Customer Reviews

Pac-Man: Adventures in Time

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a kid of the 80s, I lived and breathed Pac-Man. I couldn't get enough of the pellet chomping and ghost devouring. This 21st century version of Pac-Man is a spectacular adaptation of a game that never goes out of style.

For starters, the graphics are outstanding. The game's open is one of the few game opens I truly enjoy watching. While one of the basic objectives of the game is to avoid the ghosts, there are also other distractions to avoid like alligators, boulders, and snakes, all of which make the game that much more challenging. The mazes are superbly designed. The first maze caught my eye since the layout is the same as the first maze on the original Pac-Man. The bonus rounds, like a river run and a variation of Concentration, are a change of pace but they do not take away from the overall enjoyment of the game. In short, Pac-Man: Adventures in Time is a definite must get game.

This is a somewhat uneven adaptation of pac-man. In general, it has great graphics, good mazes, etc. It keeps the Pac-man playing style while adding nifty modern touches.

The problem comes in the playability. I often found that I was fighting the game: slow responses at critical times, getting into situations where I couldn't see important things due to the field-of-view, etc.

Hopefully they'll come out with a Pac-Man 2 that can clean up these glitches. If they do, it will be a fine game.

I really loved playing this game. It's your basic Pac-Man run around and collect little pellets and dodge all the gosts, except some really cool scenery and quite a few new twists, including rolling boulders, killer snakes, mine carts, seesaws, and multi-level and sideways mazes. And more. Oh yeah, and don't forget Pac-Man is traveling through time. From cavemen ghosts to high-tech scientist ghosts from the future, Pac-Man has a lot to deal with. Adventures in Time includes room for six players to save (each player can have three saved games), multi player games, cool short videos showing the super-cute Pac-Man, sub-levels which let you earn extra points, and over 45 3D caveman, acient egyptian, medieval, wild west, and future mazes. I don't mean to sound like an add, but this is a really cool game. Oh yeah, and if you buy it, here's a tip: don't use your lives unless you absolutely can't get past a level without. :)

Remember those days way back when, when you were a teen and spent all of those hours in the arcade? This game will allow you to revisit those years in no time and take your kids with you.

From various difficulty levels, to truly superb scenery this game is definitely a bargain that will bring hours of enjoyment for anyone .

Truly the best Pac Man game yet for your PC.

Dude, this game is the best! This is no boring flat Mr.Pac Man with no action. this game is for anyone ages 6-100! Even though i'm 15, i find this game incresingly difficult! In a 3D world you eat pellets,swim,climb tree's,canoe,seesaw,and more!! You will get a briefing from Professor Pac Man at the start of each maze. There are over 45 mazes and 5 gigantic world's! dude if you dont get this game, you are "MISSING OUT, (TOTALLY)

This is one of the hardest computer games I've ever played! I only know one person who beat all 30 or so levels. I would recomend this game to any one who is looking for a challenge!

Pac-Man Adventures in Time is a great game. The graphics make you feel like you are in Pac-Man's world. Some of the levels are very easy, some are very hard. Sometimes I stop myself because I'm about to zoom through a whole era(5 mazes). Also, maybe they could make a maze editor or something like that. Buy this game, it's worth the money, but don't play it with a 300mhz or below computer

Having never had a Sega Dreamcast, I never experienced this game there, I was simply aware that the PC version I'm reviewing now (6 years late--lol) was a port of the original Dreamcast game. I picked up my copy of this game several years ago, and have never regretted it. The game stands as a personal favorite, and has re-paid it's self many times over.

At first glance, you might be tempted to not take this game seriously--expecting it to be overly simplistic, and aimed squarely at a very young or casual gaming audience. But it would be a big mistake to allow yourself to be decieved by your initial impressions of it. There is a remarkably challenging, and replayable game under the misleading "kiddy game" disguise. The game stays true to the original's gameplay formula, retaining all of the core gameplay dynamics of the original game, but adds new conventions such as good looking 3D scenery, and 45 unique mazes--each with different elevations, and terrains with some impressively imaginative new layouts like spheres and cylinders. The first maze is even a 3D re-make of the original Pac-Man maze. You can choose to play from the classic overhead, or an isometric 3D view, and you can toggle between them any time in-game. It includes everything you would expect a decent port to have, including three difficulty settings, good looking graphics, well designed mazes and colorful scenery, native gamepad support (including rumblepads), and Pac-Man even has a much appreciated jump ability that can be handy quite often. The catch is that it's usefulness is limited by a meter that must refill over the course of about three seconds before Pac-Man can jump again, forcing you to use it as a last resort means of escape when the ghosts have you surrounded, and even to escape environmental hazards from time to time.

