The other big gameplay mechanic is the addition of upgrades and power-ups. It turns the game into a surprisingly tense endurance run, and combining the endless Glitch with trying to avoid getting pinned by the ghosts requires a lot of focus. If you stop moving even a very small amount of time, the glitch-wave will catch up to you and Pac-Man is no more. It’s basically Pac-Man: Endless Runner edition. The biggest change is that, rather than having levels where you eat all of the dots in order to progress, PAC-MAN 256 has you moving forward through (what I think is) an endless Pac-Man maze, with a glitch-y tidal wave slowly encroaching on you from the bottom of the screen, inspired by the Level 256 of lore. And even though I think it's a bad habit to repeat yourself, I don't think it automatically makes PAC-MAN 256 a bad game. So as you might expect, PAC-MAN 256 is pretty much just Pac-Man again. Yet for some reason, Pac-Man's answer to the question of how to stay relevant has appeared to be, for many years, do the same thing more and more and more! How is something like Pac-Man supposed to stay relevant? One would assume that the obvious answer is to take the Mario approach Mario has been along for nearly every major gaming revolution, because Nintendo has constantly used him as a framework, a blank slate, to do new things. So when something becomes solidified in legend like that, even if it's against its own will, the issue of modernity becomes a critical one. So ubiquitous is the Pac-Man, in fact, that every time video games are brought up around my grandfather, he brings up wistful memories of playing Pac-Man and being better at it than everyone else. When something becomes so ubiquitous it is hard for it to branch out successfully. If there's a dead horse in the video game world that continues to be beaten, I hate to say it, but it's Pac-Man.
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