Pac-Man Championship Edition

If you had never heard of Pac-Man Championship Edition and someone described the game to you, you might think that what you were hearing was nothing but crazy talk. After all, the original Pac-Man was released in video arcades in the year 1980, and these days, the only places you'd normally expect to see it pop up would be on some kind of retro arcade collection, or possibly as a quickie game for mobile phones. The days of classic, arcade-style Pac-Man seem to be over...right?

Wrong. Pac-Man Championship Edition revived the dot-eating mania in a big way for the arcade faithful when it launched on Xbox Live earlier this year. Coincidentally or not, the game was launched in time to coincide with the release of the 2007 documentary film The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which is focused on, of all things, a Pac-Man score record that was established more than two decades ago. Pac-Man Championship Edition challenges you to put your own competitive-scoring skills to the test with a fast-paced and endless wave of continuous mazes that spawn and respawn new sets of dots to gobble and increasingly determined ghosts to dodge. Maybe it's not surprising that the basic Pac-Man gameplay holds up so well, but it's completely crazy how well it holds up in this new-and-improved format nearly 30 years later.