 Ms. Pac-man: Maze Madness
Following Pac-Man World, Pac's wifey gets her own next-gen game, also
developed in the States. Unlike Pac-Man World, this one would deal
strictly with mazes. Specifically, it takes the original Pac-Man concept,
and expands it with enhanced graphics, multiple maze designs, and new
puzzle elements! Yes, there's still a lot of running around and eating
dots, but now there's block-pushing and stuff as well! This is an idea I
can really get behind. The game is reportedly kinda easy, though the controls take some time getting used to. The reviews tend to range between 7 and 8 out of 10. And that's all I have to say about that! Namco Museum
Mass Media's Dreamcast Museum game was the exact same shitty collection
the N64 had. The Dreamcast was certainly capable of doing much better...
After all, it was the fucking Dreamcast.
The Museum games keep coming and it won't stop anytime soon, but at least in this case, we're actually seeing some improvements over the other Museums. Unfortunately, the Ms. Pac conversion is the worst of the group, with botched sound effects, but Dig Dug, Galaxian, Galaga, and Pole Position turned out all right. Overall a nice step above the craptacular N64 and Dreamcast versions. Maybe these games are easier to program on a 2-D oriented system; who knows. Not that Mass Media is completely off the hook. A weird and confusing trend of Namco collections that wouldn't save high scores started with this game as well. Seriously... every GBA Namco collection would be missing this, while ports for the other systems wouldn't. Did the developers just not understand the concept of saving without a memory card, and if so, would it really have been that much trouble to figure it out? It's not like there's any goal to achieve in these games other than beating your high score! Pac-Man Collection
Shortly after the Museum port, Mass Media brought us this pretty decent collection for Pac-Man fans. Unlike the Ms. Pac Museum game, the conversions of the games are pretty spot-on in this collection, and they include the original Pac, Pacmania, Pac-Attack, and most importantly, the first-ever home port of Pac-Man Arrangement, which alone makes this collection worth having. Aside from the ridiculous lack of high score saving, most people consider the major shortcoming of this collection to be... Pacmania and Pac-Attack, really. Personally, though, I think the Puzzle Mode of Pac-Attack makes for a fun diversion while waiting for the bus or something, as puzzle games often do. Pacmania IS pretty worthless, however. It's mediocrity is pretty apparent when you have a few other Pac games to compare it to, and the compressed vertical view caused by the GBA's widescreen REALLY hurts. The view field was already pretty small as it was, and now it takes super-reflexes to avoid the ghosts while moving up and down. But hey, problems like that are easy to ignore when you got Pac-Man Arrangement! Pac-Man Arrangement! Whoo hoo! Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze
Another PC-only Pac game that I never heard of until I started researching for this guide. I can't offer my own opinions, but screenshots make it looks like an attempt to update the original formula like the Adventures in Time PC game. Except it's a lot simpler, and the graphics are completely hideous. The reviews I've seen confirm this, more or less. Namco 20-Year Reunion
In 2001, Namco developed a series of arcade machines marketed toward collectors who had money to burn. They were (and still are) sold through the fancy Brookstone company. Among others, the series included a "Space Invaders / Qix" machine and a "Donkey Kong / DKJR / Mario Bros" machine, and then this machine featuring their own games, the only one that was offered to arcades. Decorated with the original US machine art, and charmingly subtitled "Class of '81", this arcade machine contains the original Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga games, as well as Pac-Man, if the player enters a hidden code. I'm sure Namco saw a pretty good deal here... The arcades which still held onto their old Ms. Pac and Galaga machines over the years (read: all of them) would get a chance to save some space, and in return, Namco would now have Ms. Pac and Galaga machines in America with their name on it, and not Midway's. >=3 It was a pretty swanky-looking machine with a big-ol' monitor. They even included a Turbo mode for Ms. Pac, something Namco's home ports always leave out.  Namco Museum
