First and foremost are the green, static, "sleeping" ghosts that litter the mazes. In addition to loading the game up with a well-considered number of visual styles that recall or reimagine past incarnations of the Pac-Man, as well as a good fistful of new mazes that feature varying balances of straightaways and tight corners, DX introduces three key gameplay concepts, the total sum of which is an experience that feels fresh precisely because it still feels so familiar. Like Pac-Man Championship Edition, the widescreen mazes are split into left and right sides, with different maze patterns appearing on one side as you clear out all of the dots and Power Pellets on the other, giving the whole game a relentless sense of momentum, and putting more of a focus on high scores than simple survival. Like Pac-Man, you are constantly nagivating a series of mazes, eating up dots and using Power Pellets to turn the tables on the marauding ghosts. As Championship Edition was a modern evolution of the original Pac-Man, DX expands specifically on the work done by CE, creating an experience that’s anchored by a lot of the classic Pac-Man sights and sounds and the fundamental gameplay concepts, but whose resemblance to the old quarter-chomper is rapidly slipping away. Pac-Man Fever has been effectively weaponized. This is sensory overload of the highest order, the kind of game that leaves your eyeballs dry, your nerves shot, and every last bit of you wanting more. But not only does DX make CE feel like weak tea, it all but makes that game obsolete.
As unlikely as the success of Pac-Man CE was, we're talking straight-up Powerball odds that the follow-up, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, would be able to match it, let alone exceed it. Taking clear inspiration from Geometry Wars pretty much across the board-from the thumping techno and pulsing neon lights to the perpetual sense of escalation and pure speed-2007's Pac-Man Championship Edition made Namco’s old pie-chart feel more vital than it had, arguably in decades. The ghosts have numbers, but YOU ARE THE PAC-MAN.
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