Pac-Man World 3
This is how you celebrate a 25th Anniversary?
Published: November 21, 2005
Added this time are a few new moves to complement the previous additions of invincibility by turning silver (yes, just like Mario), a butt bounce, a spin dash and the cool pac-dot chains that let Pac-Man slowly chomp his way through the air in a lazy, twisting path that offers a few neat vistas you'd never be able to see otherwise. PM has a punch move, can climb up certain walls like chain link fences and taps the powers of the ghosts to bring things from the spectral plane into the real world.
A couple of power-ups also turn his punches into electric blasts, and turn his butt bounce into a huge shockwave. The coolest of the power-ups, though, has to be the Ribbon Loop power-up, which leaves a trail of energy behind Pac-Man as he moves when he finally wraps back around to the original starting point the ribbon closes with a massive blast that destroys anything caught within it.
For all that was added or brought over from old games, though, Blitz's take on things is still mainly about platforming and item hunts. In this respect, the game never really feels especially polished. Repetitive, predictable sequences that spawn ghosts, a crappy camera that gets hung up on geometry (and that's when it's not trying to move on its own to best show you things) and a general lack of cohesive level designs or personality in the world itself offsets all that the great controls and humor in the cutscenes and voice work accomplish.
The game just plain looks bland. Pac-Man himself is fairly impressive, with some nice highlights on his hands, feet and, uh, tongue, but the levels are far too blocky and the enemies mostly throwaway. The level designs themselves often wrap around upon themselves, but it's more or less an illusion; you can't jump down to an old area (not that you'd want to, of course), so it tends to destroy the whole feeling that you're traversing massive levels.
There's also the issue of a painfully inconsistent framerate, which ranges from understandable hiccups where the camera is taking in a lot of geometry and enemies to inexplicable ones where nothing's really happening on screen. This offsets the charm and personality packed into most of the cutscenes, which really are clever and filled with more than a few chuckles. The personality they gave Pac-Man this time around feels dead-on, and his comments, while not universally original, add a nice bit of levity to things.
This is in no small part due to the voice actor they got to play Pac-Man, but everyone else manages some nice performances too, rattling off the dialogue with a cartoony but intelligent camber. The rest of the effects are more basic, and the game doesn't seem to tap into the classic Namco sound libraries quite as much save for the pac-dot chomping and the sound effect when dying.
In fact, there's a lot of stuff in place here that I've heard in other games, such as the weird, garbled chatter near the many rings you'll have to touch while traversing the levels. It's a little odd to hear the security cameras' electric gurgle from Deus Ex in something like a Pac-Man game.
This is Pac-Man in the vaguest sense. Yes, he's yellow and rotund and eats dots and ghosts, but something's lost when the whole mess is brought into 3D, and it's a crying shame. For their part, Blitz did contribute some nice personality into things, but the underlying gameplay is so generic that it's a wonder Namco would even allow a game like this to be published. It's not that it's bad, just that a hallmark of video games shouldn't be allowed to sink into mediocrity, and that's sadly what's happening here.
