PAC-MAN Lite: Nostalgia and lameness all rolled into one.

Eating magic pills and gobbling ghosts has become an american past-time; where did we go wrong?

Actually, I love PAC-MAN.  I remember going to Pizza Hut as a kid where they had those awesome tables complete with a glass top where you could rest your slice of pepperoni.

The game is classic, and there is no need to review it, but this new iPhone incarnation warranted a few words.

The idea of a PAC-MAN game for the iPhone is great.  I was very much looking forward to having this classic arcade game with me at all times.  When I opened it and started playing, I was very pleased.  The first board was a lot of fun.

Classic graphics and familiar controls.

More than that, the game developers were very clever about using the iPhone to its fullest advantage control-wise.  You can toggle between using a standard directional pad, using the accelerometer on the phone (still haven't really figured this one out), or using a "swipe" option: you actually "swipe" a graphical joystick to change its orientation.  This is, by far, my favorite way to play the game, but I appreciate the ability to choose.

Graphics are 100% authentic eighties, which is awesome.  But it also makes me wonder why the app takes at least 5-10 seconds to load.  A small complaint, but there it is.  Also, the number of menus is unnecessarily high, walking you through a number of choices every time you start a new game.  Another small gripe.

The big complaint, however, is how little game there really is.  PAC-MAN Lite is a whopping one board.  And for anyone who has ever played PAC-MAN, the difficulty level is ridiculously low.  When you complete your level, it takes you to a screen giving you an option to exit the game and buy the full version.  If you choose to abandon a game prematurely, it takes you immediately to the iTunes store to buy more Namco games.

Hope you really like Board-1.

So, in the end, PAC-MAN Lite is little more than an advertisement for the full version of the game, and it kind of bugs me.  PAC-MAN is such a fun, simple game that you'd think Namco could offer us a little bit more in the lite version.  I mean, with amazing free games out there like JellyCar and Topple, how does Namco think they can get away with charging $5.99 for a PAC-MAN game?  I can get the full version of SimCity for $9.99.

I guess it all comes back to nostalgia.  I would love to have PAC-MAN on my phone, but I can spend $5.99 on something better, and the lite version isn't really worth keeping.  What Namco should do is make a multi-board version, ad-sponsor it to make a few bucks, and let users download it for free.  It's time to stop milking money out of people for these old games. [They'll get to it as soon as people stop paying for it. -ed.]