99 Yellow Pac-Mans

Namco shadow-dropped Pac-Man 99 onto the Switch last week, and I’ve been playing it. That is probably the most to-the-point introductory sentence I’ve ever written.

A Nintendo Switch Online exclusive, Pac-Man 99 is a battle royale game where 99 people start playing parallel games of Pac-Man, and the last Pac alive is declared the winner. It’s the exact same formula as 2018’s Tetris 99, and the late Super Mario Bros 35. Which is to say that it’s a fun as heck spin on a classic video game, and I will never ever be able to claim a first place victory.

I didn’t watch the release trailer or read about it or anything before diving into the actual game, so I had a lot of questions about how exactly Pac-Man would work in this context. It’s a little weird! No longer do you progress through stages as you clear the maze: now, the objective is to simply eat enough dots to make a fruit spawn, which will in turn replenish the dots and power pellets. This results in a mutation of Pac-Man that can theoretically go on forever.

My understanding of how interactions with other players works is limited, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with eating ghosts. As you much on said ghosts, a combo counter ticks up, and I’m pretty sure that it does something to impede the progress of other players. It may or may not be what triggers the “phantom Pac-Man” thingies that show up in your maze. These are white Pac-Man outlines that gambol about, and while you can pass right through them, they slow Pac-Man down just a smidgen. There are also little baby ghost icons on either side of the maze, and when you roll over them, it adds sort of a phantom trail to one of the ghosts. This is very important, because when you grab a power-pellet, all of that phantom trail becomes edible, allowing you to chain a huge combo to… do something to an opponent.

Difficulty ramp-up seems totally arbitrary to me, having not read any sort of document on how this game works. The ghosts seems to increase and decrease in speed randomly. It may be an effect of other players getting big combos? Your power pellets also wear off faster as the game goes on, and I’m pretty sure that is tied to how many players are left. Also, when the game is nearing its end, some of the phantom Pac-Men turn red, and will kill you if you hit them. I haven’t pinned down exactly when that happens, but it seems to be around the 20-15 players remaining mark.

The one baffling about it is that while you can buy like seventeen thousand skins to change the game’s visual theme (most of which draw from Namco’s storied history of arcade games), Ms. Pac-Man is not one of them. Which makes me think that maybe Ms Pac-Man 99 could be its own thing, either as a future DLC mode, or a completely separate game.

I’ve only played a handful rounds so far, but I’ve been having a great time with Pac-Man 99. I think I actually like Tetris 99 a little more, because it’s possible to recover from a bad move in that game, but I definitely see myself picking Pac-Man 99 up from time to time to get a few rounds in. Exactly like with Tetris 99.

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