Pac-Man 99 is not just your typical PacMan game. There are a few mechanics that can be difficult to figure out, so we thought we’d put together some quick tips and tricks on how the game works, as well as how to win!
To start off, let’s talk about the powers. On the left side of the screen during gameplay is a menu with four options. These indicate what happens to PacMan when you eat a power pellet, beyond simply making the ghosts vulnerable.
The game starts on standard, which keeps the game as you know it without extra abilities triggering with the power pellet. Speed increases Pac-Man’s movement speed for the duration of the power pellet. Stronger and Train are where it gets more interesting.
Stronger makes Pac-Man slower and the duration of the power pellet is much shorter, but for every ghost eaten, opponents are sent two or three Jammer Pac-Man instead of just one. Train adds more sleeping ghosts than normal to the ghost train, but each extra one creates a Jammer Pac-Man on your screen. The best strategy is to change which power-up you’re using as needed.
Speed is a pretty good default to help you fly through the maze and catch up to ghosts, but Train and Stronger can definitely help you take down your enemies. The “pro” strategy may just be to wrack up a massive train of ghosts with the Train power-up, then take them all down with Stronger, sending a huge army of Jammer Pac-Man to your opponents.
Of course, you could choose to ignore the powers completely and just stick to standard. The power-ups only work during power-pellets, so make sure you swap to the power-up you need before eating one!
Like classic PacMan, you want to eat as many dots as you can, making fruit spawn in the center. Clearing the entire board of dots grants a speed up to gameplay. Eating a fruit resets the maze by respawning all dots, pellets and sleeping ghosts, but often in different layouts rather than filling the whole map.
While eating a power pellet gets rid of the Jammer PacMan that slow you down, it only freezes the red ones in place. Since these act like additional ghosts that can kill Pac-Man, you want to deal with them. Only eating a fruit can clear the maze of the red Pac-Man enemies.
You can cut corners for slight speed boosts by turning with good timing, as indicated by Pac-Man making sparks along the wall as he turns. It’s best to wait for ghost trains to get very long before chasing them down and eating them all, as higher combos are more devastating to your opponents.
Finally, make sure to change who you’re targeting with the menu on the right! Don’t only target Random opponents, make sure to target opponents close to being knocked out, who have the most KOs, or who are targeting you!
That’s about it for our tips and advice for Pac-Man 99, including how the power-ups work! It’s a fun little game and we look forward to playing it more. What do you think? Let us know your thoughts down below.