iLounge

Company: Namco

Website: www.Namco.com

Title: Pac-Man

Players: One

Price: $5

Compatible: iPod 5G

Namco Pac-Man

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By Jeremy Horwitz

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Monday, September 25, 2006
Category: Games - iPod nano, classic + 5G

Nearly 25 years after Atari released its infamously ugly Atari VCS/2600 translation of Namco's 1979 arcade game Pac-Man, the iPod version ($5) has proved that it's still possible to screw up the classic maze game in new ways. To be fair, Pac-Man has demonstrated great staying power over the past quarter-century despite numerous translation challenges - most of them visual - and its least impressive iterations have still satisfied hundreds of thousands of younger players. Aesthetically, the iPod version is ahead of most of the pack: Apple's 2.5" 320x240-pixel screen lets you see apparently pixel-perfect renditions of the game's mazes, ghosts, dots, and main character, and its sound effects and small bits of music similarly sound arcade-perfect. There are even enough pixels left over on the right side of the screen to fill with old-fashioned Pac-Man cabinet artwork and a picture of a joystick.

Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that joystick: it’s there to let you know the direction Pac-Man’s just been pointed in. Rather than allow the iPod’s four cardinal face buttons to control Pac-Man definitively, Namco’s control scheme here forces you to tap or sweep your finger across the Click Wheel’s surface to signal direction changes, a decision that will remind fans of the simple, efficient, classic Pac-Man controls of how the arcade machines used to play when the joystick was broken. Even when you’ve tapped in the right direction, Pac-Man will sometimes veer unexpectedly in a different direction, such as off into a tunnel or a ghost. The precision motions needed for fakes and turns become harder with the iPod’s control scheme, and the lack of other control options doesn’t help matters, either. Pac-Man on the fifth-generation iPod feels worse than it has on cell phones and other devices, which is a real shame.

Given the dozens of possible ways you can play a decent game of Pac-Man these days - as part of a compilation cartridge or disc for a real handheld, or as a download for a cell phone or other device - we’d advise you to pass on the iPod version of Pac-Man unless your standards are pretty low (think 1989 or so), or something is done to improve its control schemes. Other iPod games will be a better use of your $5.