In Pacmania there are four worlds for you to eat your way through: Block Town, Pacman’s Park, Sandbox Land and Jungly Steps. To finish the level, you’ll have to eat all dots in the maze. The green ones will increase your speed and the red pills will have the same effect as the power pills mentioned earlier, only ghosts will now increase in points-value when caught! You’ll start off with four lives, but for every 100.000 points you gather you’ll be awarded a brand new one. In the middle of the maze there will sometimes appear, besides the occasional pile of fruit, green or red pills.
In later levels ghosts copy this ability, so the jumping will then get less useful. This will also work positively on your points-counter! When there aren’t such pills in his vicinity Pacman can also jump over the ghosts and make a run for it. Is Pacman totally helpless against these little blighters? Happily not, because in every maze there are some power pills to be found, which stun the ghosts temporarily so he can eat them (I told you Pacman has got an appetite!).
Also living in these mazes are some very scary ghosts who don’t like a big mouthed figure in their neighbourhood and so they do everything to get their hands… uhm… or blankets on our little round hero. To fulfil his appetite Pacman strolls, walks, glides… or whatever you call his mode of movement, through some mazes, which are filled to the brim with his favourite food. Pacman is a little ball-like creature with a very big mouth that likes to eat little dots and the occasional piece of fruit for good health (mind the all important vitamins!). Although I think I don’t have to explain what the game is about, I will do so anyway for those of you who have never laid eyes on the Pacster, meaning you probably have been living in isolation from birth. Pacmania is actually a 3D version of the original Pacman-game, originally created for the arcades and converted to the Amiga by the lads at Grandslam. With Pacland in 1984 Pacman ventured into a completely new genre of games, namely the sideway platformer, but in 1988 with the release of Pacmania, reviewed here, Pacman focussed again on its roots, the maze-game. Pacman became an icon back then and after more than a quarter of a century it still is! After the first Pacman in 1980, there followed quite a bunch of other incarnations of the game, like Ms.
strange huh? Well, back in the early eighties, people loved it to death when it first came to the arcades. Way back in time, at the dawn of computer games, there came a small pixelated yellow ball with eyes and a rather big mouth into being which ate dots for breakfast, lunch and dinner and who was being chased by ghosts.