How Pac-Man: Champion Edition DX Personifies Modern Game Design

     In the earliest days of video games, arcade games were the meat of the market. Games were designed to be difficult and kill the player often in order to sucker them into giving the machine the next quarter, the next quarter, and hopefully the one after that. The original Pac-Man was an incredibly fun game at the time; it was also indicative of game philosophy at the time. While expert players like Billy Mitchell have learned to master the game, most of us just remember the sound and animation of when Pac-Man was caught by those pesky ghosts.

Remember this? Don't lie.

     Last November, Namco introduced us to Pac-Man CE: DX, which completely revolutionized the Pac-Man experience. It took the refinements of Pac-Man CE and, well, made them crazy. In my head, I always like to think that someone brought the original Pac-Man to a group of game designers and said, "Here. Make this better."

I hear Quicktime Events are popular...    

     As crazy as that sounds, though, what's crazy is that they actually did. By introducing seemingly simple things like sleeping ghosts, bombs, and a slight slowdown when near-death, Namco turned Pac-Man from a food connoisseur who occasionally snacked on ghosts into a creature that could single-handedly depopulate an entire planet full of ghosts. After all those years of being killed by ghost after ghost, building up a chain of them just to turn around and chomp them into oblivion feels so good. It's downright cathartic.

This is for stealing all my quarters!

     And it's not just that it feels good as revenge. It's fun. There's no other way to describe it. Now that game designers aren't just after your quarters, they can really craft an experience that is fun for the player, not frustrating. With all of the helpful items to swing things in Pac-Man's favor, that dying animation is very rarely even seen, changing Pac-Man from a battle of survival into a test to see who can eat ghosts faster. After seeing what Namco has done with CE:DX, I look forward to see what other game companies can come up with in the future. Taking classic ideas and characters and melding them into modern gameplay ideals seems to be a pathway to a whole new source of innovation.

     Now that they've improved Pac-Man, I can't wait to see what they do to the wheel.