#pacintime

[ampthoughts]

I never played #pacintime before. I hope its fun.#bandainamco #pacmanmuseumplus #nintendo #nintendoswitch https://www.instagram.com/p/CgIAkY3uHPp/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[artyrogue]

Blind Date Gaming: Pac In Time

Tonight's date was an interesting one to say the least. It was with Pac-Man, the iconic game character from Namco that helped build video games as a mainstream activity! The only issue was that it wasn't...JUST Pac-Man. No, it was a pun and a spinoff all in one. It was... Pac In Time!

Soak in the colors, 'cos from here out we're mostly back to 4-color palettes.

I've seen some of the other Pac-Man spinoffs before and they just never felt right. There was some dumb point-and-click game on the SNES where Pac-Man clearly had a lobotomy, some pinball game, and that one where he was fighting a bunch of nerds on some floating platform called 'final destination' or whatever. So yeah, they're typically lame attempts to make a buck based on the identity of one of gaming's most well-known IPs. I didn't expect much, then, going in. It was a bit bias of me, sure, but I was still willing to give it a chance. The first thing I was presented with was a super-long, slow-scrolling wall of text with absolutely no music or sound throughout the whole thing. Brilliant first impression, that.

'Crazy events' here means 'binge eating countless unmarked medications within the confines of a series of neon-infused tubes with occasional spontaneous manifestations of fruit and/or keys'.

Okay, okay, sure. Some ghost witch sends Pac-Man back in time and now he has to travel through different zones to find a way back to the present. That could have been summed up much more succinctly; in fact, I basically relayed all the information you need to know right there. It also really doesn't matter at all in the long run, so my heart reaches out to the poor writer whose hopes were squandered when Pac in Time didn't end up being their gateway to better writing gigs. What matters isn't the story here, it's the gameplay! So what do we have?

It's a platformer. A pretty floaty one at that. You always slide all over, with momentum that takes a bunch of effort to dissipate. Jumping follows the Mario 64 school of gaining height in each successive jump, but it really doesn't seem necessary. It's quite bad and takes some getting used to. There's an additional aspect to the game that helps bring puzzle aspects to it: powerups. You're given a few in each level that give you different abilities and can sometime pick up (or lose!) them along the way as well. They don't really seem to fit into the typical Pac-Man lore, though. Unless there's some fanfic where Pac-Man can shoot fireballs and swing around like Spiderman?

Yes, that is a screenshot of Pac-Man shooting a Kamehameha at a shark. This is fine.

Some levels are pretty interesting, but a lot of them are short and kind of dull. Most of the time you don't even end up using half of the powerups they give you. I will say, though, that the grappling hook was well-programmed and a lot of fun to mess around with. Sometimes there are issues canceling grappling momentum when an enemy is right in front of you, but otherwise it's liberating to swing like a monkey through a level in mere seconds.

Wheeeeee!

Somewhere around world 3, though, things start to take a turn for the worse. For the most part, enemies are tame and take a major backseat to the puzzles and powerup adventuring. In the jungle world, you start to see some annoying and poorly-programmed enemies marring your fun. Some foes relentlessly track you down, some change their velocity in unpredictable ways, some blast into the center of the screen as soon as you approach, and more. It starts feeling more like I Wanna Be the Guy, a game I loathe not for its toughness, but for it's cheap death tricks and poor design. Games like that aren't about skill as much as they are about rote memorization. That's...not fun to me. Make the obstacles visible, not surprises. I'd rather spend time memorizing something useful.  Although apparently my brain seems to define 'useful' as being able to list the first 386 pokemon and recalling room layouts for a mall that has been dead and destroyed for like 15 years?

I suddenly have flashbacks to Super Meat Boy, although that game was fair and up front with its obstacles. This buzzsaw popped outta nowhere, which I guess is standard in an ancient Egyptian tomb.

I had to look up a walkthrough on a certain level, too, where the only way to progress was apparently to walk off a cliff into a pool of lava. Then, an invisible air stream carries you across the lava to safety. Jumping the gap kills you and does not reveal an air stream, there are no indicators that walking off is a good idea, nothing. Just know the trick or be stuck. Great. The walkthrough on GameFAQs even says that the walkthrough's writer was stuck on this level until someone gave them a tip. That's...not exactly a good sign of game design. There were other annoyances, like teleporters teleporting stones higher than you: if you walk into one too quickly after pushing a stone into it, the stone appears above you and crushes you to death. Also, many levels host a plethora of arrow signs that don't make lick of sense.

Right, right...I get it now. It's all so clear where I have to go!

I got through world 4, and looking up a gameplay video reveals there are 4 more worlds to go, but I had my fill. This date isn't going anywhere I want to be. So yeah! No second date here. I've also found via the comments of that video that the game is actually a reskin of another game on DOS called 'Fury of the Furries'. They basically just turned the main character into Pac-Man and made some lame music tracks that sound like the one ditty from the arcade game. Even the enemies and final boss are the same. Boo! Get some originality or keep the Furries! I mean I know the internet in general has some hangups with them, but I've never had a bad experience with a Furry myself, let alone felt their Fury! Although if the world followed this game's lead, all furry conventions would turn into massive Pac-Man cosplay events, and I would definitely pay to go see that.

I found a furry! Except it kind of beat me to a pulp, but I guess I deserve it since I stole his game.

Before I end this, am I crazy or does part of the Beach world theme sound vaguely like some Mega Man track? Listen here and skip the first 50 horrid seconds to get to the part I mean. I swear, it sounds like something I've heard before, but I can't tell which track it was. Mega Man has too many Men to keep their themes straight. Maybe I should invest my useless memorization into Mega Man theme recall instead.

And so ends another date. I'll be looking around for something else, thank you! I will say, though, that today's Sprite of Passage is a keeper. Put this as a war decoration on your uniform and go speak of the fierce battles you went through to earn it! Don't be surprised if no one gives you any sympathy or anything though. They might instead give you the number of a psychiatrist. Maybe that shrink will give you pills and you can lay them out in a maze to eat them or something? Pac it all in!

They finally, really did it...YOU MANIACS!! YOU BLEW IT UP!! DAMN YOUUUU!!