N-Philes

Pac-Pix

Posted by Stephanie DeSiena.

When I think of a handheld game, what usually comes to mind is my concept of portability. For a gamer like me, someone who would rather finish a game quickly and be able to go back and play it continuously when I'm bored, Pac-Pix seems like a prime choice in the Nintendo DS's library. Since the system itself is, even now, in the early stages of its life, we're still seeing games that can sometimes feel like we're playing beefed-up tech demos. Supposedly deeper experiences are to come later from various developers, Namco included, but for now we handheld gamers will have to settle for pick-up-and-play in every game.

I like pick-up-and-play a lot, especially in handhelds, but that's for another day.

So, in terms of Namco's recent offerings on the Nintendo DS, the question here isn't exactly "What can you expect?" more than it is "Why aren't I playing it now?" In true contemporary game-evaluation fashion, and because I'm a nice guy, I'll answer both questions in this review.

Pac-Pix is Namco's big stab at utilizing the DS's standard technology. The basic premise of the game is to draw Pac Man on the bottom screen and lead him to eat up other ghosts, but using your stylus to control his every move. As you progress in the game you're introduced to some new special commands to draw, such as an arrow that you can launch at objects on the screen to trigger certain events. You use all of the tricks in the book to ultimately clear all the ghosts on the screen so you can go on to the next stage and do the exact same thing.

First off, to get it out of the way, I don't mean to make the game sound monotonous by any means. The game is set up like a book - there are twelve chapters and five pages in each chapter, with a boss stage in every other chapter. If Namco had set the game up so that there were any more than five pages in a single chapter I'd have to rip my eyeballs out because I know I'd quickly get sick of it, but five seems to be just the right number of stages. Each page is arranged differently and does something to switch up the layout. For instance, on page 1 you might start off with two triggers on the bottom screen that you need to hit in order to gain access to the upper screen, but on the next page those triggers might be on the top screen and you'd have to start sending arrows flying in order to hit them. Add some enemies to the mix, and you have a game. The number of enemies is fairly limited with only about five or six different types appearing throughout all twelve chapters, but that's all you really need in order for the game to get its point across.

The most important part is how this all comes together. My tolerance for poor game design is higher than any Average Joe Gamer's who throws a hissy fit on the internet over a twitchy camera, but this seems to not apply to any game so far on the DS. That's not to say Pac-Pix is poorly designed, but it does have major flaws. Generally, if you let the timer get too low on any stage, chances are you're not going to win and you should go ahead and give up. That's not my gripe; it's the journey that seems to get me. You need to draw Pac Man's mouth before you draw anything else, which seems obvious because it sets the direction he's supposed to move in. However, in the later stages things can get frantic. I've found myself attempting to draw a Pac Man facing right, even starting towards the right and moving the stylus the way it's supposed to go, and then suddenly he'll take off down and completely off the screen. In Chapter Nine this happened to me at least once every page. Arrows are impossible for me to draw in any direction except for up because you need to do those in one stroke. Start from the zenith of the point, work your way down towards the left side, horizontal line, back to the point and down. On the off-chance that you did this correctly, an arrow should appear and go flying in whatever direction you drew it. It never seems to want to work correctly though, and sometimes I'd draw an arrow pointing straight up only for it to shoot off in some wacky 90 degree angle into nowhere. Doing this wastes lots of time when you're trying to time your shots correctly because your target keeps swerving in and out of barriers. Now that I really think about it, I seriously hate arrows in Pac-Pix. They're absolutely useless. At least when you get bombs you won't have to worry about drawing arrows to hit triggers on the bottom screen, right?

WRONG.

Bombs make things that much more frustrating for the player. You can use bombs to hit triggers, stun enemies, and get baddies out of the little shells they hide in. When a bomb explodes, it leaves a temporary patch over the area in which you drew the bomb that you can't draw over, so sometimes you need to wait before you start another explosion because there's no way around the patch and nearby enemies. Drawing a fuse is just about as much fun as cancer sometimes because you'd draw a giant line leading up to the fire only for it not to register as a fuse, rendering the bomb absolutely useless because, after that line, the game will never allow you to connect a fuse on the same bomb for as long as you live.

But hey, it's not all bad. The music's actually pretty neat for those of us familiar with the classic Pac Man theme. Namco whipped up a nice arrangement of the tune for the entire game which I admittedly didn't even notice until Chapter Six. The Pac Man "whawo" noise makes its return as he moves about the screen. There really isn't much else to say in the audio department. Pac Man was never really an aurally pleasing franchise.

In terms of the game's length, this being a pick-up-and-play game, it doesn't take very long to get to the end. You'll breeze right through the first nine chapters, but chapters ten through twelve will make you hate yourself. There's a good chance you'll want to ignore the game once you get to the tenth and only play the previous nine when you decide to power it up again. The tenth chapter introduces fun new elements into the game like walls that you need to draw bomb fuses around in order to win. I spent a good minute and a half just clearing the way so I can eat the first five ghosts on page two, and then I ran out of time. Either that, or I ran out of lives because the bombs kept registering as Pac Man and I usually figured that if the guy is that desperate to be drawn then he doesn't deserve to be saved. Namco also threw in a card-collecting aspect which lets you read details about fascinating items in the game such as strawberries and bundles of sticks lit on fire.

This game gets an N-Philes score of C.

Namco's first Pac Man offering fails to deliver the fun in an otherwise great concept because of its design flaws - it's as simple as that. It's too frustrating for an eleven year old and too mindless for anyone older, so it's hard to tell exactly who this game is for or even why it was made in the first place. I'm still going to pop it back in for those bus rides to work because I'm a sucker for torture, but I'm going to have to score this one low because of those damn arrows. God, I hate them so much.

Posted in: Reviews

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