more than a glitch now. It has evolved into something more sinister. The official trailer for the game even says “A menacing supervillain returns” when describing the thing. From now on, I’m not calling it the glitch. From this point on, I dub this thing Pn’gimoo Qohj’nii. Don’t ask me how to pronounce that.
Pn’gimoo isn’t the only villain of this game, of course. This is Pac-Man, and what is Pac-Manwithout the ghosts? The ghosts all act differently from each other, and luckily they are all color coded: Blinky, the red ghost that won’t give up the chase for Pac-Man, Pinky, the pink ghost who really lives up to her original name of Speedy, Spunky, the gray ghost who sleeps a lot but will strike the moment he sees you, Clyde, the orange ghost who clearly didn’t get the memo that the bottom of the screen equals death, Inky, the cyan ghost who feels the need to walk around in circles, Sue, the purple ghosts that will always try to block your progression, Funky, the green ghosts who always stick together, and… the ghost that can change color and randomly spawn anywhere at any time in the same way that a coin might, Glitchy, the spawn of Pn’gimoo. Having all these ghosts move in vastly different ways from each other allows for more strategy to go into this game than the almost-random AI (artificial intelligence) of the original Pac-Man allowed, which is good. Simple challenge is fun, but being able to plan to take on the challenge can be even more fun.
The last thing I should talk about is the price. As you see above, the game is free… at first. One round of the game with power-ups or a continue costs one credit each, and every few minutes your credit counter resets to the maximum of six. Of course, you could *sigh*… pay extra for infinite credits or double coins. This is nothing new for mobile games, and I mentioned in my PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist review how much I hate this kind of business model. I feel like if you want to make money on a product, make people pay for the product at first, don’t pretend that it’s free and say “Oh, wait! Here’s some additional features that should come standard, like being able to play the full game whenever you want! I hope you have a lot of money!” The absolute worst way that I’ve seen this used was in Angry Birds Transformers, where you had to wait for your characters to uncover a level, or you could just pay for them to unlock the level immediately. I would be sort of fine with this, if it wasn’t for the fact that you can’t replay older levels. Basically you get the game for free, but you have to pay for the right to play it when you want to. Repeatedly. What the pfftubnakjfbvu4we{insert angry person losing his mind noises here} THAT IS NOT A THING THAT SHOULD HAPPEN! The way it’s used in this game is okay though, since I can still play the normal game whenever I want without paying. Occasionally it also lets you continue by watching an advertisement instead of using credits. It doesn’t frustrate me as much.
Pac-Man 256 is a very addicting and fun game that perfectly recreates the basic gameplay of Pac-Man while also adding a lot of new things that just make it even better. It is a great tribute to one of the most famous video games in history while also referencing one of the most famous video game glitches in history. All in all I give this game 8 <strong>[4$DPh9|-|j|<L]<strong> out of 10.
Genre: Endless runner, arcade
Game System: iOS, Android
Price: Free
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Halloween is almost upon us, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, it probably already is upon us by the time you read this. The time of horror, the time of spooky scary skeletons and all things ghostly. As such, I have prepared a review of one of the most terrifying video game ghost stories of all time:PAC-MAN! What could be scarier than a bunch of brightly colored ghosts chasing you around a dark maze? …What do you mean a new Slender Man horror game was just released on the Wii U? Well who cares about “relevant” games? We’re getting old-school up in here!
Developed by the same people who brought us the popular mobile game Crossy Road, Pac-Man 256is a version of the classic Pac-Man video game with some twists, made to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the game. If you don’t know what Pac-Man is,
you play as Pac-Man (as surprising as that is), a yellow circle person who runs around a maze with no exit eating dots and running away from technicolor ghosts, and eating giant dots will let him eat the ghosts. I wish I could come up with ideas this crazy.
This game keeps that classic gameplay, but like every good sequel it also comes with some new additions. First of all, there are tons of new power-ups that you unlock after eating a certain amount of dots, which all help you defeat the ghosts and get a better score. Some of these include one that has Pac-Man shoot a giant laser from his mouth that will incinerate every ghost in his path, one that makes all the ghosts around Pac-Man explode when he touches one, and one that creates a tornado that chases ghosts around the maze. Most of them involve killing ghosts…honestly. Some say Peter, Raymond, and Egon were the original Ghostbusters, they’re all wrong. It was Pac-Man!
