Mrs. Pac Man for the Xbox 360 Is Difficult
Posted by Murjab on 6 January 2008
Of all the old-timey arcade classics, Mrs. Pac Man has long been my favorite. In fact, if I were to get any arcade machine, it’d be the Mrs. Pac Man one, (or actually, the one with both Mrs. Pac Man and Galaga, but maybe it’s not fair to choose a two-games-in-one package). Back in the day, I was able to zip through much of the beginning of the game, getting to the last fruit stage (banana) with ease. A score of 100,000 was the score I would try to achieve at the very least – anything less would be unacceptable, like bowling less than 100. (Yeah, I know a score of 100 a great bowler does not make, but for a run-of-the mill bowler, I like to set that as a minimum goal.) I want to say that my top Mrs. Pac Man score was around 150,000, or maybe I think that because my top bowling score was, I think, 153. Anyway, I was not a great Mrs. Pac Man player, but I was pretty good and probably better than most people I know.
Naturally, with the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade, Mrs. Pac Man was a priority. I had never had much success with console versions of the game, and this is no exception. In fact, a quick look at my gamer profile reveals that I don’t even have all 200 gamerscore achievement points! I’m missing 30 points for the “Perfect” achievement in which one must eat all ghosts four times within the same stage. This is a task that, for the first couple of levels, used to be extremely easy for me to do in the arcades. My overall high score on the game is a mere 37,070. I guess some of the blame must go to the Xbox controller, but then again, I’ve been pretty bad at other Mrs. Pac Man ports to home consoles in the past. I think I just need the actual arcade version, which is another reason why my first purchase of a real-live arcade machine would have to feature this game. Perhaps my skills have dwindled in the past few years, but I don’t think that alone would account for a high score of only 37,070.
On the other hand, I have done well at the Xbox 360 port of Galaga. I managed to get around 99,000, which is probably higher than I’ve ever gotten in the arcade.
