2514: Ghost Train

A short while ago, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 was considerably reduced in price on the PlayStation Store, so I grabbed a copy. I’m a big fan of the previous Pac-Man Championship Edition games — particularly Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which is one of the finest arcade games ever created — but had heard mixed reviews about Championship Edition 2. Still, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The first thing I’ll say about Championship Edition 2 is that its big new structural addition — a so-called “adventure mode” — is total garbage. It consists entirely of time attack phases in which you have to eat sufficient dots to make a piece of fruit appear — very rarely is this the entire maze worth of dots — and repeat until you have eaten sufficient fruit to clear the stage. At the end of every block of near-identical levels is a supposed “boss fight” in which you do exactly the same thing, only with a giant ghost bashing into the background every so often.

“Total garbage” may be an exaggeration in retrospect, as these challenges are mildly diverting, but they miss the entire point of Pac-Man Championship Edition, which is to score as many points as possible against a strict time limit.

Fortunately, the Score Attack mode is a lot of fun, and Championship Edition 2 is a different beast from its predecessors in a number of ways.

Firstly and most significantly, bumping into a ghost no longer immediately kills Pac-Man, unlike all the previous incarnations of the game including the previous Championship Edition installments. Instead, Pac-Man bounces off the ghost, though bumping into one several times (or once on Expert mode) causes the ghost to become “angry”, which makes it speed up, chase Pac-Man and become fatal to the touch. However, sometimes it is desirable to do this, since making a ghost angry causes it to fly up in the air and out of the way for a couple of seconds, so you can deliberately provoke a ghost in order to clear a path for yourself.

Secondly, the “ghost trains” introduced in Championship Edition DX work a little differently. There are several modes of play — the first has four ghosts wandering around, but only one of them forms a train when Pac-Man passes by a sleeping minion ghost, while the other two form up to four trains in total, one for each ghost. Unlike Championship Edition DX, minion ghosts don’t join a train by a ghost passing them; they immediately wake up when Pac-Man passes by them and automatically attach themselves to one of the trains, even if it’s nowhere near where the minion was. This allows you to create huge ghost trains by planning your route carefully rather than having to manipulate the ghosts AI.

Eating a power pill works a little differently, too. Power pills only spawn on certain mazes after you’ve eaten a certain number of dots, and consuming one causes the ghosts and their trains to turn blue in the traditional manner. However, in Championship Edition 2 they move on set routes that are specifically marked on the maze, allowing you to predict where they are likely to go and head them off easily. Said routes tend to branch in several places in the harder mazes, so it’s not as easy as it sounds, but by learning the routes and the way the ghost trains attempt to avoid Pac-Man, you can become more and more efficient.

Oh, and ghost trains have to be consumed from their head now rather than from any point. This can be surprisingly challenging, though chomping your way through all four ghost trains in the maze, which causes both the train and Pac-Man to go flying through the air in a ridiculously overblown display of acrobatics, is immensely satisfying.

Bombs work differently, too. Rather than blasting the ghosts up in the air for a moment as in the previous installment, bombs now send Pac-Man back to the starting point of the maze, which can be a quick means of retrieving the fruit if it’s spawned and you’re a long way from it. However, bombs are worth quite a few points at the end of your allotted time, so it’s worth holding on to them as much as possible; more can be acquired by consuming every dot in a maze rather than just the amount required to spawn the fruit needed to progress.

Extra lives also show up at predictable moments — every 1 million points — as collectible items in the maze, and these are worth huge points at the end of a game, so it’s in your interest to collect them before progressing to the next maze. They’re easily missed, so the mark of a true pro Championship Edition 2 player is going to be planning their scoring effectively so that they hit a multiple of a million points at a suitable moment to grab the extra life without inconveniencing them — and not, say, crossing the million boundary on the changeover between levels, which causes you to miss out on the opportunity to collect the extra life altogether.

There’s quite a lot to Championship Edition 2, then. Fundamentally, it’s still based around Pac-Man, but it’s pleasingly distinct from its predecessors and fun in its own right. It has a couple of irritating factors — most notably a lengthy, non-skippable and rather unnecessary tutorial sequence before you can play Score Attack or Adventure mode, and, of course, Adventure mode itself, which is a waste of time — but on the whole, once you get stuck in to chasing the high scores, it’s a lot of fun. And, like its predecessors, it’s a game you can easily spend several hours enjoying when you really have more important and interesting things to do with your life.