Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness

In trying to escape its arcade roots, the Pac-Man series tried multiple things: a puzzle game, a bizarre point & click adventure, shoving Pac-Man into a different 2D platformer made for another character and, of course, a 3D platformer (and that’s not including the strange attempts at new arcade games). It’s rather strange, then, that it took Namco this long to build a more structured game based on the original gameplay: collecting dots in a maze.

Maze Madness does expand upon this, though, by adding puzzles you need to solve to progress, primarily in the form of block puzzles. One thing that really annoyed me about these puzzles was the complete lack of discovery. When you encounter something new, a hologram of Professor Pac blocks the way to tell you exactly how it’s used. For complex mechanics, this is a necessity, but this is all simple stuff, and should be easy to figure out on your own. It may sound simple, but by being told exactly what to do, it just feels like you’re going through the motions.

That feeling penetrates the whole game. The puzzles don’t get difficult and the enemies are quite easy to deal with, with ample health provided if you do get hit. The biggest difficulty is in forcing yourself to put in the effort of trawling through the levels collecting every single dot – with hundreds in every level. To progress, you need to collect stars under four conditions: getting a high score, finding all the hidden fruit, finding every single dot and completing the level a second time in a separate time trial mode.

Maze Madness isn’t bad, it just doesn’t have much challenge or excitement. The levels feel too long, and I think that cutting them up into separate levels would have helped immensely due to having to play to find everything on your first playthough (if you don’t end up missing something in an area you can’t return to) and completing it quickly on a second. Being able to quickly play a level would probably help with the more arcade style gameplay. As it stands, this game is just fine.

Fine

If anything, in fact, it’s too easy. Maze Madness is far too eager to help you through to the end of each level – there are arrows, signposts and a moustachioed Professor Pac-Man handing out hordes of hints – and the limited number of ghosts, mummies and terrifying dogs chained to posts isn’t much of a threat to the smiling yellow blow, thanks to the sheer number of power pills left carelessly scattered around by the arenas. By the fifth level, we’d collected over 20 extra lives without losing a single one, and found every last yellow dot, powerpill and piece of bonus fruit – without really trying.

Mark Green, N64 Magazine #48

Remake or remaster?

Maze Madness is worth putting on a collection of Pac-Man games, although Namco would probably need to replace the main character due to the strange licensing issues around Ms. Pac-Man.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to play Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness.

N64 pac-man puzzle