The mazes become more challenging as your progress, and despite claims to the contrary, there is a good amount of challenge here even for seasoned Pac-Man veterans. There are sixteen sub-levels with various mini-games which link the mazes, and the game presents you with imaginative maze layouts, covering five worlds, and time periods from the Jurassic, medieval, ancient Egypt, and the wild west; each with their own unique hazards (besides the ghosts) to traverse like various dangerous animals, volcanoes spewing hot rocks, platforms that crumble away when you run over them, and rolling boulders. Later levels feature imaginative completion objectives like having to keep your eye on a grip gauge as you go horizontal and munch on pellets on the sides of structures before your grip runs out, and completing a maze before a sleeping dragon awakens, and toasts Pac-Man. Still others feature power pellets sitting atop columns which must be lowered by running across a tile with a corresponding rune or symbol, mazes with no power pellets at all, partially submerged levels where Pac-Man must swim (complete with depleting oxygen gauge), and still others with key areas being guarded by deadly snakes which must be charmed into their baskets for a limited time by acquiring a magic flute. You also get a high score plaque where you can post your initials, a maze mode where you can play individual mazes, and a cutscene viewer where you can watch the various cutscenes you've unlocked.

No game is without it's weakenesses, and Adventures in Time can get a bit repetitive since saves are spaced further apart on higher difficulties. This can mean replaying the same mazes several times until you reach a save point, but I can see this feature being implemented in favor of offering greater challenge for veterans who might otherwise find the game "too easy". There are also a couple of camera bugs, but to be fair, the camera only became a problem in a handful of instances for me. Beyond these forgivable flaws, I can find little to complain about in this game. The game looks immensely better than the Dreamcast original, and sports a generous array of resolutions starting as low as 640x480, and ranging right on up to full 1920x1080 hi-def (though this may vary depending on what your graphics card supports). The sound is just as configurable with settings for different speaker modes (including surround), three frequency selections, and support for EAX (environmental audio extensions), though Sound Blaster owners using Vista and Win 7 will need to use Creative Alchemy (or the universal version of it for non-Sound Blaster owners) to be able to take advantage of hardware acceleration, and EAX. For as intimidating as all these advanced settings may sound to novice users, it's all handled gracefully through an easy to understand configuration panel with only two simple tabs. All of the Dreamcast orginal's play modes are included, which includes multiplayer via two player hotseat, or over internet or LAN. Unfortunately, though the game does support two player hotseat, it does not support more than one gamepad which is a bizarre, but forgivable oversight (and there's always Xpadder).

At the end of the day, this is a must-have game that Pac-Man fans simply can't go wrong with. It offers all the fun of the original game with some nifty modern touches. The game is completely kid/family friendly, and offers hours of retro fun. It's system requirements are so laughably low by modern standards, it's no trouble at all to unleash it's full graphics potential even on entry level systems, and it's advanced setup options make it a cinch to run even on current operating systems. It's also an extremely well behaved game. In fact, I can't recall having ever had any technical problems with this game. As if all this weren't incentive enough, it's being offered as a very affordable value title, and it's easily worth every penny. Hasbro Interactive has delivered a fine update to the classic Pac-Man game which is sure to be remembered by fans as one of the most entertaining, and compelling installments in franchise. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

UPDATED EDIT: Pac-Man Adventures in Time is Win Vista/Win 7 compatible.

This is one of my first video games that I actually bought, and it is worth the money. If you like mazes, then this one is for you. It is not a complicated video game to play; kids to "adult kids" will find this enjoyable. Keep chomping those pellets!

We bought Pac Man for our Gateway computer and found that it wouldn't run unless we rendered the graphics through the software mode which ended up making the game useless -- the graphics are so poor in software mode that you can't see what you're doing. We had all the requisite equipment, and the software's help file even said that it supported our graphics card, but in the end it wouldn't run from the graphics card and the technical support people at hasbro couldn't tell me why. We even tried it on another computer and while we didn't have the same problem, we had another one and were unable to run it there either.