#0029 Ms. Pac-Man

Here's something you might not have known. Ms. Pac-Man is not just Pac-Man wearing drag. It's true! Not only do you see them both on the same screen during the intermissions, but there's actual gameplay differences between the two. Am I the only one who didn't know that? Yes? Okay. On to the review.

It may interest you to know that Ms. Pac-Man was not a Namco production in any way. Rather, in 1980, there was a small company called the General Computer Company. Today they make printers, but back in 1980, they found themselves making mod kits for arcade games. Which in and of it's self isn't so bad, there's lots of mod kits out today for games like Half-Life2, but it became a bit of an issue when they decided to sell their mods as separate games, which is a no-no. They got in trouble from Atari when they were sued over their game Super Missile Attack, a mod of Missile Command. They settled out of court, and part of the settlement terms barred GCC from selling future conversion kits without consent from the original game manufacturer.

After that whole fiasco, rather than scrapping a game that was to be a Pac-Man mod called Crazy Otto, they decided to show it to Midway, Namco's distributor in the United States. Midway was already impatient in waiting for Namco to release it's next Pac-Man game (Super Pac-Man, which isn't on the list) and saw this as a good opportunity to act as something to hold over the fans until Super Pac-Man arrived. They bought the rights to the game and changed the sprites to fit the Pac-Man universe and renamed it Ms. Pac-Man since Pac-Man was the first game to have a largely female player base, this was their way of thanking all the ladies who enjoyed it. It was released in Arcades in late 1981.

When the game made it big, Midway and GCC had a brief legal battle over royalties. But this all ended when Namco got wind of the game all the way over in Japan. Turns out the game was made without Namco's consent, meaning that both the companies had to turn the rights of Ms. Pac-Man over to Namco. Unfortunately, this was only the first in a series of unauthorized sequels and Namco and Midway eventually went their separate ways To this day, there is no mention of Ms. Pac-Man in Namco's official archives.

So that was some fun history wasn't it? The gameplay is nearly identical to the original, you earn points by eating pellets and avoiding ghosts. Eating a power pellet causes the ghosts to turn blue allowing them to be eaten for extra points. You complete the level when all the pellets are consumed. So what makes this game different from the first one? Like I said before, this isn't just a Pac-Man reskin, it's actually a different game.

Visually, the game now has different mazes. Four different mazes to be precise, each are a different color rather than the standard blue. Three of these four mazes actually have two warp tunnels, as opposed to only one in the original game. The spaces have also been filled in, making it a little easier to immediately see where the boundaries are.

Mechanics wise, the ghosts behavioral patterns are different, including semi-random movement, rather than predictable algorithmic movement. Meaning that you actually have to be good at this game and you can't just follow a pattern. Instead of the fruit appearing in the center of the maze, the fruit bounces in through one of the warp tunnels, and bounces around the screen and eventually leaves through another warp tunnel. Other than that, some animations are a little different, the music has been changed entirely.

So how is the game? Honestly? I think it's superior to Pac-Man in every way. The level designs are progressive, and don't get old nearly as fast as the original Pac-Man maze, the music is vastly superior, and the new ghost mechanics means that you don't always know what they're going to do, which keeps you on your toes and really brings that good tension up when they're close to cornering you. Overall, there's a reason it was number 10 on Game Informer's lit of top 200 games of all time. It's a really fun game, one of those timeless games that you can keep coming back to over and over again. One of my favorite arcade games of all time. Also it helps that Ms. Pac-Man was the very first female playable character in arcade game history. Something that's still an issue today as females continually fail to have good honest representation in the video game industry.

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