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Pac-Chain: A Pac-Man game for the 21st century

Some would say there is nothing wrong with the original Pac-Man format. What was good enough for our video-gaming ancestors should be good enough for us, even if we play on hand-held touchscreen devices and they played on giant arcade machines.

But now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Pac-Man game, Namco has come out with Pac-Chain for the iPhone.

It’s a Pac-Man game featuring all your favourites – yes, the ghosties are here, as are the delicious fruit pieces – but instead of running around chowing-down on yellow dots and avoiding ghosts and whatnot, they’ve decided to go with a match-three affair.

The object is to clear the screen, which you can do in several ways. The easiest is to click on clusters of like-coloured ghosts to clear them from the screen. Clearing them in chains nabs you more points, but it’s pretty easy and pretty boring.

Alternatively you can have Pac-Man munch the right icon to turn all the ghosts into, er, ghostlier ghosts then eat as many of them up as possible before the time runs out.

It’s not exactly fun but it is quite irritating and addictive, which, we suppose, is the point of Pac-Man games. If you like Tetris and bright flashing colours, then this will keep you happy for hours, but anyone who’d prefer a bit of a narrative or some clever puzzles will probably get bored pretty quickly.
 

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