You can upgrade these power-ups in exchange for coins, which are placed in different spots around the maze and can also randomly spawn anywhere on the screen. Another new gameplay element is the dot counter. Unlike the original Pac-Man, there are some parts of the maze that don’t have dots on them. In this game whenever you eat a dot, a number appears next to Pac-Man that says how many dots he’s eaten in a row. If the counter gets to 256, all the ghosts on screen die. Oh, so that must be why the game is called Pac-Man 256, right? Well, that’s not completely true…
You see, the original Pac-Man was meant to go on forever, but a glitch stopped this from happening. The level counter was stored as an 8-bit integer, and as such it can’t go higher that 255. If you managed to get to level 256, the right half of the maze explodes into a wall of random graphics and text, which also removes 113 of the dots needed to get to the next level. This time around, the glitch isn’t content with waiting for players to go through all those boards. Now it’s actively trying to consume the entire maze, and it’s taking you down with it! It almost makes Slender Man sound friendly in comparison. See, this was a better choice for the Halloween article!
I’m not joking when I say this thing is scary, the developers made sure of that. After a certain amount of time the glitch will start slowly rising from the bottom of the maze. The farther up the screen it is, the more corrupted the screen gets and the louder the garbled noise becomes. It is legitimately terrifying. This… thing is more than a glitch now. It has evolved into something more sinister. The official trailer for the game even says “A menacing supervillain returns” when describing the thing. From now on, I’m not calling it the glitch. From this point on, I dub this thing Pn’gimoo Qohj’nii. Don’t ask me how to pronounce that.
Pn’gimoo isn’t the only villain of this game, of course. This is Pac-Man, and what is Pac-Manwithout the ghosts? The ghosts all act differently from each other, and luckily they are all color coded: Blinky, the red ghost that won’t give up the chase for Pac-Man, Pinky, the pink ghost who really lives up to her original name of Speedy, Spunky, the gray ghost who sleeps a lot but will strike the moment he sees you, Clyde, the orange ghost who clearly didn’t get the memo that the bottom of the screen equals death, Inky, the cyan ghost who feels the need to walk around in circles, Sue, the purple ghosts that will always try to block your progression, Funky, the green ghosts who always stick together, and… the ghost that can change color and randomly spawn anywhere at any time in the same way that a coin might, Glitchy, the spawn of Pn’gimoo. Having all these ghosts move in vastly different ways from each other allows for more strategy to go into this game than the almost-random AI (artificial intelligence) of the original Pac-Man allowed, which is good. Simple challenge is fun, but being able to plan to take on the challenge can be even more fun.
The last thing I should talk about is the price. As you see above, the game is free… at first. One round of the game with power-ups or a continue costs one credit each, and every few minutes your credit counter resets to the maximum of six. Of course, you could *sigh*… pay extra for infinite credits or double coins. This is nothing new for mobile games, and I mentioned in my PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist review how much I hate this kind of business model. I feel like if you want to make money on a product, make people pay for the product at first, don’t pretend that it’s free and say “Oh, wait! Here’s some additional features that should come standard, like being able to play the full game whenever you want! I hope you have a lot of money!” The absolute worst way that I’ve seen this used was in Angry Birds Transformers, where you had to wait for your characters to uncover a level, or you could just pay for them to unlock the level immediately. I would be sort of fine with this, if it wasn’t for the fact that you can’t replay older levels. Basically you get the game for free, but you have to pay for the right to play it when you want to. Repeatedly. What the pfftubnakjfbvu4we{insert angry person losing his mind noises here} THAT IS NOT A THING THAT SHOULD HAPPEN! The way it’s used in this game is okay though, since I can still play the normal game whenever I want without paying. Occasionally it also lets you continue by watching an advertisement instead of using credits. It doesn’t frustrate me as much.
Pac-Man 256 is a very addicting and fun game that perfectly recreates the basic gameplay of Pac-Man while also adding a lot of new things that just make it even better. It is a great tribute to one of the most famous video games in history while also referencing one of the most famous video game glitches in history. All in all I give this game 8 <strong>[4$DPh9|-|j|<L]<strong> out of 10.