Pac Pix- Review

Pollack-Meets-Pac

(Nintendo DS; $29.99; Rated E; www.namco.com)

(three stars)

The Pac’s back, but now with a much more Picasso feel.

“Pac Pix” utilizes the DS’s touch screen capabilities by challenging players to draw the classic icon using a stylus and complete the numerous stages of puzzles where Pac Man will do what he does best: eats up some rambunctious ghosts.

Drawing Pac is as simple as starting with the wedge for the mouth and circling around. A successful interpretation will spring the drawing to life with the familiar “waka-waka-waka” sound of old. But don’t worry about being too exact, whatever drawn shape that is even somewhat close to Pac Man will suffice- which is to say that there will be a lot of mutant Pac’s drawn in an effort to beat the clock and move onto the next stage.

Guiding The Yellow One is as easy as drawing lines on the screen to bounce him in other directions. The larger Pac Man is drawn, the slower he moves, so when time is of the essence, small gobblers are the way to go. Players can also draw multiple Pac Men to and juggle between them to keep them all on screen.

And that’s about it…

Sure there are some other challenges, like drawing bombs, or drawing arrows to shoot targets on the DS’s top screen, but that’s about where the inventiveness stops. “Pac Pix,” although a neat new twist on the Pac Man history, is nothing that is going to have you playing for hours like the original arcade of old. In fact, you may put it down after the first 25 minutes- all the stages look alike, and there’s no real variety anywhere in the game.

For the right audience (read: very young), this is a game that is distracting enough to buy parents some quiet time on road trips, but I’d advise picking this up for anyone over nine or ten, it’s one-trick pony idea, just is not going to hold older audiences attention for long.

Neat concept, original use of an industry icon, but ultimately unfulfilling. This time, the ghosts’ win.