I've played them all. Championship Edition, DX, Pac-Mania, Arrangement, even Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal.
This one is my favorite one. No, I'm not kidding! Please hear me out.
I think the Championship Edition games as a whole are some of the best that Pac-Man has to offer: great flashy visuals and music along to a speedy reinterpretation on the classic Pac-Man formula based around scoring as high as you can within a fixed amount of time.
The original Championship Edition was great; you can tell it was Toru Iwatani himself behind the design of the game from start to finish. Ghosts are genuinely threatening, and their positioning based on your movement is key to keeping a combo going and ultimately scoring high...
But it's a little basic when you look at the games that came after.
I think the nomenclature behind DX was a massive mistake. Too many people assume that this was the same game as the original that Toru Iwatani worked on, just slightly enhanced-- but that's not my point here.
DX is flashier, with more customizable options, more mazes with genuinely interesting designs, and more options like Ghost Train and Time Trials, as well as a practice mode and visualizations of your game speed...
But it's a lot more superficial. Ghost Trains end up making the AI much less interesting, and the slowdown and bombs end up affecting the game's pace too much that it becomes a nearly braindead experience. After all, what danger are you ever truly in when you get five whole seconds to decide whether to use a bomb in the face of a ghost or not?
Both of them have some very interesting concepts that I think were underutilized - and that's where Championship Edition 2 comes in.
Firstly, the dots. The reason why you don't need to eat every dot in order to progress is to increase how much more open the game's sense of pathing can be. Routes are now less about just following the most optimal paths through the dot trails, but more about figuring out the fastest way to the fruit while also spawning it. Score and game speed increases considerably the further you get into the maps; your goal is always to get to a 500 dot combo, then to eat the fruit as soon as possible.
I'm a little mixed about the bombs, but I think they're good overall. The points you accumulate from getting the early maps' bombs don't stack up to the sheer score you can rack up from later maps' ghost trains and fruit, so there's no real point to going out of your way to hoard them. The fact that they give you score might make players hesitant to use them, but it's always a tradeoff of whether using one might let you catch a blue ghost train faster, thus leading to more scoring time.
I think it's much better than in DX, honestly. It doesn't drop the pace of the game (which feels like a running theme with 2 vs DX), doesn't immediately punish you for using it but focuses more on risk vs reward, and most importantly - transforms what was originally a solely reactionary tool into a potentially proactive one.
I think the power dynamics between Pac-Man and the ghosts is made more equal by giving Pac-Man a brake (especially important in extreme!), removing one-touch kills and the bomb having more utility than ever - besides, angry ghosts can't go in to hurt you in the pocket where the fruit spawns, so you can camp there to calm the ghosts down... except they go in to kill you if you stay there for 30 seconds, at which point I'd argue that's not exactly how the game intended itself to be played anyway.
Finally, I like that the game is a lot more transparent than DX. Ghost patterns are clearer and more predictable if you put time into it; the fact that the ghost trains are all contained into the ghost box at the end of every power pellet maze effectively resets the ghost patterns every now and then, and even the blue ghost and fruit bubble behavior are predictable and possible to manipulate and intercept - even if the fruit moreso than the ghosts.
Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 might be the most lab-able, the most solvable game in the series after the original, and I think that's a good thing. Its strategic elements are laid considerably more bare than any game after the original (yes, even more than the original CE), and if you take time to understand its mechanics and make the most out of them, I think CE2 proves itself to be a deep game that's more fun to master than the misnamed, flashy but superficial CEDX, and the slower, harder and more methodical almost-to-a-fault Championship Edition.
This one is my favorite one. No, I'm not kidding! Please hear me out.
I think the Championship Edition games as a whole are some of the best that Pac-Man has to offer: great flashy visuals and music along to a speedy reinterpretation on the classic Pac-Man formula based around scoring as high as you can within a fixed amount of time.
The original Championship Edition was great; you can tell it was Toru Iwatani himself behind the design of the game from start to finish. Ghosts are genuinely threatening, and their positioning based on your movement is key to keeping a combo going and ultimately scoring high...
But it's a little basic when you look at the games that came after.
I think the nomenclature behind DX was a massive mistake. Too many people assume that this was the same game as the original that Toru Iwatani worked on, just slightly enhanced-- but that's not my point here.
DX is flashier, with more customizable options, more mazes with genuinely interesting designs, and more options like Ghost Train and Time Trials, as well as a practice mode and visualizations of your game speed...
But it's a lot more superficial. Ghost Trains end up making the AI much less interesting, and the slowdown and bombs end up affecting the game's pace too much that it becomes a nearly braindead experience. After all, what danger are you ever truly in when you get five whole seconds to decide whether to use a bomb in the face of a ghost or not?
Both of them have some very interesting concepts that I think were underutilized - and that's where Championship Edition 2 comes in.
Firstly, the dots. The reason why you don't need to eat every dot in order to progress is to increase how much more open the game's sense of pathing can be. Routes are now less about just following the most optimal paths through the dot trails, but more about figuring out the fastest way to the fruit while also spawning it. Score and game speed increases considerably the further you get into the maps; your goal is always to get to a 500 dot combo, then to eat the fruit as soon as possible.
I'm a little mixed about the bombs, but I think they're good overall. The points you accumulate from getting the early maps' bombs don't stack up to the sheer score you can rack up from later maps' ghost trains and fruit, so there's no real point to going out of your way to hoard them. The fact that they give you score might make players hesitant to use them, but it's always a tradeoff of whether using one might let you catch a blue ghost train faster, thus leading to more scoring time.
I think it's much better than in DX, honestly. It doesn't drop the pace of the game (which feels like a running theme with 2 vs DX), doesn't immediately punish you for using it but focuses more on risk vs reward, and most importantly - transforms what was originally a solely reactionary tool into a potentially proactive one.
I think the power dynamics between Pac-Man and the ghosts is made more equal by giving Pac-Man a brake (especially important in extreme!), removing one-touch kills and the bomb having more utility than ever - besides, angry ghosts can't go in to hurt you in the pocket where the fruit spawns, so you can camp there to calm the ghosts down... except they go in to kill you if you stay there for 30 seconds, at which point I'd argue that's not exactly how the game intended itself to be played anyway.
Finally, I like that the game is a lot more transparent than DX. Ghost patterns are clearer and more predictable if you put time into it; the fact that the ghost trains are all contained into the ghost box at the end of every power pellet maze effectively resets the ghost patterns every now and then, and even the blue ghost and fruit bubble behavior are predictable and possible to manipulate and intercept - even if the fruit moreso than the ghosts.
Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 might be the most lab-able, the most solvable game in the series after the original, and I think that's a good thing. Its strategic elements are laid considerably more bare than any game after the original (yes, even more than the original CE), and if you take time to understand its mechanics and make the most out of them, I think CE2 proves itself to be a deep game that's more fun to master than the misnamed, flashy but superficial CEDX, and the slower, harder and more methodical almost-to-a-fault Championship Edition.