Saturday, February 5, 2011

New Pac-man & Galaga Dimensions Game for 3DS Announced (no 3D for the Pac-man portion)

I've been thinking about how I should write about new game details, and I think it would be best to only speak on the first announcements for a game, and then again when it releases for now. Maybe if a really big, unexpected piece of information drops about a game then that would get an inbetween post. This info will be a bit late, but, practice makes perfect. 
 
To be clear right off the bat, "Pac-man & Galaga Dimensions" is one game, or two games on one 3DS game card.
Coming from Namco Bandai, the Pac-man portion seems to be a tilt controlled side-scrolling platformer fittingly titled Pac-man Tilt. It's got the "newer" Pac-man design with the arms and legs, and a rainbow aesthetic that seems to have arisen from Pac-man Championship Edition. Pac-man seems to have other abilities like dashing through bricks in his classic ball form or being shot like a pinball off of some pinball paddles. To look at the screen-shots, the game is 3D but doesn't have a lot of depth, and I guess this is because they decided fairly early that the stereoscopic 3D effect would be off for the entirety of the game. A little disappointing, but if they really want to push unique controls then its for the best.

The Galaga portion is also a pretty big departure from classic Galaga. Called Galaga 3D Impact, this game has you moving the whole 3DS around you to aim and blast away at incoming classic Galaga enemies, the aiming seems to be like the full body rotation in Steel Diver or the first-person aiming in the Ocarina of Time demo at the recent Nintendo Conference. It's been said that it is on rails, rather than having enemy "waves" come at you. I must say that the enemies in Galaga have some really nice shader effects applied to them. Unlike Pac-man, Galaga 3D Impact uses stereoscopic 3D, but will dynamically turn it off if you rotate the system. Again, to avoid eye-strain it just makes sense, but it would be neat if there were an option to leave it on for those willing to move their head accordingly.

The game seems to be a celebration for the 30th anniversaries of both series (technically 2011 will hold the 31st anniversary for Pac-man) and I think it's definitely a better decision to put both game on one cart rather than selling them separately. They both seem like pretty small game concepts, though, and I would personally rather get the re-imaginings that they both got fairly recently in Pac-man Championship Edition and Galaga Legions. I'm mildly interested because of the control schemes, but I'm not sure it would be a comfortable purchase at even $20 for all the details we have.

Let me know if you guys have any interest in the game in the comments.

Lots of pictures here (Japanese)
Official game website here (Japanese)
Magazine "scan" (Japanese)
Sources here and here (English)

2 comments:

  1. I'm just not sure about these games, while I don't doubt they can be fun(and probably will be), like you, the price is a huge factor for me with these type of games.

    If they release this on the 3DS with a $40 MSRP, no way...I think these games would be better off as 3DSware games, than full retail...but perhaps I'll be proven wrong, and 3D Pac-man will win me over!

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  2. I assume the biggest reason they didn't opt to make these downloadable 3DSWare games was because of the anniversaries thing. There some intrinsic loss of worth/respect if it's downloadable, I guess.

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