Virtual 100 – Game 10
Hey! Look at this, finally a game that isn’t going to require a huge write-up. Whether it actually turns out to be a huge write-up is another thing entirely.
This is one of those games that’s difficult to write about. Pac-Man World RePac is a ground-up remake of an old PS1 game, and while I guess it was a pretty cool game back in the day, I couldn’t help but ask myself why it needed a remake. I looked it up and it was done in collaboration with the whole Pac-Man Museum game that released recently, so I’m guess maybe it was an anniversary thing? Possibly?
Not that it matters. The fact is, it exists, and I played it. I played it all the way through. And I don’t know why.
It’s not that Pac-Man World RePac is a bad game; the game is pretty competent in most regards. It’s just not that fun.
I feel this is characteristic of a lot of the games from back then. They came out on a classic console back when everything was fresh and new, and we loved them for what they were. But when you put a fresh coat of paint on something like that to bring it up to date with current-gen games, you can’t help but compare them to current-gen games. And when you do that, you realize just how far behind they really are.
Look at what happened with Yooka-Laylee. It wasn’t a bad game (it wasn’t a great game, either), but technically it was solid. It was pretty much a direct, spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie. The problem is, we loved Banjo back on the N64, but the formula that worked back then just doesn’t translate well. I tried to play Yooka-Laylee and it bored me to tears. I should’ve loved it as I loved the Banjo games. I just found that, as I played it, I just didn’t care anymore.
I also have the remake of the first two Klonoa games, and again, I’m having a hard time getting into it. There was something about those blocky, pixelated, jittery graphics back on the PS1 that made everything seem… faster? Playing it at a locked framerate with pretty graphics seems to slow everything down for whatever reason.
But anyways, back to Pac-Man World. Pac-Man World starts out with the ghosts— Pinky, Stinky, Winky, and Blinky (that might not be their names) being tasked with kidnapping Pac-Man. Being the racist ghosts that they are, they can’t tell which one he is, as all Pac-People look the same. So they kidnap the entire Pac-Family, including the dog.
It turns out that Pac-Man wasn’t even at home, he was out doing the Pac-Shopping. He returns home to find his home ransacked and his entire family murdered.
Okay, they weren’t murdered, although seeing Pac-Man go John Wick on some shit would’ve made this game much more interesting. It turns out, the evil being that contracted the ghosts to kidnap everyone was an evil Pac-Man with iron jaws and airplane wings who, despite being way cooler than Pac-Man himself, is holding a grudge against him for whatever reason.
So Pac-Man has to waddle through six different themed worlds and bounce on stuff and collect dots and fruit because… well because it’s a platformer and that’s what they do. This was from back in the days of the collect-a-thons, so of course each stage has a number of things to find and unlock. Gather all the letters of PACMAN and you get a bonus stage. Find a special maze looking icon and you unlock a traditional-style Pac-Man board to play.
This is all pretty standard stuff and none of it will knock your socks off. The bonus stages only vary a little bit and they play out a lot like the hidden areas in Donkey Kong Country. You have a limited amount of time to gather all the things, and if you do you get bonus points. The mazes are small and if you’ve played any Pac-Man game at all over the past forty years you’ll blow through them easily enough.
The thing that really got me though, and it was enough to make me put the game down after only a stage or two each time I played it, was the god-awful slot machine mini-game that you play after each stage using the coins you collected.
This is the slowest slot machine in the history of slot machines, and it’s completely fucking manual. Meaning you have to tap the button each time you want the wheel to stop. It’s incredibly boring. And if you’re good at gaming, and you play the stages properly, you’ll end up with 4 or 5 coins for the slot machine after every stage.
I would have been fine with it if it were automatic, and I tap the button to begin the stopping process, and whatever I get is what I get. But no. Tap the button, wait. Tap the button, wait. You can’t skip it, either. I stopped caring about this after the second or third stage and after that it was just something I needed to slog through to get to the next stage.
The slot machine game in Super Mario Bros. 2 was more enjoyable than this shit. It was easily the worst part of this entire experience.
The stages themselves were pretty standard stuff for that time period. Pac-Man, being the round, portly bastard that he is, isn’t the most agile Pac-Person around, but he can get the job done. Sometimes the platforming can get frustrating, especially in the “Space” level, as a lot of the platforms are floating out in darkness and sometimes I lost a little bit of context as to where I was in relation to them, and I would jump thinking I was lined up when I really wasn’t, and Pac-Man would plummet to his untimely death.
