Every Friday, AV Club Staffers kick off our weekly open thread discussing game plans and recent gaming glory, but of course, the real action is in the comments, where we invite you to answer our perennial question: What are you playing this weekend?
One of the calls from the Battle Royale formula, so widespread in online gaming in recent years, is that success boils down to a simple binary number. Either you live, in which case: hooray. Or you’re dead, and the hordes of pre-teen jackals are already picking your corpse clean looking for more Fortnite building materials. You may be behind in gear or card position, but there is no “loss” in a game like PUBG or Apex Legends: You win or you’re dead.
The problem with this grim reality, however, is that it cuts off certain previously important measures of success in the service of this survival mindset. You could crow about your number of deaths in a game of Call Of Duty: Warzone, but if you get shot in the back at the last minute by someone who’s been hiding behind a shipping container the whole game, well, you still lost and they still won. In essence, these games are not about playing well, but about playing the longest. And that’s a problem when it comes to a game like Pac-Man 99
Released this Wednesday, Pac-Man 99 is Nintendo’s latest free attempt to hook players to the Nintendo Switch Online program (as if you could hunt with your friends in Monster Hunter Rise was not enough service). Follow in the footsteps of the devilish brilliant Tetris 99, and the less successful Mario 35 PM99 again, the player pits it against 98 other Pac-Men, all vying to be the last standing. As with other games in this strange little series, effective play allows you to send obstacles to your distant opponents, fill their fields with ghostly Pac-People that can slow down and even kill them. Last Pac Chews Wins.
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In a sentence, Pac-Man 99 is a clear evolution of many of the trends Bandai Namco has applied to the classic Pac formula since Pac-Man Championship Edition came back in 2007 and massively accelerated old-school gameplay by eliminating discrete rounds in favor of ever-increasing waves of complexity and speed. (It mainly takes out concepts Championship edition 2, particularly the ability to generate massive trains of ghosts to consume in a widespread orgy of pixelated undead.) However, where it’s falling apart is by failing to acknowledge that Pac-Man is not essentially a game about survival. Instead, it’s all about the points.
Aside from the “oops, that’s where I’m going to hit the killscreen types”, death is a natural part of the Pac-Man method. You run the board, you collect points by slurping in fruit and matching ghosts, you die, and then, hopefully, that stash of points has given you a few extra lives in the meantime to keep the run going. The result is iterative: good play gives you the ability to recover from mistakes, creating a cycle of success. The original Super Mario Bros. is similar, with coins and 1-ups keeping you in play even after a bad jump or an obnoxious enemy robs you of your precious fire flower. Of the three games, Nintendo has only applied the online battle royale formula Tetris is a one-off affair – and that could help explain why it is so better suited to a treatment that continues to praise it in the game over any other form of successful play. (Although also, Tetris is probably just a better base game than Pac-Man, that’s why it needs less refinement over the years.)
Like all 99/35 spell, Pac-Man 99 is undeniably neat. The confusion on the screen is visually stimulating and running through the maze remains fun. (There’s also a whole strategy element we’re still trying to wrap our heads around, namely, the game’s four different power-up modes.) But through a core element of the game. Pac-Man formula – collecting points, either in the service of extra lives, or simply as a goal for oneself –99 loses touch with what has made that little yellow puck such an enduring icon for the past 41 years. After all, not everything has to be a matter of life and death.