Not long after his rather amusing appearance in this summer’s retro gaming-themed Adam Sandler comedy Pixels, Pac-Man has returned to his more familiar gaming environment. And it’s worth us emphasizing the word “familiar”, as the little yellow pellet-nibbler is once again outrunning ghosts and endangered by the surprise return of a certain historic gaming glitch…
The free-to-download Pac-Man 256 strongly adheres to the fundamental gameplay and visual character of the original Pac-Man arcade game released 35 years ago. However, rather than carefully navigating pre-determined mazes, your objective now is simply to get as far through a never-ending maze as possible, in the process hopefully bettering your current highest score and unlocking new power-ups.
Another twist sure to bring broad grins to the most hardened Pac-Man fans is that, all the while, the player is pursued by the legendary “256 Glitch”. That’s a bug that affected the original Pac-Man game, replacing level 256’s walls with a wave of random letters and numbers. It’s a charming touch by developer Hipster Whale, but can’t overly distract from the fact that, for better or worse, Pac-Man 256 remains largely the same Pac-Man that the world is now thoroughly familiar with.
