Pac-Man World 2

Richard grins wildly with pleasure; he always did like the more 'colourful' games.

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If you should fall from grace you will be punished. Perhaps I have become spoiled by the luxury that comes from quick saving and loading on the PC but I have an extreme aversion to being forced to repeat large sections of a game if I die. In Pac Man World you have a limited number of lives, each one made up of four sections. Should you bump into an enemy you will lose one section of your life, but most of your lives will be lost instantly by falling into the depths below the platforms. There are checkpoints in each level but I found them too few and far between. If you lose all your lives you will have to start from the beginning. I hate that. In some games it is a system that can work, mainly when repeating a section will give you a notable advantage for the area that bested you previously. That is not the case here. There are things to collect in the game, fruit for points and tokens, but you will grow weary of a section as soon as you've had to traverse it a couple of times. The game gets less and less forgiving as you progress. Pac Man can hang onto ledges should you slightly misjudge a jump, but in later levels the areas you land on are often so close to the deathly layer below that you need to make a perfect clean jump or you die. Further on there are some welcome variations in gameplay such as piloting a mini-sub. The game does quite a good job of mixing in a few different playing styles to keep things fresh. Of the twenty three main levels available, six of them are boss battles. If there is one unwritten rule in game design it is surely that you may not, on pain of death, repeat a boss battle. J'accuse Namco, in Pac Man World 2 the first four bosses you encounter are copies with minor changes. Bad designer, no biscuit.

It will probably take you around eight to ten hours to get through everything the first time around. You can revisit any level to try and collect every piece of fruit and munch every dot, but what may make you come back for more are the tokens and the mazes. In the main village where you start there is an arcade that holds some of the classic games, to play them you will need to collect sufficient tokens that are hidden amidst the levels. On offer is the original Pac Man, Pac Mania, Pac-Attack and Ms Pac Man. Ms Pac Man is probably the game most people will want to get at but it unfortunately requires one hundred and eighty tokens from the one hundred and ninety available. The original Pac Man is still good fun and only requires ten tokens. In the main levels you will also come across small Galaxian symbols (they look like space invaders) which will open up reworked Pac Man levels with modern day graphics. It is when you are playing these little gems that you'll wonder why Namco didn't just choose to update the original concept. These maze games, once collected, can be accessed from the arcade and are simply great fun. They may not hold your attention for very long but at least in these games the camera stays fixed so you can see what is going on.

Pac Man World 2 is a pretty decent platformer. There are moments that you will enjoy quite a lot, particularly when the camera is behaving itself. The story and simple nature of many of the elements will appeal to younger gamers much more than mature platform fans. It doesn't manage to bridge the gap, in the same way that the 3D Mario games have, between those audiences. The original Pac Man included here is still a very good game, but it is also a very old game and as such it cannot command a full retail price on its own, particularly for a modern console. Pac Man World 2 is a basic 3D platformer that borrows from this legacy. If one were to juxtapose the game with the inspiration that kicked off the mania, Pac Man World 2 would be a large cheese and tomato pizza. Tasty, but nothing special, and you will have probably have had your fill before the final slice.

You dig up the past, all you get is dirty.

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By Richard Clifford