#outofpellets

Don’t get me wrong, friend. That’s an excellent outlook to have.

However, I can’t see it happening. See, unlike with Sega, Namco’s pretty much subject to the whims of Bandai’s product-centric agenda at this point. If they’d never been bought out-- er, absorbed-- aquired-- AHEM, “merged”, Pac would likely have never gotten the ridiculous overhaul.

See all those diverse designs and aesthetics? Not to mention all the other various Namco series inclusion?

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Well, I’ve kind of elaborated upon this already, but I’ll lay it all out here in one convenient post.

Pac-Man to me is…well, the perfect classic game hero.

Let me explain:

If there’s one thing I can boast expertise on, it’s medium history. I love delving into any given craft and knowing how it started out. Such one is animation, which I didn’t need to look much up upon.

I spent my childhood watching the iconic old toons: Looney Tunes, Woody Woodpecker, classic Disney, Merry Melodies, and freaking Popeye the Sailor Man. The general consensus with lasting characters in all of these was the same, they were made so they could go on any adventure, fill any role, get wrapped up in any shenanigans, and yet still maintain the characteristics that made them so beloved in the first place.

Pac-Man is very much the same.

I was introduced to Pac-Man via Namco Museum Vol. 1. In this title, there was a breadth of little info and tidbits of the titles and their merch, both localized and overseas. In this way, I feel that the game helped me first get into other cultures, especially the differing tastes of both US and Japan, but back to the point. There was a limited-edition jacket towards the end of the Pac-Man hallway before you got the the game room proper. Upon it, it held the series’ slogan for the timeframe: “He is essentially what he believes”.

This is the perfect slogan. What is Pac-Man? Nobody knows, but it’s really not important. He’s not there to make sense, he’s there to be fun and have fun. You can put him anywhere, into anything, and he’ll find a way to work with it. In this way, he was the “do-anything” game hero even before Mario cornerstoned the concept. There’s a reason I boast Pac-Man’s center of originality, and that’s because his game introduced or finalized more concepts that would go onto gaming than most people could imagine. It’s not just being the first videogame hero, or introducing powerups, no. Named villains, cutscenes, enemies of differing behaviors, characters with character traits; so much more.

Anyways, continuing back to my point, how Pac-Man’s basically the classic toon of gaming: if you listen to the Smash Bros. 4 soundtrack, you’ll hear a ragtime-sounding, arcadish Pac-Man theme tune. This isn’t new, it’s the Pac-Man theme once known, now long forgotten, but brought back again. If that song’s not enough, look at the character design, how simplistic yet versatile it is. The “pie eyes”, the cutscene antics, the general tone that carried all the way into the 3D era, his dialogue in Pac-Man 3 that’s so wonderfully “straight man” (As in being witty and unfettered, not gender orientation yeh newbs) in a way it harkens back to characters such as Bugs Bunny, and again, he tackles any and all problems by sheer virtue of doing whatever he damn well wants, which ends up being virtually anything.

Another credit to Pac-Man World 3, despite being not the most impressive game, is the tone: Pac-Man is unchanged despite the incredibly serious threat he faces of multidimensional collapse; he has full confidence in his ability to get the job done and stays comical and optimistic the whole way through, unconcerned whether he’s facing mutants, spectral monsters or a bunch of killer robots. This is another trait shared; characters being able to get thrown into a situation of varying consequence, but return to their usual lives afterwards, and keep on being who they are.

I suppose Pac-Man’s character to me is very akin to how Popeye and the older Mickey Mouse were. He can do anything from a minor inconvenience to grand, fantastic adventure; he’s a family man, a jokester and a hero, but plays it all off like it’s no big deal when all is said and done and goes back to his daily life. I love that in heroes, really. They’re perfectly content with who they are, and treat adventures like just another day in the life.

//SUP NERD

x cyoos yoo

at least I didn't sail here on a

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