Pac-Man Collection

Pac-Man Collection
File:63749--pac-man-collection.png Pac-Man is Back on GBA
Genre(s): Action Puzzle Platform(s): Game Boy Advance Release: NA: July 13, 2001 EU: December 7, 2001 JP: January 11, 2002 Developer(s): Mass Media Publisher(s): Namco

Pac-Man Collection is a 2001 compilation released on the Game Boy Advance. It was developed by Mass Media and published by Namco. The compilation consists of 4 games, namely Pac-Man Arrangement, Pac-Man, Pac-Attack, and Pac-Mania.

Why It Rocks

1. It marked the first way to play Pac-Man Arrangement and Pac-Mania on the go.
2. Good ports of the arcade games, especially Pac-Man Arrangement and the original, that are faithful to the arcade because they were hard to remake.
3. The menu music is catchy and cool to listen to as it is a medley of at-least one track from each game.
4. It's the first Pac-Man game on GBA.
5. In the original Pac-Man, you can choose full screen to see the full maze.
6. You can go to the settings menu and choose what number of lives you prefer to start with, as well as the difficulty, making the games easier to some peoples.
7. The cover art is good and tells you what games are in the collection.

Bad Qualities

1. The port of Pac-Mania is abysmal.
   • Due to storage limitations, the soundtrack is heavily trimmed to where it gets tiresome quickly.
   • The game also suffers from screen crunch, making it difficult to jump over the ghosts.
2. The port of Pac-Attack, while better than the port of Pac-Mania, has terrible audio quality (with a lot of bitcrushing) and is borrowed from the Genesis release, rather than the SNES release, which is better quality and the GBA can emulate natively.
3. There is no scoreboard in any of the games, this problem would also been later seen in Pac-Man Pinball Advance.

Reception

The compilation received positive reviews, with a Metacritic score of 79 (generally favorable reviews). The compilation is also a commercial success with 2,940,000 copies sold which was the 9th best selling game on the Game Boy Advance.

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