This is madness! This is Pac-Man 2!
Give Pac-Man Championship Edition on XBLA a chance, seriously. Earlier this week Microsoft announced Pac-Man CE (one of the worst title choices in gaming history, but more on that in a second) as this week's game for Xbox Live Arcade. This news came following a misstep by a Microsoft exec. saying they had big news to announce Tuesday, when they were just trying to generate any type of attention for their Pac-Man World Championships. When the "big news" was announced and it ended up being a freakin' Pac-Man game, there was just a little bit of understandable anger.
However, Tuesday night, our very own PSP and PS3 Fanboy lead writer, Andrew Yoon, wrote a piece on Joystiq about Pac-Man: CE saying it's more than people think it is. Over the next couple days, between IMs on staff, we kept asking each other, "Did you check out Pac-Man yet?" This would be followed by an awkward pause and the person saying, "It's actually ... good."
Our own Jared Rea wrote on his blog, "Calling it a 'champion edition' of Pac-Man is a misnomer and a real bad move on Microsoft's part. A better name for it would have been Pac-Man 2. Not Pac-Man Again or Pac-Man: Retro Evolved, but a name that gets the point across that Pac-Man: CE is the first true sequel to the game since Ms. Pac-Man." So, why is Pac-Man standing with the boys of Gears of War? At this point, any image of Pac-Man would probably just be skipped over because it's just Pac-Man. But really, it's not just Pac-Man, the horribly named Pac-Man Championship Edition is a true successor to the game we all know. Is it worth 800 MS points? That's a bit of a stretch, but you owe it to yourself to at least try the demo. You never know.
