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One of the best Pac-Man games in years is playable on YouTube, of all places

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Those who’ve played the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition series will be familiar with the high-speed vibe here, but Pac-Man Superfast remains focused on the game’s original maze and selection of just four ghosts. That means old-school strategies for grouping ghosts together and running successful patterns through the narrow corridors work in similar ways here. Successfully excecuting those patterns becomes a tense battle of nerves here, though, requiring multiple direction changes every second at the highest speeds. While the game will technically work with swipe controls on a smartphone or tablet, high-level play really requires the precision of a keyboard via a desktop/laptop web browser (we couldn’t get the game to recognize a USB controller, unfortunately).

Collecting those high-value items at the bottom is your ticket to a lot of extra lives. Credit: Youtube Playables

As exciting as the high-speed maze gameplay gets, though, Pac-Man Superfast is hampered by a few odd design decisions. The game ends abruptly after just 13 levels, for instance, making it impossible to even attempt the high-endurance 256-level runs that Pac-Man is known for. The game also throws an extra life at you every 5,000 points, making it relatively easy to brute force your way to the end as long as you focus on the three increasingly high-point-value items that appear periodically on each stage.

Despite this, the game doesn’t give any point reward for unused extra lives or long-term survival at high speeds, limiting the rewards for high-level play. And the lack of a built-in leaderboard makes it hard to directly compare your performance to friends and/or strangers anyway.

A large part of the reason I wrote about this game was to see if someone could beat my high score.

Credit: Youtube Playables

A large part of the reason I wrote about this game was to see if someone could beat my high score. Credit: Youtube Playables

Those issues aside, I’ve had a blast coming back to Pac-Man Supefast over and over again in the past few days, slowly raising my high score above the 162,000 point mark during coffee breaks (consider the gauntlet thrown, Ars readers). If you’re a fan of classic arcade games, Pac-Man Superfast is worth a try before the “YouTube Playables” initiative inevitably joins the growing graveyard of discontinued Google products.

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One and done: Elden Ring’s first DLC expansion will also be its last

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Over and out —

But the studio is “leaving some possibilities” for a sequel that continues the story.

–

A big erdtree casts a big shadow.

Enlarge / A big erdtree casts a big shadow.

Namco Bandai

The good news for Elden Ring fans is that the two-plus-year wait for the game’s first DLC, “Shadow of the Erdtree,” will end in just a couple of months. The bad news is that “Shadow of the Erdtree” will also be the last bit of DLC for FromSoftware’s multimillion-selling action RPG.

In a wide-ranging interview with Chinese site Zhihu (machine translation), Elden Ring producer Hidetaka Miyazaki said “Shadow of the Erdtree” contains a lot of existing lore and content that was created for the original game but couldn’t fit into the final package. Miyazaki said the team decided to release all of that unused content as one large DLC expansion, rather than multiple smaller bits, because “if they were sold separately, the freedom of exploration and sense of adventure would be reduced.”

As for just how big the DLC will be, Miyazaki balked when the interviewer asked how long it would take players to complete. Miyazaki brought up memories of being called a liar after estimating in an earlier interview that the original game would only take about 30 hours of play to complete—crowdsourced game-length database HowLongToBeat puts the “main story” estimate closer to 60 hours.

While Miyazaki was definitive on the lack of plans for additional Elden Ring DLC, he left open the possibility of further games that could continue the story of the Elden Ring universe. “FromSoftware’s style of doing things is that it generally does not allow the future of an IP to be easily locked, but it is better to leave some possibilities” he said.

Previous games in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series have split additional content across multiple episodic DLC expansions in the years after their respective releases (though Bloodborne only saw a single DLC expansion, “The Old Hunters“). Last year, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red confirmed that the “Phantom Liberty” expansion would be that game’s only DLC, owing to an engine transition within the company.

Elsewhere in the interview, Miyazaki said the upcoming expansion would closely match the legendary difficulty of the original game’s second half. The DLC was designed with the expectation that “players… should already have a certain understanding of the game,” he said. But players who have grinded their characters into unstoppable, overpowered machines will be able to turn off the leveling system in the DLC area to add a bit of additional challenge.

Miyazaki also offered a few hints about the DLC’s plot, which will include new characters like St. Trina, a counterpart to Miquella, who was only hinted at via item names in the original game. Most characters featured in the DLC will be completely new to the expansion, Miyazaki said, if for no other reason than that “there may be a situation where the player kills the NPC [in the original game], causing him/her to be unable to appear in the DLC story.”

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