It's nearly Christmas, after all. But just so we're clear, the goodwill of the season doesn't extend as far as Sony, who are the same shower of hateful greedy thieving cunts they've been for the last few years.

That's because the game we're about to discuss, like all recent PSN releases, costs six and a half quid on the Xbox 360 and £8 on the PS3, for no reason at all other than that they think they can get away with it.

This might be the only time when they're right.

The original Pac-Man Championship Edition was a revelation at the time – a bold, super-stylish reboot of Namco's classic maze-chasing dot-muncher. But look at it again today and it's amazing how little there is of it. Just six mazes, and while it claims to have three gameplay modes (Championship, Challenge and Extra) they're all functionally identical.

The superb iOS version upped the content dramatically, with literally hundreds of distinct stages and the genuinely different Mission mode added to the normal Championship and the harder, shorter Challenge games, but they're all basically still variants on the same theme.

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, though, takes everything that was great about the original, throws away everything that wasn't quite right, and comes up with a game so radically new, and so enormously better, that it really deserves a separate name of its own. I'm going with Pac-Man Astonishingly Awesome Edition.

Despite selling for the same price as the original Pac-Man CE, Pac-Man Astonishingly Awesome Edition packs in a lot more game. (And also a lot more idiot corporate and nanny-state bollocks – you have to sit through a ridiculous NINE separate screens – half of them unskippable – of moronic health warnings and various branding splashes,just to get to the main menu screen. The fastest possible time from the XMB to munching your first dot, just hammering fire to select all the default options, is 57 seconds.)

There are nine separate mazes, seven of which offer three types of game – the standard Championship mode (in a 5-minute version with selectable difficulty and a 10-minute fixed-level variant), a clutch of Time Trials (broadly equivalent to the Mission mode from the iOS game, and in which you have to achieve a specific goal against the clock) and a Ghost Combo mode, which is the normal game but played for the highest possible continuous string of ghosts eaten rather than for points.

The eighth maze is "Half", which hosts an all-time-trials mode comprising a very specific type of challenge that's more akin to a puzzle (albeit one played at high speed). Then there's Darkness, which lets you play time trials in any of the other eight mazes but in the dark. Duh.

The final choice on the main menu is Free, which is basically a practice mode in which you can play a 10-minute Championship game in any  of the other eight mazes, with any combination of difficulty and ghost numbers, and with infinite lives and bombs. Bombs? Oh man, there's SO much to tell you about.

That's because the core gameplay in Pac-Man Astonishingly Awesome Edition is barely recognisable in nature to that of its parent. Whereas PMCE essentially played like ordinary Pac-Man on fast-forward, this is something almost entirely new that just happens to be set in a maze full of dots and ghosts and fruit.

The first big change is the presence of the aforementioned bombs. Pac starts each game with a supply of explosives (the exact number depends on the difficulty setting), which detonate instantly on pressing the X button and send any active ghosts within a fairly large radius back to the central ghost pen.

"Active" ghosts? Ah yes. In addition to the normal roaming presence of Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde, each maze is home to groups of "sleeping" ghosts, who are still deadly to the touch but who don't move unless Pac wakes them up by passing very close by. (These ghosts are part of the maze furniture, and when the maze changes form – usually when Pac eats a fruit – they disappear to be replaced by the new layout.)

Once awoken, the former sleeping ghosts follow conga-style in Pac's exact footsteps, which adds an element of Snake to the proceedings – basically they're only dangerous if you let the line get too long (or tie yourself in a knot) and have to cross your own path. Inky and pals will sometimes join the line, but still have free reign to go wherever they like.

The game's big payoff, then, comes when you gulp down a power pill and turn the tables on the line of drones. Like a spinning coin coming to rest on a table, Pac chomps through the line at a quickening pace amid an explosion of sounds and combo points that feels so good you just can't wait to do it again.

(Sometimes you don't have to wait, as some of the drone ghosts contain power-pills which reset the spook-scoffing timer, enabling you to go and find another line of defenceless ghouls – all of a maze's ghosts are vulnerable to power-pills attack, including the sleeping ones.)

The third and final major gameplay change is Pac's new power of super-slow motion. Whenever he gets close to a dangerous ghost (whether active or sleeping) the game slows instantly to a near-standstill, giving you more than enough time to either find a safe route back out of the situation or trigger a bomb. And it's the cumulative effect of these changes that makes Pac-Man Astonishingly Awesome Edition such a fundamentally different (and superior) game to its parent.

Because while it's still possible to fail (ie run out of lives) in the new game, you really have to work at it. You get so many lives and bombs (with lots more added during play, though I haven't yet quite worked out the exact criteria) that you'll realistically never lose them all. While bombs can occasionally get scarce at the higher difficulties if you resort to them too often, usually you'll have plenty.

But this isn't a game about lives, it's a game about points. The real penalty for being caught by a ghost isn't the loss of a life, but the reduction in speed. You start off (according to difficulty level) at speed 5, 15 or 25, which increases as you play up to a maximum of 50. Getting killed, though, costs you 10 speed units, which obviously means you can't gather dots and fruit and ghosts as fast and therefore reduces your scoring potential.

The genius of this approach is that it eliminates the one big drawback of Pac-Man CE, namely the way that when it got really fast it was basically just a lottery. Here, the predictable nature of the drone ghosts, the bullet-time and the emergency bombs allow you to concentrate on the real skill required – plotting yourself the most profitable route through the maze – but without reducing the speed or drama.

Adding to the pleasure of the experience is the fact that the game comes equipped with a bundle of different Pac-skins. There are eight different visual styles for the mazes (mostly borrowed from the history of the Pac-Man series), six different looks for Pac and the ghosts (from standard to super-retro pixel style to the smooth semi-3D of Pac-Mania) and six different music options (including silence).

You can select any combination for any mode in any maze, and you can separately alter the base colour too. So you could have, say, Pac-Mania characters in an original-style neon maze, but with the maze walls purple or yellow. (My personal favourite visual permutations are G5 and A2, both in classic blue.)

I've tried to give a fairly comprehensive account of the nuts and bolts of Pac-Man Astonishingly Awesome Edition here, but none of that is what really counts. This is a game you need to play to fully grasp how great it is, (I think I love the pseudo-puzzle "Half" games the most) and fortunately both the 360 and – for once – PS3 versions come with a reasonably useful demo version.

While the slow-motion and bomb features reduce the differential a bit, it's unquestionably a better game to play with the surefooted cross-pad of the PS3 controller than either the analogue joystick or the notoriously skittish d-pad on the 360. While I very much resent being gouged for the extra quid-and-a-bit by Sony's money-grubbing tossers, on this one occasion it's probably worth gritting your teeth and paying more, if you have the choice.

(Unless you've already bought some sort of arcade stick, in which case you should get the 360 version.)

In either case you get astonishingly comprehensive leaderboards, with rankings for every mode in every maze, but this is a game so fun you'll be happy to play it for its own sake and to beat your own scores, before you ever start worrying about competing with anyone else.

This is a definite and strong contender for my Game Of 2010, and it's also very probably the most impressive standard-bearer yet for the entire New Arcade phenomenon. It's a game which transcends "hardcore" and "casual", enormously accessible to anyone who ever held a controller, yet with challenge aplenty for the most boggle-eyed obsessive.

It costs the same as a new Spectrum release did in 1992. If you're playing Gran Turismo 5 instead, you're a fucking idiot.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 2:03 pm and is filed under awesomeness, games, ps3, x360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.