Pac-Mania

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Pac Mania brings a different style in Pac Man gaming. The maze is now shown in isometric perspective and is larger than screen which will scroll to follow the action. To help get out of tight spots, Pac-Man now has the ability to jump. But be careful, because some of the ghosts have learned this trick as well and you could end up in a mid air collision. And believe me this jump can save you from hard situations. The main goal of the game is to swallow all the dots and complete the level. There are four worlds (rounds here) to travel through, the first three are selectable as staring levels from the front end. On the higher levels, things like wraparound mazes appear just to fool you into thinking that the maze is larger than it is. More and more ghosts appear and mazes become more intricate. Right near the end, the big ghosts appear (twice the size of an ordinary ghost) which are hard to avoid and have the ability to...jump too! There's also a use a Pac Booster that lets him move at super-speeds. The only problem is, now you can no longer see the full playfield, so you can't know exactly which pills you haven't taken, or plan your routes and strategies accordingly.
In general, Pac-Mania is great. You'll love the new challenging levels - they are available in so many mind-boggling shapes and they'll surely turn you into a certified Pac-Maniac! What a simple, addictive and excellent game to play indeed!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Atari ST conversion is unfortunately inferior compared to any other 16bit home computer and this happens due to the system's graphics hardware limitations. As a result, several features from the original's visuals and its innovative level design are missing from this conversion and each stage's backgrounds look almost monochromatic (except for the sprites). Also, the gameplay area is significantly smaller compared to the Amiga or the Acorn A3000 conversions, since it covers only the 2/3 of the full screen. The animation seems quite slow on the ST as well probably due to the lack of a Blitter chip on the earlier ST models and thus the inability to scroll large portions of background layer (due to the pseudo-3D effect) so the entire screen has to be re-drawn everytime you move the Pac-man! I think an STE conversion would do much better than that! Sonically, the game offers the original arcade tune plus a few sampled sounds effects, slightly inferior in sampling quality to the Amiga and the Archimedes computers.