Pac-Mania



Pac-Mania is the last arcade game in the Pac-Man series. It was released by Namco in 1987 and was licensed to Atari Games for US manufacture and distribution. It runs on Namco System 1 hardware.

Just like most of the other games in the Pac-Man series, the object is for Pac-Man to eat all of the pellets before he is caught by the ghosts. This game has several significant changes from the original format. The first and most noticeable change is that the board is viewed in an isometric, 3D format. Because of this, it can sometimes be difficult to remember where the ghosts or the remaining pellets are. Secondly, and more importantly, Pac-Man can now jump. This in principle makes evading ghosts easier.

The ghosts are Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (light blue), Clyde (orange), Sue (purple and from Pac-Land) and two new ghosts, Funky (green) and Spunky (gray).

The most significant feature of these new ghosts is that they can jump as well (whenever Pac-Man jumps), beginning on the sixth round respectively. However, Funky does not jump as high as Pac-Man and with good timing, Pac-Man can jump over him. Spunky, however, jumps just as high as Pac-Man, and thus cannot be jumped over at all; often he will appear at the worst possible times, blocking any escape route. (They continue to be able to jump when edible, and even their bare eyes jump after they have been eaten.)

Making the game even more difficult is the fact that that the ghosts often travel in groups spaced in such a way as to render jumping ineffective, even if Funky and Spunky are not there. Even worse, after the fourth round, Funky usually appears in pairs, and the last few rounds have pairs of Spunkys as well. Since this can add up to as many as nine ghosts on a round, the scoring for eating them is the familiar 200, 400, 800, 1600, followed by 3200, and each ghost after that is worth 7650 points (765 being a Japanese word-play for Namco).

Finally, the bonus objects in the centre of the maze include not only fruits but also additional pellets that cause effects such as making Pac-Man go faster, or doubling the amount of points Pac-Man gets from eating ghosts. There are also assorted edibles such as candy, hamburgers, ice cream cones and Galaxian flagships, all worth more than the fruits.