In keeping with their general levels of inept bumbling irritancy, Namco have ungraciously just rendered much of last Saturday's enthusiastic piece about Pac-Man S inaccurate and redundant, by wiping the leaderboards and releasing a new and substantially different version of the game.

Luckily for them the new version is even better, and therefore few will die.

It's worth covering again just because the game is so great it deserves another shove, and in order to detail the significant alterations. Apart from a shiny graphical makeover, the main differences are the power-ups and the scoring. Three of the four power-ups (which you can employ two of in any one game) are the same, but there's a new one, Slacker, which makes the ghosts stay blue for an extended period.

(Annoyingly I can't remember which one it's replaced, but as it was one I never used it can't have been very good.)

So far I've still found the best combination to be the Power Bite (which starts the spooks at 2x points rather than 1x) and the Speed Up for Pac, but there's definite merit in the Slacker one too, so you should experiment to see which combination works for you.

More radical remodelling has been applied to the scoring, however. Now the points you get for munching the ghosts are more traditional, rising for each successive one you scoff with the same power-pill. If you manage to get four with one pill the screen announces "EXCELLENT!", which it did before, but here it also means a bonus at the end of the game, which increases exponentially the more you get and adds a major new layer of strategy.

The maximum ghost multiplier is now 256 rather than 64, and the multiplier now doesn't get reset when you die, which means it isn't effectively a one-life game any more – you can still come back and notch a competitive score even after death. (I came within half a second of beating my current best in a run where I died in the middle.) I wouldn't like to say for sure at this stage, but I suspect there may even be a possibility of a tactically-useful suicide, if you want to gather scattered ghosts back together at the centre of the maze for easier chomping.

The biggest downside of the new version is that the power-ups cost more points than they used to, and you get fewer points back for your score at the end of the game, so you may run out of ability to play. (Especially since the Add Points button still does nothing.) I don't know if uninstalling and reinstalling the app may fix that, though.

It would seem a bit stupid of Namco to make a game you might be unable to play after a few hours, but then stupidity isn't that unfamiliar a concept to the videogames industry. Just in case, be extra-sure to enjoy the addictive awesomeness of Pac-Man S while it lasts. You've got 662,830 to beat, losers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 3:18 pm and is filed under awesomeness, free stuff, games. 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.