Last week saw the release of Pacman CE (standing for Pacman Championship Edition) for the Xbox 360 as a part of their Live Arcade platform. I, being a hardcore Pacman fan, immediately picked this up based on promises of a more competitive style of play not found in the original Pacman. That didn’t mean a whole lot on the surface, but after playing and enjoying this title a great deal, I now know exactly what they were talking about. The game is now completely timed. In the standard mode of play you have 5 minutes to see how high of a score you can possibly get. There are now multipliers given for pellets eaten without a death, so now instead of the base value of 10, depending on how long you can last (this is a difficult game), you can get up to 50 point per pellet, a great incentive to survive. You never move on from the level you begin on. There are no longer levels. Instead there are 2 sides of the maze to the left and right. with the ghosts, whose only goal is to eat you, Pacman, starting in the center. This is played in a 16 x 9 aspect ratio to fit wide screen displays. Eating all pellets on either side will spawn a fruit pickup on the opposite side of the ghosts spawn point, and eating this fruit will again, fill the side of the maze emptied to spawn this fruit, with more pellets to eat. As you proceed through the round, you will unlock more and more fruits which are worth increasing amounts of points, the speed of both Pacman and the ghosts will increase, and the patterns of the pellets will continue to change. A major change which exponentially increases the points earned is the implementation of combos earned with power pellets. Pacman is now able to eat a power pellet, eat the ghosts, and before the time on the power pellets expires, eat another power pellet to continue the combo. It is very difficult to explain with words, so for a greater and clearer understanding, please see the included video at the end of this post. One omission that I would have liked to have seen included would have been a multiplayer mode. Being a competitive title, how can we maximize the competition without multiplayer? Thankfully the leader boards are a integral part of this title. After topping my highscore time after time I found myself repeatedly checking the boards to see how I compared to other players. For the record, at least as of now, I have a score of a little over 200,000, and rank among the top 600 players. I think that is swell personally. To me, Pacman CE is fast frantic fun that no Pacman or arcade fan alike should find themselves missing. 4/5