Pac-Man Pinball

For all you wannabe pinball wizards out there, what better way to get some practice in away from the arcade than to have a pinball game on your mobile phone? Especially now that Namco has released a pinball game featuring everyone's favourite yellow arcade character, the insatiable Pac-Man.

Despite eating almost solidly since 1982, Pac-Man still has quite an appetite for those little yellow dots and has kept his figure remarkably well. Incidentally, we have it on good authority that he was originally going to be called 'puck-man', given his likeness to an ice-hockey puck, but, fearing youths with black marker pens in the arcades, Pac-Man was christened.

As you might expect given Pac-Man's age, Pac-Man Pinball is not a totally new concept. It's not as old as the original arcade game, mind, but having seen a Pac-Man pinball game on the Gameboy Advance a few years back, we were interested to see how well it might fare on a tiny mobile phone screen.

All the familiar Pac-Man characters and items are present, from the various coloured ghosts which show up one by one as you rack up points, to the little yellow dots you can collect by hitting the correct chute with your ball. All of which provides a hit of nostalgia to those old enough to remember the Pac-Man games the first time round.

And happily, some clever design decisions mean that you don't feel like you're playing on the world's smallest pinball table. Rather, the table is split into upper and lower levels, in the same way that most real pinball tables have flippers half way up.

The idea is to keep the ball in the top half of the table (screen one) for as long as possible, and then when you lose the ball it simply drops into the lower half of the table (screen two) so you can carry on racking up those points.

This transition between the two screens is smooth enough to ensure a seamless gameplay experience. It's also possible to launch the ball up a chute on the left hand side of the screen to get back to the top half of the table from the bottom, so you can keep the ball in play for as long as possible, something which you'll need to do to get anywhere near the top score for the table. Points do seem to rack up incredibly slowly, and without any kind of useful help tool in the game to tell you how best to accumulate them, it's hard to know whether you're doing well or not at times.

Pac-Man Pinball's brightly coloured cutesy visuals will please the masses, especially younger kids and the female audience, which arguably all modern games should make an effort to appeal to. If you manage to break the 76,500 high-score our copy came preloaded with you deserve a pat on the back, but until then, whether a pinball lover or a novice you'll have enough to keep you entertained for quite some time.