Pac-Mania was the last arcade video game in the Pac-Man series, released in 1987 by Namco, while licensed in the United States and other countries by Atari.

Description

Just like all of the other games in the Pac-Man series, the goal is to eat all of the dots before he is eaten by the ghosts. This game has several significant changes from the traditional format. First of all, the board is in an isometric, 3D format. Because of this, it can be sometimes difficult to remember where the ghosts or the remaining dots are. Secondly and most importantly, Pac-Man can now jump. This obviously makes things a bit easier, because only two of ghosts (a green ghost named Funky and a later silver ghost named Spunky) can jump and they do not appear until later in the game. The final difference between Pac-Mania and the other games in the series was that the item in the center not only were fruits but also items that did such things as make Pac-Man go faster or double the amount of points Pac-Man could get by eating ghosts). There were also items such as candy, hamburgers, ice cream cones and coffee that were worth more than the fruits.

Pac-Mania was plagued by many problems. Chief among the problems was an A.I that was too easy in the early levels and ridiculously hard later on. So level 5 or 6 became a sort of glass ceiling that nobody could transverse.

Ports

Pac-Mania was ported to the Amiga, Commodore 64, Sega Genesis, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, and the RISC OS operating system for the Acorn Archimedes. Amiga conversion with improved graphics was greeted as succesful and it had a nice soundtrack by Ben Daglish.

External links

• Pac-Mania entry on the Killer List of Videogames