Perhaps the most famous videogame sequel of all time is now available on Xbox Live Arcade. Marking the second straight Namco Bandai retro game offered this month, Ms. Pac-Man will gladly gobble up your 400 Microsoft Points. In exchange, you will receive the same game you could not stop popping quarters in as a youth, with some easy achievements and an annoying glitch to boot.
The premise of Ms. Pac-Man is the same as the original; eat all the dots on the screen while avoiding the four ghosts. If Ms. Pac-Man should run into a ghost, the player looses a life. With larger Power Pellets in each corner of the maze, players can change the ghosts from dangerous enemies to snacks. Occasionally bonus points, in the form of fruit, come bounding across the maze, moving from one side to the other, unlike the original Pac-Man's stationary fruit-drop. As the stages go up, so does the difficulty, as the time goes on, the effectiveness of the Power Pellets on the ghosts decreases and the overall speed of the game increases. Clear as many stages as you can, before using all your lives.
The classic game, graphics, sound, and cutesy cut-scenes with Pac-Man included, are all here with some minor annoyances. At no fault of the developers, the same control issues that plague Pac-Man on Xbox 360 are here also. Neither the left stick nor mushy directional pad on the 360's controller is ideal for this game. Gamers will find themselves heading in the wrong direction from time to time at a dead-end in the maze, or just stalling for a moment. The issue is not frequent enough to wreck the experience completely, but it is more than slightly annoying when nearly finishing a stage only to die because of an errant turn.
The more serious issue with the game is that it breaks the number one rule of a Pac-Man game; ghosts kill. In this version, this is not always true. Yes, it is true probably ninety-eight percent of the time, but that two percent where it does not is noticeable and a bit odd for such a simple game. In a two-hour gaming session, and in preparation for this review, it happened five times. Sometimes the ghost and the player would be turning the same corner, making it likely a timing issue where the game recognized the two, but on more than one occasion the ghost and player were heading toward each other in a straight portion of the maze but no death occurred.
In keeping with the unfortunate tradition of Namco Bandai Arcade titles, Ms. Pac-Man offers an easy array of Achievements. With the standard twelve achievements totaling two-hundred points, they had an opportunity to pull gamers back to an old favorite repeatedly with more than just fond memories of sticky-floored arcades. Rewarding Achievements for eating each of the fruits in the game is fair, but perhaps one for a difficult to attain high-score should replace 'Eat three ghosts in succession after eating a Power Pellet'; considering it also offers one for eating all four.
