Case Study: Pacman Championship Edition Deluxe

I guess this will be a new "series" I run in this blog, where I take a close look at a particular game and dissect it. My aim is to break down all the elements of a good game and figure out why exactly it's good. Hopefully it will be an educational process for both myself and the reader! The first game I want to put under the microscope is a new title from Namco that came out for the downloadable services on Xbox 360 and PS3, Pacman Championship Edition Deluxe.

Now before I dive too deep into the theories and philosophies behind this game, I'll first talk about the original arcade game from the 1980s, and how it's played. The player takes control of the iconic yellow circle, and the object of the game is to eat all of the pellets in a maze while avoiding ghosts. Skilled players would be able to accumulate a high score along the way, and get their initials saved on the high score screen for great honor and glory.

The original Pacman.

So the premise is simple enough, but Pacman was revolutionary in the way it explored non-aggression from the player, which even today is something that is rarely seen in games. The goal of the game isn't to kill the ghosts. Quite the opposite, the goal is to avoid them. If Pacman eats a power pellet (seen in the image above as the slightly larger pills scattered through the maze), he will temporarily gain the ability to eat ghosts, which would be the primary way that the player's score would increase, but for 99% of the game, the player is running away, not attacking. This makes Pacman one of the earliest examples of a stealth game.

Flash forward some thirty years to Pacman CE DX, a further refined follow up to the first significant return of Pacman known simply as "Pacman CE." Namco wanted to bring Pacman to the present day and make a game that can be appreciated by anybody, yet still reward those most dedicated to chasing high scores. That was the goal of this project. When designing a game, I think it's incredibly important to have a strong idea of a problem you want to solve or a goal you want to achieve, and without a doubt, the goal of Pacman CE DX was to broaden the appeal of Pacman without squandering fans of the original. How did they achieve this?

Pacman CE DX adds stuff.

Let's get something straight right away: the original Pacman is HARD. And I mean real hard. Sure, pros and crazy people could make their high score a priority, but for the layman just popping a quarter into the machine at their local arcade, the high score is the farthest thing from their mind as the struggle for survival consumes their concentration. This kind of difficulty was not uncommon for games of that time because every gameover is another quarter swallowed up by the machine. But in an age where the consumer pays a flat price in order to play a game as much as they want, frustrating them with an extremely difficult game only serves to turn many people away. Pacman CE DX's first order of business, therefore, was to make the game easier. Or rather, make it harder to die.

In the new game, if Pacman finds himself about to slam into a ghost, the game will zoom in and go into slow motion, allowing you time to correct your mistake and turn away. And if you find yourself trapped with no where to run, pressing any button on the controller well detonate a bomb, temporarily sending all ghosts back into the ghost box. In other words, you basically can't die. There's always a way to save yourself, and so much of the stress of the original Pacman is lifted from the player's shoulders.

But before I get too much deeper into this, I should explain the main differences between CE DX and its predecessor. The spirit of the game remains intact, but it is in fact quite far removed from the original idea. As you roam around the maze in CE DX, you will pass by sleeping ghosts. As Pacman tears past them, they will wake up and give chase. Eventually, you can have dozens and dozens of once sleeping ghosts chasing behind Pacman in a ghost train. They stay right on your tail, and they make sure that the action never stops, and that Pacman keeps moving. Eventually, the player will gulp down the fabled power pellet, turning all the once vicious ghosts into blue edible ones. As soon as the power pellet is devoured, the player can turn Pacman around and chomp through every single one of the thirty or forty ghosts that were once chasing you so vigorously. The effect is truly satisfying, and watching your score rocket upwards as the ghost train is eaten is very exciting.

The ghost train falls.

In addition to this change, players are faced with a single trail of pellets to eat, rather than having an entire maze filled with them like in the original game. So instead of wandering a huge maze aimlessly trying to consume every pellet on the map, players are given very clear directions of where they should go first: straight to the first trail of pellets. Eating that small trail will reveal a fruit which, when eaten, will reveal the next trail of pellets.

What this does is create an optimal path for Pacman to follow, and as the pellet trails become more complex and branch off into different directions, much of the challenge becomes finding the optimal path to take to eat all the pellets in as little time as possible. Players want to find this optimal path because the game does not run indefinitely like the original Pacman; one can choose to play either a five minute or a ten minute game. At first, the brilliance of this decision hadn't occurred to me, but as I grew more and more addicted to the game, it suddenly dawned on me why this is such a great idea.

An example of the simpler pellet trails to follow.

There is a scene for people who like to compete in old school arcade games like Pacman to be sure, but the amount of people who can break into this scene is very small. You have to, one, have access to a 30 year old arcade cabinet, two, live near people who are a part of this scene, and three, have the patience to play a single game session for hours and hours on end with no breaks. Even if you really like Pacman, this can be a pretty unreasonable thing to ask of the player. But if play sessions are limited to ten minutes and high scores are shared online, the price of admission for competition is greatly reduced. As I casually played through this game and watched my score slowly rise up the leaderboard, a thought occurred to me: there's nothing stopping me from being number one. No reason I couldn't have a perfect ten minute run and be the best in the entire world. It wasn't a question of my patience like it would be in the original Pacman, it was a question of my skill. And the thrill of competition was tremendously exciting.

So with the challenge of survival eliminated, the difficulty in the game lies in achieving a high score. Aimlessly wandering the maze, getting cornered by ghosts, and using bombs are all things that are detrimental to your final score. The challenge of the game comes from the player's desire to make as few mistakes possible, take the shortest routes through the maze as possible, and maintain control as the game speed increases to ridiculous levels.

Pacman CE DX is an amalgamation of so much good game design, it's incredible. The accessibility for the game combined with the potential for competition is something rarely achieved in game design, as the ideas are often mutually exclusive. Not to mention almost everyone is familiar with Pacman, and brand recognition like that can't be achieved easily. The stars really had to align to make this game as good as it is, but the result was an extraordinary gem of a game. An instant classic. I'm looking forward to seeing if Namco can breathe new life into any other old arcade franchises.