Repurposed Puzzle Action

And now we get to one of the real oddities of the Pac-Man series (and yes, I know, that sounds weird considering we also had Professor Pac-Man, but hear me out). Released on the SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, and other consoles of the era, Pac-Attack was the franchise’s first ever foray into true puzzle gaming action. And, by all accounts, it was a mediocre attempt at best. In most ways this would be just a simple footnote in the Pac-Man franchise history, one of the many times that Namco tried to do something weird with their yellow munching character and, in the end, failed.

Except there’s one specific detail to keep in mind: this wasn’t originally meant to be a Pac-Man spin-off at all. In truth, while developed by Namco, the game started life in Japan as Cosmo Gang the Puzzle, the third game in the Cosmo Gang series, after second title Cosmo Gang the Video, a space shooter in the vein of Galaxian that was, in fact, at one point called Cosmo Galaxian in early development, and the original Cosmo Gang, which was a stand-up arcade shooting machine with real, physical pieces that moved down the board towards the players. Because those titles never made it over to the U.S., the branding for the game was changed to something familiar to Western audiences. Something beloved. Something yellow and puck-like.

The branding, though, is the only thing that changed between iterations. Much like how Super Puyo Puyo became Kirby’s Avalanche and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine stateside, Cosmo Gang the Puzzle turned into the Pac-Man-themed Pac-Attack… and nothing else was really changed. That doesn’t make it a good game, bear in mind. In fact I’d argue that whatever you call it, it’s really a pretty mid-level puzzler, but it does at least give this Pac-Man title a bit of interesting history to mull over as you play an otherwise mediocre experience.

The basic mechanics of Pac-Attack (or whatever you want to call it) are pretty simple. Like most block dropping games, the player has a vertical well. Puzzle pieces start at the top of the well and then slowly drop down. The falling pieces come in four varieties: standard blocks, ghosts, Pac, and a fairy. The basic blocks are kind of line Tetris pieces in that once a full row of them line up horizontally they’ll break, dropping everything above them down one line. Your job is to manage the well and make sure it doesn’t fill all the way up or you’ll game out.

The other pieces help you manage that well better. The ghosts are another type of basic block, but the trick with them is that they can be cleared out without having to be in long lines. Whenever a Pac block drops, the player can control if it moves left or right once it lands. Once activated at the stack of bricks, it will then move, gobbling up all the ghosts in its path. Pac can move back and forth, but if he ever gets to a point where he can’t make forward progress, he’ll stop. Then all the bricks that are now floating above where the gobbled up ghosts used to be will fall, aligning to the bottom of the stack. In a two-player game, where junk lines start coming in, these falling bricks will also bash down the junk lines, clearing the well a little more.

Finally there’s the fairy, and she’s a rare item. When she shows up she clears the well. That’s it, full stop. Doesn’t matter how full the well is, or what kind of danger you are (or aren’t) in, the fairy clears it all and starts you off fresh. Naturally she only shows in normal mode, the “player attack” game (where you square off against a CPU or another player for well domination) and doesn’t come into play in the game’s puzzle mode since she would break that game… but we’ll get to that shortly.

While interesting in concept, Pac-Attack lacks real depth of play. In standard attack mode there’s functionally only a couple of brick types, standard or ghosts, and everything is about managing those two types. Despite the Pac-Man series having a number of different colored ghosts, some who even have special abilities (see: Pac-Mania), there’s only one kind of ghost in Pac-Attack, and they’re passive enemies in the game. They drop, they wait, sometimes they get gobbled, and that’s as far as it goes for the game. That’s because the Cosmos in the original version of the title only come in one variety and, like the ghosts here, they’re passive participants in the experience. Since this is just a simple reskin of the Cosmo Gang version, nothing functionally was changed about the mechanics. Different looking enemies, different types of ball dropped to clear enemies, but that’s all they really changed.

It would have been nice to see some variety in the play style for the well. Maybe there were some ghost types that could move around when Pac was on screen? Maybe some could jump so you’d have to have bricks on top of them to trap them. A bit of variety (instead of all of the ghosts being a passive, red type) could have added a lot of fun and thought to the game, not just in the main attack mode, but also in the puzzle variety. Certainly, with so many ghosts in the series, even just coloring them different colors (whether they had differing behavior or not) would have felt like something.

Puzzle mode, though, is where the game really falls apart. This mode has 100 stages and you’re given a limited number of pieces, including a limited number of Pacs, in each stage to clear all the ghosts. The game starts basic enough, with simple combinations of standard bricks and ghosts. As it goes on, though, other brick types are introduced, like floating bricks that won’t drop even when other stuff falls around them, and concrete blocks that have to drop twice to break. The brick variety is nice, but by and large you’re still playing the same kind of puzzles over and over until you clear all 100 stages. It’s not really hard, just time consuming.

Here, again, the different kinds of ghosts really could have helped. Having to trap runners horizontally, and cage in jumpers vertically, would mean you’d need to put more thought into where bricks go and how you manage them. I’m not saying it would have added a ton of depth – I liken it to the various brick types you have to manage in Arkanoid, which really just means slightly more thought while you randomly move around – but it would have been something, and this game is desperately crying out for any kind of life that could have been added into it.

As it stands, Pac-Attack is a pretty boring experience. When it was released in 1993 there were already a ton of better well-drop puzzle games out there. We’re talking about the likes of Dr. Mario, Yoshi’s Cookie, Yoshi, Tetris 2 (wow, Nintendo made a lot of these), Puyo Puyo, and more. Namco’s game, whatever you wanted to call it, came to a crowded market that really didn’t have room for this half-baked experience. The company really needed to put more thought, and more flair, into their title, but instead they released something basic just to have a toe in, and then didn’t really do anything more with it when it came state-side.

I think there are the bones of an interesting experience in Pac-Attack, or at least there could have been if Namco had put more work into it than slapping the Pac-Man branding on the game and calling it a day. Cosmo Gang the Puzzle is a boring experience but Pac-Attack could have been something more. Sadly they didn’t put in the effort, so what was a middling gaming experience never got to truly shine like it could.