Setting a new high score on your favorite videogame should be a killer gamer high, but Namco’s latest take on Pac-Man and Galaga sucks all the joy out of it.
Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions, released Tuesday for Nintendo 3DS, is a collection of six twists on the company’s two classic arcade games. From 3-Dified versions of the ’80s originals to wholly new concepts, a half-dozen distinct games are packed onto this one cartridge. To Nintendo 3DS owners hurting for more content, something new on the shelf will likely be a welcome sight.
But Dimensions is kind of a mess, and when I got hooked on one of its games I started to realize why. Pac-Man Championship Edition is the standout star of this package. Originally released in 2007 for Xbox Live Arcade, it’s an amped-up, high-tension riff on the maze game everybody’s already familiar with. Rather than try to clear successively more difficult mazes, your goal is to rack up as many points as you can by screaming around a maze, eating power pellets and chomping up ghosts with reckless abandon before five minutes run out.
If you can pull off some fast escapes and never hear Pac’s familiar, tragic beeeeyooop death rattle, you’ll probably beat your own high score. Generations lets you log on and compare your score to your friends’ (and the rest of the world’s) best games, but it doesn’t let you compare it to your previous performances.
As near as I can figure, having pored through the game and its documentation, Dimensions doesn’t have a high score table. Once you set a new high score, it’s written to the cartridge and all records of your previous high scores are gone forever. This is a total kick in the dots. I want to be able to see my progress: By how much did I obliterate my previous personal best? Are my scores hovering around a certain number? Are there any outliers? I can try to remember this in my head, but why should I have to? Keeping track of high scores is so trivial that even the first Pac-Man was able to do it in 1980?
This deficiency also means you can’t share your cartridge. What if I wanted to have a high-score competition with a friend, passing the 3DS back and forth? What if two people wanted to play the game and have their personal scores on the record?