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 Amiga conversion of Pac Mania features cute, colorful graphics and innovative level design and concept, all taken from the original arcade. It features a quite large low resolution screen (340 x 272 pixels) compared to the Atari ST counterpart (320 x 200 overall but with only 176 x 200 pixels of playing area)! The Amiga offers 32 colors on-screen of which the first 8 colors are for the background layer, the next 8 are for the foreground and the final 16 are for the sprites. The Amiga's sound is awesome, featuring a few nicely composed tunes taken directly from the original, along with a number of sampled sound effects.

COMPARISON
Comparably, the Acorn Archimedes version runs in 16 colors but the graphics look and play equally good with the Amiga, while the Atari ST version runs in 16 colors but the limitations of its graphics hardware make the game visually much inferior). Although the Amiga conversion looks and plays great, the Sharp X68000 is the best of all 16bit home computer conversions, as it is identical to the arcade.