This, in combination with the extremely asinine decision to pair the “jump” and “ground pound” actions to the SAME BUTTON was probably the most aggravating thing in the game. There is the double-jump, which is more like a short hover, that is mapped to a different button. But you can’t just un-learn 30 years of gaming instinct; tapping a button to jump, then tapping it again in mid-air to double-jump is a gaming standard. It is INSTINCT. You have no idea how many times I meant to double jump, only for Pac-Man to ground pound his way into the afterlife.
IN ADDITION TO THIS, and I have to use all caps to emphasize it because it’s that stupid, anytime Pac-Man does not have both feet on the ground, the ‘jump’ action changes to the ‘ground-pound.’ Meaning if you press the jump button even a half a step too late when coming off a platform, Pac-Man is once again plummeting to Hell. And no, you can’t change the button mapping for that action. I tried.
Pac-Man also has the ability to grab and dangle from a ledge, in which case you’d press the jump button to hop up on top. But if you’re anticipating that ledge grab, and press that button just a fraction of a second too soon… yep, you guessed it, Ground-Pound Of Death. I began to think that the titular “ghosts” of Pac-Man fame were all just victims of an untimely ground-pound.
There are six themed lands which all contain about four stages, except for the temple land, which for whatever reason only had three. They made up for it though by making the Temple boss one of the most aggravating pieces of shit in the whole game.
I’m not sure exactly what it was about this boss, but holy hell I had a hard time with him. Then, after like, my 11th death, the 12th try was a cakewalk and I kicked his ass, and I’m not entirely sure it was because I “got gud.” The game asked me if I wanted to try it on Easy, to which my answer was ‘hell nah.’ I’m no Pac-Bitch. Especially not because some developer felt my gaming prowess was lacking. So I beat it on Normal, but I don’t know… something was different. It seemed easier. Like the game let me win.
Anyways, the boss after that was insanely easy, mainly because it was a Galaxian riff, and was kind of a top-down shooter. And that’s my jam. I practically slept through that shit. Which was actually a nice change after the controller-chucking rage session that was that fucking Space world.
The game itself is not that difficult. Nothing in the game requires split-second reflexes or an advanced understanding of physics. But you’ll constantly be fighting the controls. I’m not the quickest button masher on the planet, and my reflexes aren’t quite what they used to be, but I’m pretty sure there’s some input lag at play. Sometimes I’d press a button, especially the jump or (when I actually wanted to do it) the ground-pound, and nothing would happen. Sometimes I’d have to press and hold the button, as a tap wouldn’t seem to register. Likewise, as I mentioned above, there is a horrible lack of context for Pac-Man’s position on the playing field. Where most games have a small shadow under the player to tell them if they are positioned over a specific platform, the lighting here is at an angle, so Pac-Man’s shadow, and the shadows of any airborne enemy, are behind the characters. If you are trying to jump on a small floating platform, Pac-Man’s shadow won’t even register, giving you absolutely zero idea if or when you’re even on top of said platform. Oh, and the platforms move a lot, too. So have fun with that. I’m very curious to see if this was a problem in the original or if the developers of the remake, in all their creative wisdom, didn’t create this problem themselves.
This game took me far longer to complete than it should have. When Pac-Man World RePac was at its best, it was boring. At its worst, it was rage-inducing. Back in the PS1 days, this would’ve been a game I picked up at Blockbuster in their Previously Played Games section for $6.99, so I guess it’s appropriate that I got it on sale for about the same price, if not less. I had a few games like this, back before “backlogs” were a thing for me; I’d buy a game for cheap, play it through, and trade it in for something else. I suffered through many a crap game just because it was all I could afford.
Now I’m much older, have a steady job and adequate funds, and yet I’m still buying crap games for cheap and suffering through them. I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m sure this will be a recurring theme throughout this whole Virtual 100 backlog endeavor. Because I have no willpower and will buy literally any piece of shovelware if it’s less than ten bucks. You think I’d learn my lesson.
Anyways, that’s it. It turns out, I had more to say about this game than I thought, but I’m done. I’m not talking about it anymore. It’s wasted enough of my time. That’s a wrap on Game #10. That puts me at 1/10th of the way through this endeavor. Ten percent. Only 90 more games to go.
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
Go away now.
