WoSland Game Of The Saturday
Is, of all things, a Facebook game. I know! Specifically, it's Pac-Man S.
Namco are on a great run of doing excellent stuff with their old IP these days, and we might easily have been recommending New Rally-X S instead, which is also pretty darn good. But Pac-Man S, which borrows several elements from the Pac-Man Championship games, is arguably even spiffier.
Like all the "S"-series games (and indeed many of Namco's other recent remakes, like Pac-Man CE DX and Galaga Legions DX) Pac-Man S is a time-attack game. You get two minutes to rack up a high score, and you can die as many times as you like, though there's a stiff scoring penalty if you do let the ghosts chomp you.
That's because getting killed resets the points multiplier for blue ghosts, which is the key to rising up the leaderboard. Every time you eat four blues, the next time you scoff a power pill one of the ghosts will be nominated as the multiplier carrier, carrying a big sign over his head to advertise the fact. Eat him and every ghost from then on will be worth 2x or 4x or 8x (etc) the normal value of 100, all the way up to a maximum (as far as I've been able to tell so far) of 64x.
The four-spook counter doesn't kick in again until you've nabbed the multiplier ghost, so to maximise your score you'll need to prioritise him as much as possible, while also eating dots to ensure the appearance of bonus fruit, which (as in Pac-Man CE) generate new lines of dots and power pills.
Before each game you can choose two from four power-ups to help you, bought with "points" that you're generously rewarded with 500,000 of at the beginning for installing the game – enough for a couple of hundred plays before presumably you get asked to buy more (although the "ADD POINTS" tab doesn't seem to be functional yet).
Anyway, that's enough with the hints and tips. If you're not already on my Facebook chums list, the WoSland record at time of writing is 570,040. I'm pretty much calling you a puff.
A good -quite excellent you say- facebook game? Hard to believe really, but off I go.
I might have asked this before but have you looked at the Pickford's superb Magnetic Billiards yet? I'm glued to it on my iPhone and have just noticed I've clocked up about 30 hours play in just 2 weeks.
I've played it, and I see what people like about it, but it just doesn't click for me. I hate having to NOT make the balls smash into each other, it's really unintuitive. I also found the lack of clarity about the IAP really annoying.
There's a moment where it "clicks" and you suddenly start wanting to rack up huge scores with the multipliers. I found at first I played it as a puzzler, now I approach it more like a pinball table and try to rack up huge scores.
Just thought I'd let you know you were right. It's brilliant. Brilliant!