Yet more collections... more collections! But we're in the 128-bit era now. I guess the systems are now powerful enough to translate the games completely accurately. Of course, Namco's heart will never be in it like it was with their 6-volume PSX collection. It's still called "Namco Museum", but the actual Museum feature is long gone, and they've moved entirely to farming out US developers to handle these games. Anyway, these ports are improved versions of the N64/Dreamcast games, with all the games from the GBA Pac-Man Collection added as well as a couple other Arrangement games from the Namco Classics arcade series. Specifically, the Pac-Man games in this one are Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Attack, Pacmania, and Pac-Man Arrangement. Again, Pac-Man Arrangement is the only reason to buy this. Actually, Galaga Arrangement isnt bad, either. Pac-Man Fever
I've got Pac-Man Fever! It's drivin' me cuhray-zeh! Pac-man Fever! I'm goin' out of my mind! Pac-Man was a game people enjoyed so much, they'd listen to music like that, simply because it was about fucking Pac-Man. 20 years later, there is a now a game named after the song about the game. And it's basically Mario Party, except with Pac-Man! And other memorable Namco characters, such as Tekken Character, another Tekken Character, Japanese Lady, and Astaroth... the Soul Calibur guy, not the cute blue Succubus from 2chan. The game may have been worth playing if it had her in it. Alas, it's pretty much like all the Mario Party clones, as well as all the Mario Party games after 4. That is, it's awful. Pac-Man World 2
Pac-Man World gets a sequel on multiple platforms. I don't remember its plot, and I don't really care either. A lot of people own the GameCube version of this game because there's no other way to get Pac-Man Vs. That's why I own it, and it's the only Pac-Man World game I've played all the way through; therefore, I can give you all my actual opinion on it. My opinion is that I didn't COMPLETELY hate it, but it offered nothing new from the first game in terms of gameplay. The first stage (in the Pac-Village) threatened to introduce some non-linear play, but they put a stop to that pretty quickly. The level design is pretty frustrating with lots of unfair pitfalls, often resulting in the need for level memorization, which is something that just does not fly in this day and age. It's even worse if you want to try and 100% the game. One thing I'll give it is that the game actually has decent rewards in the form of nice adaptations of classic Pac games to play, but good lord... unlocking the final ones is ridiculously hard. I usually tend to be super-completist, but even I didn't have the drive to collect all the tokens. It would have been maddening. So yeah, another mediocre Pac-Man platformer. At least it looks nice.  Pac-Man World 2
This is listed seperately from the other World 2 ports, since it IS, for all intents and purposes, a different game. You can't do a fully-3D platform game on the GBA, so Namco gave Fullfat the go-ahead to create a 2D version based upon the 3D games. Except to make the port more authentic to the Pac-Man World experience, it's not ENTIRELY 2D, it's slightly isometric. This is something 2D platform games don't try often... Not because they're afraid to, but because they know better. I'm sorry, Fullfat, but nobody enjoys jumping toward an object only to find out they're a pixel too high or low to acquire it, with the flat graphics making it impossible to tell that's the case. Players also don't enjoy levels that take place entirely over giant pitfalls, with little platforms that Pac must be at the very edge of to make the jump... but not TOO far off the edge or he'll easily fall and die. The graphics are decent... Like all the recent Pac platform games, he looks so happy as he runs and jumps and stuff. But the sound quality is laughably bad, obviously taking the PCMs from the console versions and running them through the GBA sound chip, resulting in a music that sounds like it's coming from AM radio. Aside from the awful controls and physics, much of the game's "challenge" comes from pointless backtracking required to get all the fruits and stuff to 100% the game... which may or may not provide a reward; I couldn't find info on that and I sure as heck don't plan to find out myself. It's just perplexing, really... It's not like it would be a huge feat to make a 2D Pac-Man platformer that's better than Pac-Land and Pac-In-Time. Why couldn't they do it? Whyyyy?? Pac-Man Vs.
