Pac-Man Pinball 2

Pac-Man Pinball 2 – flippin’ marvellous!

The rather cute and perpetually hungry yellow sphere, better known as Pac-Man has been a familiar friend to every gamer of every generation since he was introduced to our computers some 30 years ago. It’s fair to say that many of us have wondered what Pac-Man got up to on his time off from munching pills and dealing with those pesky ghosts, so it comes as no surprise he likes to pass his time with a traditional game of pinball!

Pac-Man Pinball 2 is as you’d expect it to be... a pinball machine in the palm of your hand. Graphically, the table detail is truly superb and the way the ball moves around the table is eerily incredibly realistic. The flippers or paddles (depending on what you may like to call them) react to the deftest touch on either the left or right control on your d-pad or pressing the 4 and 6 on the number pad. Pressing down or 8 will power up the launch of your ball – by holding the key down longer, the spring’s pulled further and when it’s released, it will give the ball more momentum.

There’s no denying it, whenever you see someone play pinball it looks a doddle, but from my own experience, it is a lot more skill and fortune than you can ever give it credit for. Pac-Man 2 Pinball captures the essential elements you’d expect to see in a pinball game, luck and skill play an equally important role, but if like me, you almost blindly tap at both paddles like a frantic thing possessed, the good news is, you’re not necessarily going to get a bad score at the end of it.

Fortunately for those of us who prefer Pac-Man in his familiar maze running form, should you trigger the bonus game during the pinball game, you can try to clear the level whilst avoiding the horrid ghosts. The only downside to this, is as soon as your Pac-Man get caught by the ghost, there’s no real time for you to adjust between this and the pinball game, meaning you could easily lose a life when the ball shoots between your flippers!

Another element which is featured in this game is the opportunity to see how you played in the game. For example, you can see your total score, total game playing time, longest ball in play, best one ball score, longest multi-ball, ramps and mini-games score. Although this is quite fascinating, this isn’t saved for posterity purposes and only the highest scores are saved.

Fortunately a redeeming feature that this game has is the fact there’s more than just one table to get acquainted with. In fact there’s the original Pac-Man table, the Ghost table and the Bonus table which all pose their own modified challenges and sleek graphics.

In honest truth, this game is definitely for the fans of Pac-Man and of course pinball, the excellent graphics and realistic ball movements make the need to go to the amusements arcade totally redundant and the only thing that’s missing from this very realistic experience is the ability to nudge the table to assist you getting the best score.

Rating 80%

Positives

Excellent graphics

Realistic ball movements and responsive paddle moves

Three tables to try your luck with

Pac-Man mini game

Negatives

You can’t play the Pac-Man mini game instead of the main pinball game

Repetitive

You can’t use the motion control on the handset to nudge the table