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I've never liked the idea of bringing old-school games back, giving them a new look and completely changing the direction which the game began as. There are some exceptions and one of those is Pac-Man World 2, Namco made good use of all the elements that made the original so popular and transformed them into a simple and fun adventure game.
The entire objective of the game is to recover the five golden fruit that were stolen by a group of ghosts. The group of ghosts didn't know at the time but by removing the fruit they have unleashed a powerful ghost named Spooky (how scary), and that’s why Pac-Man must recover the fruit and stop this new evil.
The graphics in the game aren't the best, they don’t use the full potential of the GameCube. They seem a bit plain because many objects lack texture but it doesn't hurt the game that much because it goes along with the cartoon feel of the game. You wont find a lot of detail put into the Pac-Man world, but how much detail can you put into a game where the hero is a ball with arms and legs?
The sound in the game is fairly good, using sound effects very similar to the first game. You will instantly recognize the sounds as Pac-Man chomps on dots or when he loses. The up beat music goes along with the colorful and cartoony world, but it might get on your nerves after a while.
The gameplay is simple just like everything in else in the game, you follow a path while collecting dots to gain an extra life and defeating foes like ghosts, bears and rams. The game is very linear you mostly follow a straight path like Crash Bandicoot, you cant explore the world freely. The game seems to borrow a lot of ideas from Crash Bandicoot, you break crates, follow a narrow path, and there’s even a level where you are being chased and the camera is in front of you.
There are boss battles and you will fight one of the ghosts from the group that stole the fruit, if you defeat them they will return one of the golden fruits. Its in the boss battles that camera problems are most noticeable, since the bosses move around quickly it doesn’t give enough time for the camera to adjust so you might have to take some blind jumps.
But perhaps the best feature in the game is the arcade, as you travel you will come across tokens if you collect enough of these tokes you will unlock classic Pac-Man games that you can play whenever you want. Some of the tokens are placed in obvious places and others are hidden so searching for them is necessary. The list of games you can unlock are:
- Pac Man
- Pac Attack
- Jukebox (you can hear music from all the games)
- Pac-Mania
- Ms. Pac-Man
- Pac-Man World 2 (play the mazes in this game
So in a way the game is kind of a Pac-Man collection, with this addition alone the game is worth picking up.
So in all Pac-Man World 2 is a fun and easy game to get into, don’t let the "kiddy" look of the game fool you, it does have some depth just get past the childish image. -- Byron Pham, PGNx Media
---- May 19, 2002
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