As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #13, June 2005.

In 1987 Namco released one of the last Pac-Man games that stuck to the traditional formula of navigating a maze, eating dots, and chasing / fleeing ghosts.  However there were some changes afoot, namely Pac-Man could now jump as long as it was in line with the boundaries of the maze and the player would have to deal with more than the traditional four enemies.  Thus Pac-Mania was created and Namco licensed the game to Atari Games for distribution and manufacture in the United States so of course where there's Atari Games there's usually an NES Tengen port close behind.  Pac-Mania had a pseudo 3D rendered look to it and some very smooth scrolling so the port wouldn't be a simple transition as with Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man but Tengen once again rose to the challenge of making yet another unlicensed Pac themed NES game.

Often referred to as the Pac-Man game people hate to see show up in compilations Pac-Mania begins with the standard formula of Pac-Man, a maze, and four ghosts.  At the onset of the game the player can choose from starting stages in which higher starting levels will award completion bonuses.  Instead of the entire maze being presented on one screen the action is more zoomed in and the camera scrolls horizontally and vertically with Pac-Man as the player navigates the maze in traditional Pac-Man style.  Each level is presented in a pseudo 3D semi isometric viewpoint and all objects and characters have a 3D rendered look to them, even each of the ghosts has a different expression in their eyes.  Fruits and special bonus items show up in the center of the maze as with the original Pac-Man and the game makes a point of telling you when one appears since it may be off screen.  In addition to the fruit targets special powerups will appear that do things such as increase Pac-Man's speed temporarily or cause all enemies to be edible and worth more points for a very short amount of time.  However the biggest change in Pac-Mania is the addition of a jump button.  Pressing this allows, you guessed it, Pac-Man to jump however his movement is limited to the confines of the maze.  In other words you cannot jump over maze walls or edge boundaries.  Also as the game continues on additional ghosts (up to eight total) are added and other little obstacles come into play such as not being able to leap over certain ghosts and other ghosts being able to jump as well.  Granted, you CAN play Pac-Mania without using the jump button but then as most, you'd probably rather be playing Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man.  Audio is nice and contains remixed versions of the Pac-Man theme as well as other Pac inspired tunes that have since showed up as remixes in many other Namco games including the Ridge Racer series.

Now one can't expect the Tengen port to be dead on in the graphics department, the NES simply cannot churn out the amount of smooth detail the arcade version contained.  Yet the mazes have been recreated pretty much verbatim but they do suffer from the conversion with next to no detail and shading.  The ghosts are valiantly recreated but again lose most of their detail in the transition, there expressions are somewhat carried over none the less.  The audio is decent, moving over the music of the arcade version even if it is dumbed down for the NES platform.  Take all the shortcomings of the visuals and audio that got mucked up in the conversion and this may seem like a bad port but Pac-Mania on the NES keeps the gameplay fairly in tact.  Controls function exactly as they did in the arcade however the game seems to move at a slightly slower pace but that could just be me or the difference between a vertical display (arcade) and a horizontal display (NES).  Also the ghost AI is nothing compared to the arcade version.  In the arcade the ghosts follow Pac-Man, work together to block him in, and make long chains of themselves to make jumping over them difficult.  For the most part, especially in the early stages, the ghosts in the NES port will simply follow each other around the center of the maze - not even taking a run at Pac-Man.  In fact you can go get in line with them circling around the center and then move away and most of the time they simply will not give chase.  I suppose a redeeming factor is that the little between level cutscenes are fairly well reproduced and are pretty accurate when compared to the original but it really doesn't make up for many of the games shortcomings.

I'm sure most people are thinking that if the port is so bad then why would anyone ever want to own it.  Simple - it is hands down one of the hardest, if not the hardest, Tengen NES games to find especially in complete condition.  In my years of gaming I've only come across one copy of Pac-Mania in the wild and someone else had already snatched it up.  The other side of the coin is while harder to find Tengen NES ports such as Tetris fetch decent prices you have to remember that Tengen Tetris is actually fun to play, Pac-Mania on the NES really isn't.  Quite simply, this was a port that should not have been made since it wasn't a very popular game to begin with and the NES technology wasn't there to make a solid home conversion.  On a side note Namco seems to love to rerelease this game, most recently shoving it on the Pac-Man collection on the Gameboy Advance and on one of the harder to find Namco Museum compilations (volume 5) on the original PlayStation.  However those are direct arcade ports so if one would like to play Pac-Mania today there are many places to pick it up.  Yet when this was released on the NES I'd be hard pressed to find anyone getting excited over the lackluster port of this mixed response arcade title, which is one of the reasons the cartridge is so hard to find.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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