Pac-Man World Re-Pac review – ghosts from the past

metro.co.uk:

Yet another PS1 era 3D platformer is given the remake treatment, but does Namco’s Pac-Man World really deserve the attention?

We promised we’d give up acting surprised at how increasingly more obscure games were getting full-blown remakes, but consider our minds boggled that anyone remembers Pac-Man World, let alone decided to remake it. Initially released for the original PlayStation in 1999 (2000 in Europe) we’ve not known a single person to ever mention it, or its two sequels, in the last 23 years.

When Bandai Namco first announced the remake, it was as if it was the return of a much beloved classic, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it was popular at the time, at least somewhere in the world. Although the original plan for the game was to make it an open world title, no doubt inspired by Super Mario 64 and Spyro The Dragon, the final product is a mostly linear, mostly 2D adventure closer in pitch to the original Crash Bandicoot games.

Although Pac-Man himself spends most of the time in his humanoid form there are various attempts to anchor the game to the coin-op original, as you frequently turn back into a ghost-chomping yellow ball or take part in maze mini-games. Everything is very shallow and slowly paced but if you wanted to make a family friendly PlayStation era platformer based on Pac-Man it’s actually not a bad effort. Even if that still doesn’t explain why it’s been remade.

The simplest explanation for the remake’s existence is that Bandai Namco saw the success of the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro The Dragon remakes and wanted a slice of the same pie (while conveniently ignoring that both those remakes included all three games in their respective trilogies). You could also surmise that they’re