Pac-Mania

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Pac Mania brings a different style in Pac Man gaming. The levels and characters are presented in 3D and this time Pac Man can also jump. And believe me this jump can save you from hard situations. But Pac Man must watch out for ghosts that also have jumping abilities. The main goal of the game is to swallow all the dots and complete the level. The funny ghosts now hover in the air instead of...walking. Dots and energy pellets hang in midair. In addition, Pac-Man is granted with a new power: He can jump up and over ghosts! There's also a use a Pac Booster that lets him move at super-speeds. You'll love the new challenging levels - they are available in so many mind-boggling shapes and they'll surely turn you into a certified Pac-Maniac! What a simple, addictive and excellent game to play indeed!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Atari ST conversion is unfortunately inferior compared to any other 16bit home computer and this happens due to the system's graphics hardware limitations. As a result, several features from the original's visuals and its innovative level design are missing from this conversion and each stage's backgrounds look almost monochromatic (except for the sprites). Also, the gameplay area is significantly smaller compared to the Amiga or the Acorn A3000 conversions, since it covers only the 2/3 of the full screen. The animation seems quite slow on the ST as well probably due to the lack of a Blitter chip on the earlier ST models and thus the inability to scroll large portions of background layer (due to the pseudo-3D effect) so the entire screen has to be re-drawn everytime you move the Pac-man! I think an STE conversion would do much better than that! Sonically, the game offers the original arcade tune plus a few sampled sounds effects, slightly inferior in sampling quality to the Amiga and the Archimedes computers.