It's not quite the same as the ghost trains of Pac-Man CE DX, but it's damn close, and it’s great to see each one sent off to a foe’s screen. There are also two rows of small ghosts on either side of the maze, and eating them creates ghost trains, which you can then devour under the influence of a power pellet. You can stack these effects with each new level clear, which is a crucial part of survival when the match is down to its last 10 competitors. The wafers also serve a valuable new function, in that winding your way through the maze grants you a permanent speed bonus once you've eaten every wafer. When there are a dozen or more of these line-art Pac-Men chomping at your heels things can get pretty hairy, but gobbling a power pellet melts all of these phantom Pacs instantly, freeing you up to continue your run. Bumping into one of them slows you down significantly, which is not ideal when you’re trying to stay ahead of fast-moving ghosts. At first it seems entirely normal: The power pellets, wafers (yes, that's the official name of the dots), ghosts and fruit are here, but now every gobbled ghost is sent to another player’s game in the form of a hollow Pac-Man. You join a lobby with 98 other players and, after a few seconds, the round begins and. you play Pac-Man. Pac-Man 99, like Tetris 99 and Super Mario 35 (RIP), is a free download for Nintendo Online subscribers that shares a lot of the DNA of the previous "battle royale" free-to-play games on the Switch. But when a match comes down to the wire, it's almost impossible not to have a smile on your face. 99 just doesn't offer much in the way of variety, and even if you pay to unlock the $30 DLC, the differences are constrained to cosmetics and don't have any effect on the gameplay. Of the games I just mentioned, the large-scale multiplayer Pac-Man 99 is probably the weakest of the three, but that’s a very high bar and doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun. Pac-Man CE DX, Pac-Man 256, and now Pac-Man 99 are all great examples of repackaging a legendary game with new ideas while retaining the feel of the original. I'm a big fan of novel twists on old formulas, particularly new spins on classic games.
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