Pac-Pix (DS)
Pac-Man’s shape is one of the most iconic symbols in all of gaming. Its simple design is easy to replicate, it is only really associated with the video game it represents, and it’s how the world first met what might be the first popular video game character. In a game where you need to draw the main character over and over again, there might not be a better pick than Pac-Man, and in Pac-Pix, that recognizable circle with a slice cut out of it certainly gets put to use.
In the world of Pac-Pix, a substance known as Ghost Ink has been wreaking havoc across the world. The moment something is drawn with the ink, it manifests as a real ghost that can travel between books and other print media, spreading chaos until the day Pac-Man pushes back against them. Using his own magical pen he is able to confine them all to one final book, but before he can finish them off, he gets sucked into the book as well, his only hope for ever leaving it now resting on the player and their use of the magic pen. Working through the chapters of the book, the player must draw Pac-Man and other objects to combat the ghost ink’s creations and eventually take on the ink itself, although if you beat the game you end up unlocking a second harder book with similar levels that doesn’t really fit that story set-up since it’s essentially just an unlockable difficulty mode.
Once the action begins, you’ll quickly find most levels are built off the same simple design. The DS’s touch screen makes up the active play area where you can interact with the game world while the top screen contains a lane that you can send Pac-Man off into to pick up items like extra lives or point bonuses. These pages are set apart from each other by the way enemies and other objects are added to them, the main goal of a page being to eat all the ghosts, although some pages will only have more ghosts appear after the first batch or two is dealt with. To chomp the ghosts up requires having Pac-Man on the field, the player bringing him to life by drawing him with the stylus. There is a lot more to the act than simply drawing him however. The size of Pac-Man will determine how quickly he moves, the yellow ghost-muncher moving forward automatically in the direction you drew him facing. When he’s been drawn and starts moving, you can still influence him some, able to pull him backwards with the stylus some but more importantly, you can draw lines in his path that will make him change direction when he collides with them, turning to match the direction you drew the line in. No matter what gimmicks are introduced later on or what foes you’re facing, these simple basics are always necessary to effectively taking down the ghostly menace, the player needing to manage their Pac-Men carefully since they are only allowed to draw him so many times in a stage, each Pac-Man disappearing for good if they leave the bottom screen from any side save where the upper lane is.
Unfortunately, the reliance on drawing Pac-Man is where we encounter the game’s major issue, and that’s the touch screen controls. To register that you’re drawing Pac-Man, you must draw him in one complete consistent motion starting from the top of his mouth and working down and around. If you draw Pac-Man any other manner, it won’t register, although there is actually quite a bit of leniency in the overall shape. The game isn’t too harsh about how deformed your Pac-Man might end up so long as it was drawn with the expected process, and while this can lead to some silly shapes, there is an unfortunate price. If you don’t close your Pac-Man perfectly it instead becomes a large mess of green lines that hog space on the lower screen until they fade or you crash a different Pac-Men into them, but more importantly, these detection issues get troublesome with the other things the game expects you to draw. To handle certain enemies and obstacles in the later stages, you eventually get the ability to draw arrows that fire in the direction you point them and bombs that can be detonated by attaching their fuse to a fire source. While Pac-Man can be reliably made if you follow the steps, the arrow is incredibly picky, the player needing to start by drawing from the top of its arrowhead and the game not really picking up on the triangle shapes too well. In fact, it’s actually wiser to draw the arrowhead as a circle, as I could only get it to consistently work with that workaround rather than the way the game taught it to me. Bombs have a different issue, where you first draw a circle for the bomb and then draw a line out of it as the fuse. The circles seem to have size requirements and style requirements meaning you need to make them rather large and not too oblong, and then drawing the fuse doesn’t always seem to pick up the fire perfectly. When these drawings do work they can modify play in interesting ways, but the fiddly nature of them makes chasing down the ghosts a much less enjoyable task than it should be.
