iOS Games I Like: Pac-Man 256

Pac-Man 256 iTunes Listing

If you like Pac-Man and haven’t played Pac-Man 256, stop reading this and install Pac-Man 256 on your iOS device.

Overview

Pac-Man 256 is Pac-Man in an endless maze. Instead of eating all the dots in a single maze, you keep moving up and eating dots. Like all Pac-Man games, there are ghosts chasing you and power pellets to eat to eat the ghosts. Pac-Man 256 also has fruit to eat. When you eat a piece of fruit the dots temporarily increase in value from 1 point to 2-6 points, depending on the fruit you eat.

Dot Chains

A nice twist Pac-Man 256 adds to the Pac-Man gameplay is to reward you for eating chains of dots. If you eat 16 consecutive dots, you get 16 extra points. If you eat 32, you get 32 points. When you eat a chain of 256 dots, all the ghosts are wiped off the board. Chaining dots is not as easy as it sounds because the mazes in Pac-Man 256 are not completely filled with dots. Ghosts are also chasing after you, which can force you to change direction to an area you already cleared of dots.

Credits, Powerups, and Coins

You can play Pac-Man 256 for free as a single life Pac-Man experience. The game gives you 6 credits initially, although you can pay once to get unlimited credits. If you die, you can use one of your credits to continue, but you can continue only once per game. After 10 minutes a credit regenerates. You can also watch an ad to continue.

Another feature of using credits is to play with powerups. In addition to power pellets and fruit, there are powerups in the maze to eat that temporarily give you abilities like shooting lasers at ghosts, blowing up ghosts, and freezing ghosts. There are 20 powerups you can acquire over the course of the game, but you can play with only three at one time.

Each powerup has 8 levels. The powerup lasts longer when you upgrade its level. The maze has coins to eat. Use the coins to upgrade your powerups. A powerup takes 16 coins to unlock. The upgrade cost doubles each level, ending at 2048 coins to upgrade from level 7 to 8. You can also get coins by completing missions in the game. Examples of missions include eating 500 dots, eating 4 of a specific fruit, eating 5 of a specific powerup, and killing 20 ghosts with a specific powerup. Completing a mission gives you a bonus of 16-256 coins. You can also buy a coin doubler to upgrade your powerups faster.