Bring back the Vs.

Pac-Man Vs. was shrouded in a (reportedly—I wasn't really following Nintendo at the time) painful E3 conference where Nintendo touted their latest round of ideas for getting GameCube up and moving, which involved buying up special cables and—if you were sitting out the Game Boy Advance domination—some of those too. It's rather unfortunate that it got all the bad press it did, because it was really a neat little gem of a game.

It was, really, probably an idea that was just way before its time.

Pac-Man Vs. ended up a pack-in with a number of Namco games, and was, especially when held up against some of Namco's other attempts at putting the Pac into new games, a pretty inspired piece of work. Rather than trying to create a new game on top of the well-loved franchise, Vs. simply took the existing dot-chomping joy of Pac-Man and twisted it ever so slightly, putting one person with a private view (on the GBA) of the action in the shoes of the big yellow guy and giving other players a limited view of only their surroundings as the ghosts. Your objective was to hunt down the 'Man so that it would become your turn to start chomping and racking up the points. It was, simply, great multiplayer fun.

In practice, though, the logistics of play were a bit clunky. Even if you had a set of Wavebirds, you still had to pass around the GBA, which was wired to the 'Cube... meaning you might have to play a little musical chairs in the event the cord proved too short. If you didn't have a bunch of Wavebirds, the controller-passing action ended up tangling the cords. On top of that, few who wanted it had it, since it was too small to sell on its own, piggybacking instead on a handful of Namco titles on a bonus disc.


It struck me, as I've been giving a lot of thought to WiiWare and the Virtual Console this past week, that now is the perfect time for Namco and Nintendo to revive Vs., on Wii.

It's so simple that it's almost silly. One wirelessly-connected DS for Pac-Man, and Remotes doing d-pad action for up to four people. No short or tangled cords to get in the way, and we get an optional extra player in the action to boot. The hot-potato swapping is limited to switching a DS for a Remote when someone wins a round, which shouldn't even require people to get up off their chairs. Price it somewhere in-between 500 and 1000 Wii Points and voilà, you have a game that everyone identifies with, ready to go on the console everyone has—and even if they don't have a DS to go with, just about every adolescent Pokémon trainer has one in the house, so that can be swiped for an hour.

There's probably not even a lot of dev that needs to be done; GameCube code already written for the original Vs. can probably be re-used (though, with all due respect to Charles Martinet, please lose the Mario voice), and Namco Museum DS has a DS port of Vs. which could perhaps be cannibalized as well. It all adds up to a no-brainer for Namco and Nintendo to get together and do, I think—and then, perhaps, Pac-Man Vs. can finally get its due.