Collection essentials #234: Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures (SNES)

One would assume a game called “Pac-Man 2” would be an arcade-style maze game that involves eating all the pellets in the stage and avoiding enemies. One would be completely wrong.

Perhaps this game ought to be thought of more as a spinoff than a sequel. In fact, the original title in Japan was “Hello! Pac-Man”, so the “2” was added in the international release, likely in an attempt to sell more copies. But you have here is not only unlike the original Pac-Man, it’s one of the most odd games I’ve ever seen and I haven’t played anything quite like it.

This is basically what you would call a “point and click adventure game”, a type of game that was much more common on computers than consoles, so I haven’t talked about any in this series so far. A “point and click adventure game” involves navigating environments that feature all kinds of things that you can interact with using a “click”, which may involve acquiring things, pushing buttons/switches, manipulating objects to solve some sort of puzzle, and so on. But Pac-Man messes with some of the fundamentals of this gameplay formula. You see, Pac-Man is the main protagonist who walks around and must interact with various things in the world to complete his objectives, but the thing is, you are NOT Pac-Man and you don’t really control him. You play as a nameless character from a first-person view, and Pac-Man is aware of your presence, but not any of the other characters in the game. You have the ability to tell Pac-Man to “look” in either of the four cardinal directions, which is primarily how you get him to change which direction he’s walking but it’s also how you get him to notice things in the environment. You are also armed with a slingshot, which you can use to fling your unlimited supply of rocks to hit and affect either Pac-Man or the things around him. You also have a finite supply of power-pellets to change Pac-Man into Super Pac-Man in a pinch.

One thing that makes this game tricky is that Pac-Man has a very wide variety of moods which affects what will happen as he traverses different parts of the world. Not only are there various basic emotions like happy Pac-Man, sad Pac-Man, angry Pac-Man, etc., but there are different degrees of each, so for example Pac-Man can be either merely angry or ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS and will behave a little differently in those different states. The game has a few different objectives that you must complete one at a time in order to win, with the first simply being that Pac-Man has to go fetch milk for Pac-Baby. The evil ghosts are out to get Pac-Man, but they are only a fraction of the danger Pac-Man faces. The environment is absolutely littered with various things that will “defeat” Pac-Man and reset you from the last checkpoint. The game is heavily based on trial and error, and a large number of deaths is practically inevitable unless you know what you’re doing. Thankfully you have unlimited lives and a password system.

You might think this sounds frustrating, not being able to directly control Pac-Man and looming defeat at every corner. And you’d partially be right, as the game can feel a little frustrating. But actually, this game’s main appeal is its cartoonishness, seeing all kinds of silly hijinks and slapstick humor play out, and you really can’t ever be sure what you’re going to see next. So even when you “lose”, there is sometimes amusement from seeing the wacky way that you lost.

The game features occasional minigames like mine cart riding or hang gliding (as seen on the box art), and those were probably made a little more difficult than they should have been, and I remember getting frustrated over too many deaths in those two sections back in the day.

As a really nice bonus, you can play ports of the arcade games Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man! There is an arcade location in the city that can be visited to play them, though Ms. Pac-Man has to be unlocked by collecting a few things hidden in the world. There are passwords you can input to jump straight to them though, so you can simply look those up online and jump right into those ports if you want.

Pac-Man is another one of my childhood games. I think it might have been another one that I got from Toy Liquidators in Kittery, Maine, and it was bought pre-owned and probably a couple-to-a-few years after it originally came out. And I believe my childhood copy is at my parents house, and I know it’s not the one shown in the photo because the top of the label of my original copy is not properly glued down. This one I have is a reprint, which you can tell because of the black-and-white instruction manual, which is unfortunate, but oh well. For being a completely unique and charming wacky experience, as well as providing childhood memories, this game certainly deserves a spot on the essentials list.