G-MODEアーカイブス+ パックマン

This is, in fact, [i]Pac-Man[/i] my dudes, and not a particularly necessary edition of it given that [i]Arcade Game Series: Pac-Man[/i] is available for $3.99. In fact, between Arcade Game Series, Pac-Man Museum and Pac-Man Museum Plus, and the fact that the original is I believe in Pac-Man World 1 and 2, plus the NES port in Namco Museum Archives Volume 1, this is I believe the [i]seventh[/i] copy of the original Pac-Man on Steam and the much-maligned Atari 2600 port [i]is[/i] available on the Atari 50 collection as DLC along with the Atari 5200 and 8-Bit versions, so this is really the tenth if you count all versions! That said this edition is still kind of cool and enticing for a few reasons that make it worth supporting. Re-releases of classic games typically focus on the most well known or "correct" version, in Pac-Man's case that being the arcade version, but different ports to different platforms can add their own flair and feel. This happens to be a port of a Japanese flip phone version of the game from 2007, and in that regard it's actually kind of impressive! The main inaccuracy to the original you'll notice is the sounds are at a much different pitch than the original, even moreso than the NES version which has it's own kinda identifiable sound that stretched into the MSX port, but otherwise it's surprisingly faithful and plays quite fluidly! My main hand-held Pac-Man back in the day was the Gameboy Advance version of [i]Pac-Man Museum[/i] which gave you the option of either zooming in up close to where Pac-Man is, or playing the game at a low resolution but with the full map on the screen all at once. The fact that the Japanese flip-phones of the time had enough resolution to show the whole map at full resolution and only minimal edits to the sprites is pretty neat and the framerate is just as solid as the arcade which still surprised me since a lot of flip-phone games run at pretty low framerates. If you disable the bilinear filter in the options menu I dare say you've got a pretty good facsimile of the real thing. I also like that if you can read Japanese, the opening screen classifies the "genre" as "dot-eating game"... which to be fair does check out. So why is this exciting? Well, I'm a big fan of what G-Mode does with their Archives series and I want to support it, and more importantly the fact that this comes out right after the excellent [i]Namco Chronicles[/i] rerelase has me thinking maybe they've finally emptied the well of Atlas releases and are turning their sights onto Namco full-bore. Don't get me wrong, I know those Atlas games have been [i]great[/i] for fans of Persona and SMT, but I've never played the "real" versions of those games so I wouldn't really get what's going on. Now classic Namco on the other hand? That's my jam and there actually are quite a few unique and interesting Pac-Man games that were only ever on japanese flip phones that I would love to see. I imagine it'd be a copyright nightmare but I would love to play [i]Pac-Man x Bomberman[/i] which was an i-mode game. Actually after they're done with Namco I'd love a bunch of obscure Bomberman flip phone games to come out too! I think at one point there was a Java version of [i]Pac-Man Plus[/i] and I don't know if that would be in this project's purview any version of [i]Plus[/i] would [i]really[/i] be something! So I'm mostly supporting this based on what it could lead to but it's still fun to play. I mean it [i]is[/i] Pac-Man. I'm glad that they bring these to Steam despite how niche they are and I buy every one in hopes they keep doing so.

You can never go wrong with Pac-Man, and there's never enough of him! This is as great if not better than arcade game series (mostly because it actually runs on my PC) and is a great footnote in mobile game, and Pac-History. Though I do have an issue which is Blinky's sprite looking odd in-game. Other than that, it's still pretty neat! Even without knowing any Japanese you can still play the game because it's Pac-Man!