I didn't own Pac-Mania growing up, but found it fascinating through my limited experience with it at a pizza parlor arcade. As expected, the X68000 version is excellent.

It's a worthy successor to its 2-D origins. There is a good variety of mazes here, ranging from colorful building blocks to emerald-green gradient pillars. The layouts are also different from stage to stage, although they all operate off the "power pellets in the four corners, ghost home in the middle" layout.

There are some special items available that help you rack up those points. The pink dot increases the ghost score from the original pattern of 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 7650 to 400, 1600, 7650, allowing you a good chance to reach the free life score. The candy I *think* increases the duration of the power pellet's effect. And the green dot confers a speed bonus. These are continual bonuses you can take from stage to stage, but once you lose a life, the effects are removed and you have to get the items again.

Once you finish all the worlds, the game still continues and has a few surprises. The fruit pattern continues with the traditional key and bell. The worlds repeat, but sometimes there are color palette swaps. The first time through, the green ghosts were introduced in stage 5. When you restart from the first stage, the green ghosts remain, but they don't jump until stage 5 again. And a gray ghost suddenly appears! It came out as a sort of blue on my first shot of it (second to last photo) so I had to adjust the camera and you can see it in the final photo.

Although it allows you to continue, all good things must come to an end. This was my best run to date, although I am not sure if it was actually my highest score.