Is there anything that could be better than playing Pac-Man with three human-controlled ghosts and commentary provided by Mario? No. No, there isn't. The whole GameCube/GBA link thing may have been yet another novel idea from Nintendo that didn't really get used much, but at least most of the games that DID use it completely kicked ass. Well, I guess it was just this and Four Swords. And there must have been at least one other one, but they all kicked ass. Pac-Man Vs. is a crazy-simple concept designed by Shigeru Miyamoto (hence the seemingly random appearance of Mario) that works out so well. The player controlling Pac gets uses the GBA to munch all the dots onscreen as usual, and the other three players control the ghosts, with a limited view of the playfield shown on the TV monitor. Once Pac is killed, the player who did the deed gets to take over. Whoever scores a certain amount of points first wins. If there's one bad thing I can say about Vs., it's that The two-player mode is pretty worthless; you'll need at least three players. Another problem is that is comes with Pac-Man World 2, and you might end up playing it. Aside from that, anyone who has both a Cube and a GBA has no excuse not to own this game. Link cables can be found for five cents on eBay. The Pac-Man World 2/Vs. bundle can be found in most game shops for $15 or less. And if you don't have at least two or three friends, GO OUT AND MAKE SOME, so you can play this game. Pac-Man All-Stars
This was a "battle game" based on Pac-Man, brought to us by the same team responsible for "Quest for the Golden Maze" (uh oh). Up to four players compete in various arenas, scrambling to collect the most pellets, which are thrown haphazardly around the field. Sounds to me like this game could have easily been called Hungry Hungry Pac-Man's. Like the other Creature Labs PC game, this is reportedly very mediocre, although somewhat more creative than Golden Maze was. Namco TV Games
"TV Games" is the term now used to apply to consoles with pre-built in games, often consisting of a controller with the code built right in, which simply hooks directly into the TV via A/V cables. It's become a well-known and successful novelty by various maufacturers, with Jakks Pacific being one of the pioneers. This, along with their Atari 10-in-1 pack (shaped like a 2600 controller), were among their first releases. Developed by HotGen, the original Namco set naturally included Pac-Man, along with Dig Dug, Rally-X, Bosconian, and Galaxian, all pretty decent ports. It is essentially yet another way to play a collection of classic games, although they do have the advantage of coming with a keen arcade-like joystick. Pac-Man
Ms. Pac-Man
Pac and wife are hitting the mobile circuit now, in Java-powered games for PCS phones. Why not? Both games make for fun diversions while waiting for an airplane or whatever. My Sprint phone comes with a demo of Ms. Pac. While the graphics are naturally rather small, it's kinda neat how, for the first time ever, a home port of Pac gets to be played on a vertical screen. Like most cell games, sound is rather limited, with music reduced to just to the opening jingle, the ghost-eating sound, and the death tune. The gameplay is pretty intact, though... What I could play of the demo, that is. Controlling Pac with cell phone buttons isn't the easiest thing in the world, but again, it's a pretty adequate experience while passing time... The problem, though, is that these games follow the typical Mobile model, meaning you can only "rent" them and pay a monthly fee to keep playing them, and there's no way to just download them permanently to your phone, which is really a complete drag. Pac-Man Casino
Pac-Man Puzzle
Along with the classic game ports, some original Mobile games were developed. The Casino series contained Pac-themed versions of Slots and Card games that are quite common in the Mobile market, and Puzzle is a brain-teasing game completely different from Pac-Attack. Aside from that, I don't know much about these games. I really don't travel enough to warrant purchasing cell games, I'm afraid.  Ms. Pac-man: Maze Madness
Maze Madness gets a port for the GBA a couple years after its initial release. It's a scaled-down version, but most of the original stages are there, with everything after the "Gobblin" level missing. It was developed by the same guys who made the World 2 GBA game, and it has the same klunky feel, but overall, it seems to be a game more suited to their talents than a full platformer. It's still quite buggy, however, and it even feels incomplete toward the end. It's got the same crackly audio their World 2 port has, and there are some funny quirks like impossible extra goals being listed for the final stage (I guess this was easier then just programming the game to tell us there weren't any extra goals for that stage), as well as it being seemingly impossible to achieve more than 99% completion. Plus, the same problems with the original game are there; it's still easy, and it still has little lasting appeal. Namco TV Games featuring Ms. Pac-Man
HotGen and Jakks's follow-up to their original Namco pack. This one obviously features Ms. Pac, as well as Galaga, Mappy, Pole Position, and Xevious. Famicom Mini: Pac-man / Classic NES Series: Pac-Man / NES Classics: Pac-Man
The Classic NES Series. Nobody knows why. Pac-man in particular... why? You could get the Pac-Man Collection released earlier this year, which cost about the same, and had a near-perfect arcade port of Pac-Man, along with three other games... or you could get this, just the one port of a port, and a really early, ugly port at that. The one thing... the ONE thing this game has above the others is the feature typically added to the Classic NES series, and that is high score saving, the feature defiantly kept out of all the other GBA ports of Pac-Man. But it also had the most annoying features the Classic NES games had, those being the overly high price and the squashed screen ratio. I never really understood that... Was it really out of the question for them to provide horizantal letterboxing, or something like that? Pac-Match!
Pac-Man Bowling
Namco will continue to develop a couple Pac-Man-oriented cell games each year. Pac-Match is a brain-teaser like Pac-Man Puzzle, which is reportedly pretty fun, and the Bowling game is what you'd expect it to be, with Pac-man being the ball. It also got good reviews. If you like Pac-Man and travel a lot, these are games you should try out.
THE INCREDIBLY FUCKING COMPLETE PAC-MAN GAME LIST VERSION 2 
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