If the drawing was more reliable, the enemies would be a great fit for it. Each type of ghost behaves differently and requires different approaches to properly munch with your Pac-Man drawings. Pink enemies are pretty standard, but blue ghosts will try to flee as you approach, something the white ghosts take even further as they teleport away when you approach. Some ghosts must be eaten in the proper order to eliminate them, some can pollute the drawing space with colors you can’t draw on top of, and others might be protected on one side or wear armor that must be blown up with a bomb first. On top of some boss battles that require the player to think more actively about the combat applications their drawings might have, the enemies you must beat and eat are a fine bunch for the play style and are mixed together with each other often enough to keep things from growing stale. What’s more, the game begins introducing new objects to interact with like switches that can open up the top lane for travel, mirrors you can bounce your arrows off for trick shots, and bubbles that enemies will hide in on the top screen that you’ll need to aim your arrow shots to pop. Most of Pac-Pix’s level, enemy, and puzzle design is where it needs to be in theory, and if the drawings worked as intended, they’d make it an enjoyable experience. Unfortunately, things fall apart a bit once you consider the issues with the unreliable touch screen.
Most of the difficulty in Pac-Pix comes from trying to get your shapes to register and do their jobs. When you’re just dealing with Pac-Man he can be easy enough to move around, but fun ideas like shooting down enemies on the top screen with bubbles become annoying as you need to not only make your arrows the right shape to please the game, but the incredibly subtle lean of it will determine its flight path, making some of the needle threading the game expects in its later levels annoying to pull off. Bombs can end up filling vital space when they don’t have their fuses work, and if the enemies that leave ink blockers about are present, you can end up with more waiting on things to disappear to place important drawings. However, the drawing detection could have been forgiven if not for the time limits on levels. Every chapter consists of multiple pages, each of these pages having their own time limit that is meant to encourage quick drawing. As time goes on these get stricter, never really requiring absurdly fast play but at the same time, they don’t account for the issues one can face with getting the drawings to work properly. If you had enough time to finagle your way into the right shapes and right movements, things could be enjoyed despite that consistent nuisance, but run out of time in a stage, and the chapter must be replayed in its entirety. When you do beat the game and unlock the second book, you will find all the enemies have been given new behaviors to make them tougher to eat, meaning that any small issues you might have with the drawing controls before will only be made much harder to handle due to much tighter victory requirements. The normal story levels can be finished in short order if things work right, but the constant battle with the touch screen makes it difficult to enjoy levels and enemies that would work well otherwise.
THE VERDICT: Pac-Pix is a fun idea on paper. The puzzles and ghosts you must overcome are designed in a way that makes the way you draw Pac-Man and his tools important to your success, and had things worked well, they’d be a good fit for the style of game on offer. Unfortunately, the drawing mechanics don’t seem quite up to snuff, the arrows especially unreliable despite their importance and other small errors in detection making moments of required precision fall flat. Were there not a timer to pressure you then the wonky drawing mechanics could be accounted for, but as is, moments of downtime after a detection failure really make the game feel unfair. If things worked properly its design choices would have made it good, but since your only interaction with these levels and challenges is through flawed touch screen creations, Pac-Pix ends up providing more frustration than fun.
And so, I give Pac-Pix for the Nintendo DS…
A BAD rating. Pac-Pix isn’t really a poorly designed game. If every drawing you made worked as intended and was detected on the first try, it’s got consistently shifting puzzle designs and the ghosts come in enough varieties to make them a decent challenge for your somewhat hands-off method of interaction. When things do work, it can be easy to see the merits of what the creators intended your experience to be. The problem is, Pac-Pix was one of the early DS games, and at that point, touch screen gaming was still being figured out. Pac-Pix tried to resolve the issues with programming a drawing detection system by requiring the player to make shapes in a consistent manner, but then the game seems to have issues parsing some of the shapes, the arrows especially prone to failure. It’s a system with many kinks in it, and if the knowledge we have today of the touch screen could be applied to it, the enemy variety would be enjoyable instead of making the hard mode such a frustrating experience. Pac-Pix still might not go much further than simply being good due to some simplicity in its design that would make the levels fairly easy without the drawing woes, but since you can’t always count on your creations coming to life as expected and the timer punishes you for the game’s failure to read your shapes, Pac-Pix doesn’t quite live up to what potential it does have.
It’s pretty appropriate that the Pac-Man shape is the most reliably created image in the game, but it feels like the player never has full control over Pac-Pix. The failures aren’t so rampant that you will constantly be struggling, but they are frequent enough that they continue to hold the game back right up until the showdown with the Ghost Ink. In some ways Pac-Pix was a pioneer in feeling out the potential of the DS’s touch screen, later games potentially having better drawing detection thanks to the knowledge creators could glean from the work of early developers for the system. Whether or not this happened can only be conjecture though, so viewed solely for what it is, the technical know-how simply wasn’t at the point this idea for a Pac-Man adventure could be given life properly.