
Pac-Man is on a rampage. He began devouring random sewer fruit and carelessly disregarded pellets after being teleported away from his peaceful home, and on his own birthday, no less.
The ghosts behind Pac's teleportation are being terrorized by Erwin, a mad genius of sorts. When it comes to evil names, Erwin is a villain we rank right alongside Crisis Zone's terrorist leader, Derrick.
Erwin has created a machine designed to penetrate the Spectral Realm (ghost home). The side effect of this is an inadvertent collapse of Spectral existence into the real world (the one with all the giant yellow balls that eat things).
Unable to defeat Erwin, the ghosts call Pac. He's going to punch, stomp, roll into, and eat his way to victory.
We just played a few levels of Pac-Man World 3 and found ourselves running around, using a charged Sonic-esque rolling attack on enemies, punching other bad guys, doing some basic jumping puzzles and beating a mini-boss upside the head. At one point we even got to go robo and use a huge mechanized suit of armor to dispense Pac-vengeance. So yeah, this ain't your dad's Pac-Man. At least, we don't remember any robot-scorpions back in 1980. Ooh. Burn!
Our adventures took us 'round a hazardous sewer system poor sanitation employees must struggle to cope with on a daily basis. The various crushing devices, plumes of green toxicity, mashing spike things and otherwise poorly laid out work areas had to contribute to quite a few "accidents."
The next part of the game was a more treacherous grassy area that gave us an opportunity to climb ropes, dangle along edges, hop up, up and up staggered pillars and eventually vault from one pole to another by spinning around and launching Pac's fat yellow body gracefully through the air.
It was all decent enough platforming fun, but honestly, we're real worried about Pac-Man. Not the game, the creature. He / it is basically a trash eating hobo. Think about it. Pac runs around, eats any piece of garbage he can suck off the floor of a sewer or spectral plane and he's constantly picking fights with people. He even sees ghosts. The boy has problems.
Pac-Man, please get yourself into a therapy program and check your eating disorder at the door because there's no telling how many diseases you're picking up by swallowing mouthful after mouthful of sewer pellet.
©2005, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Page 1 of 1
Posted: 24 Aug 2005