Yes. I have many more hundreds of hours to wait until I can accurately review Skyrim, so here's a quickie on an Arcade game I played feverishly one day not too long ago.
Ahem, where was I...
Hello all, this is Your Friendly Neighborhood Satanist on a certain Arcade game that was released in late 2010. It was given Gameinformer's January Game of the Month (Dead Space 2 had not yet been rated) and I was curious one day so five dollars and a quick download later, I was in the world of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX.
The game plays like any normal Pac-Man game. You know, get the dots, eat the bigger dots, eat the ghosts, eat the fruit, you know, Kirby before he was fat. But DX (as it will be from now abbreviated, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is just awkward to say in normal conversation) takes Pacman to a world of competition. But more of that later. If you think you'll be playing that same blue-neon map over and over again, you're WRONG. The game has... seven-ish different maps and various different gametypes.
The core gameplay is much different from the Pacman you may know and accept as the norm today, instead of eating an entire map of dots, the wakka master is tasked with devouring smaller clusters of dots, then a fruit, before more dots appear on the other side of the map. All the while, he'll want to pass by sleeping ghosts that will follow him about like a very large train of Doom and Haunting. This becomes key when you finally see that large nugget dot, turn around, and eat an entire line of ghosts like Charlie Sheen on Zimbabwe's national Coke Day. It's an incredibly satisfying experience to just hear the dinging sound and imagine that your awesome abilities "Broke the Score" as you devour an immense line of ghosts and the game blares out buzzers as your score increases by the hundreds and thousands.
Which brings me to customization, you can change the map color scheme from any of Pacman's earlier endeavors in the game world to your liking, the soundtrack, even the skins for our dot-eating friend and his wakka-hating ghosts.
Now, the game focuses on competing with other players' scores on a "Grand Leaderboard" as I call it. Essentially, you play one of the various modes, Score attack, time Trial, Total Time Trial, Ghost Attack, etc, and depending on your score and how you rank with other players on the Leaderboard, are graded. It could just be me, but some of the most rewarding experiences I've had with any 2010 game, be it ME2 or RDR, was shaving a second and a half off one of my time trials to get an "S" rating (that means I was in the top 1/10). It's incredibly addicting and uber-fun.
DX is a great game and an excellent throwback to the days of old, where getting the highest score was everything. If you're obsessed with Leaderboards, loud and colorful games, an arcade enthusiast, or just like the whole feel of the XBLA, then Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is an obvious pick.
-The S-ranked Leaderboard junkie Chillz gives P-M CE DX a 9/10
