How long have YOU been waiting for another Pac-Man platformer? Â No? Â For real?
Well, regardless of your soulless response, it would appear that the cartoon currently in production for debut on Disney XD is going to be accompanied by the little labor of love shown above. Now, I’m a platformer junkie who plays almost no platformers. Â The reasons for this are several-fold. Firstly, pure platformers seem to be few and far between, at least when considering an audience over 30. Â That isn’t to say everything has to be all blood, gore, and bust-lines, but let’s just say I wouldn’t rush out to play something where Nick Jr’s WonderPets were yelling at me the whole time. Â Many platformers are intended to cater *exclusively* to children.
This project, though it may be attached to a children’s television show, is at least abstract enough for an adult to enjoy (yet-to-be-determined gameplay quality notwithstanding) and has the added benefit of hearkening back to simpler time when personifiable video game characters were few and far between, despite the best efforts of various animation studios to personify ALL of the video game characters.
The second issue that drives me screaming from most modern platformers is perhaps that which drives the first issue mentioned above.  When platformers are made with adults in mind, they often seem to cross-pollinate with other genres in order to widen the target market.  In most cases, this means a 3rd-person-shooting mechanic.  Now, there are great 3rd-person-shooters, but I wouldn’t have said that even for cash money seven years ago.  Back then, I had no problem arguing that every 3rd person shooter ever made was flat out terrible.  The mechanics of swinging a fixed position seven feet behind a character’s neck was unnatural and disorienting.  But stalwart fans of the shooting-while-be-able-to-see-your-own-pants genre worked their little visible butts off and made some great ones, predominantly by slowing them down (ala ‘Gears of War’ or anything with a cover mechanic).  However, platformers aren’t about slowing things down.  They’re about twitchy, jumpy gameplay, and in my humble opinion, I’ve yet to see a shooting mechanic work well with that.
You may still want to defend MDK (16 years old!) and various others that have pulled this off with some financial success, and I won’t say you’re wrong, I’m just saying that I don’t like controlling the pole that’s sticking invisibly out of the back of someone’s head. Â It makes no sense to me. Â That issue seems to drive why I don’t like many adult-oriented platformers.
Obviously, Nintendo seems to still understand ageless platforming, and they continue to innovate. Â However, as the struggling sales of their current systems has shown, people are getting a little tired of shelling out hundreds of bucks for a console that really only shines with the handful of front-line first party games that Nintendo “develops” (see: publishes).
The closest I’ve come to really slurping up a pure platformer in a while was Vexx on the original Xbox, but that was a long time ago. Â It was an absolute rip-off of Mario64, but prettier. Â And, I didn’t have to buy a Gamecube to play it (also, no silly water cannon).
Just a little food for jumpy thought. Â Now, enjoy a horrible episode of the 1980’s Pac-Man cartoon and be thankful I didn’t post an episode of Q-bert.
