Every mascot has a downpoint to their series....its Pac-Man's turn.
Story 3.5/10: Proffessor pac has just made his greatist invention, the Pacfinder.This invention will help track all the pack people to make sure they're safe. One night while Pac-man was sleeping he heard a noise, so he gets up to find a letter that starts by saying " Dear Pac-man" ...but it doesnt say what the rest of the letter says, nor have any other type of story. Only by reading the booklet that comes with the game will you learn that the ghost have taken the pac-people and that he must rescue them. There was no point to add story yet they threw it in there just to spruce up a reason to turn Pac-man into a pinball
Gameplay 4/10: The controls are easy enough, with the left D-pad being the left flipper and the A button being the right, but theres so many flaws that it makes the game boring and frustrating. You go around eating dots in order to buy items from the pac house, every now and then you come across classic moments like munching on ghost and it repeats way to often. It feels like it goes in an order, 1st eat dots, then eat more, then go in house to buy items, kill ghost in between these avents, collect pacman letters to spell his name, and recue the captured pac-person ( if you get that far). After 5 minutes it gets boring because all 4 boards are the same layout with just different graphic colors but same level design. Someone just took the 1st board then spray painted it 3 other ways. After you get bored you get frustrated because the events go in order, so if you die your back to task number 1. Even if you play the game and even beat a bored theres no bragging rights or accomplishments due the lack of high scores. One of the biggest mistakes to be made as it takes out the reason to play a pinball game. You wont play this for longer than 10 minutes cause eating a bunch of dots will make you unhappily full.
Graphics 6/10: Graphic's are decent, even if the board is repeated at least its colorful enough and with different Pac-man related themes. 3D games were not to common for the GBA so this is pretty standard on expectations, but nothing past that.
Sound 5/10: All the classic sounds are hear straight from the arcade game but its covered by only 3 different music songs: One for the main menu and 2 for the 4 different boards. The question is why are 4 boards sharing 2 songs?! Theres no reason for this only to grow more suspicous on how much time was spent making this game.
Its strange that they couldnt make a good pinball game out of a mascot that already is a ball. This was an interesting take to the series but the final product ended up as an insult to 2 seperate types of gaming and was pushed out just to make an extra buck.