This pretty much sums it up how I felt. It's such a pain seeing all these once great franchises turning into freemium now. This game was such a great experience on my old Omnia7 and I was so excited when this one was announced for iOS but oh...ooooooh well.
I think I'm at the paywall- level 37 / 38 I'm not sure you can beat without using tokens to buy extra time. But until that point, it was quite fun and enjoyable. EDIT: was actually able to pass these levels but stage 40 and even more so the last challenge level to obtain the 3rd key seems impossible to pass with the time given. Hopefully these will change in the final version... (Not holding breath)
While I can understand gamers who have adapted to the freemium landscape, I'll never understand why any of us would ever champion it. Yet, here you are...
Yep. It's hard to enjoy yourself with Namco holding you upside down by your ankles and shaking the money out of your pockets while you play.
You realize that coin-op arcades were the original IAPs, right? I mean, if you've played a pac-man arcade only four times in your life, you've dropped a buck on a game that you still can't ever play again until you pay more money. I'm going to bet, with you claiming it's one of your childhood games, that you have likely played a pac-man arcade many more than just four times. Let that sink in for a bit. You've spent all that money over all those years and you STILL have to pay more money if you ever want to play it again. Honestly, I can understand the younger generation getting all bent out of shape over freemium game models, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how anyone who grew up on coin-op arcades in the 70's and 80's can be all up in arms about this kind of pay model. I was an arcade junkie as a kid, and I still, to this very day, compare the value of games to the "how much play does a quarter get me" sentiment that I grew up with. If anything, the freemium models of today (while I grant that some are horrid) are better than the coin-op era. You didn't get a free turn every15 minutes in an arcade, lol. So if you grew up on coin-ops and have fond memories of that era, shut the hell up about freemium pay models ruining any of that. Seriously, it doesn't make any sense.
Here's the thing. At an arcade, you're paying for access to a limited resource, namely the arcade cabinet. While you're playing, nobody else can use it. It also costs money to maintain and repair the game the more it gets used. If I download a game to my phone, that's that. The game runs solely on my phone, doesn't exhaust some resource that prevents others from playing, and incurs no scaling costs to the publisher regardless of how much I play it (with the exception of subscription costs for access to multiplayer servers). So when a publisher thinks they should be entitled to repeated tributes when I play a game that's running entirely on hardware that I own, I find that both greedy and insulting. To say that consumable in-app-purchases are anything like pay-to-play arcade machines is completely ignorant of the economic realities of the two.
Well, here's another thing: You don't actually have to pay a dime (let alone a quarter, heh) to play a freemium game. That's the beauty of it. You download it for free and play it for free. If you run out of energy or turns or whatever, you just turn it off and come back to it later. If you enjoy it enough to throw some money at it, then you can do so. If you don't feel it's enjoyable enough to warrant any purchases, then you can stick to freebie mode. I'm not really sure where the problem is. Either the game is good enough to drop in a few quarters for a few extra "continues" or it isn't. If you just can't handle not being able to play, yet you don't want to pay anything, then just get a few games and rotate between them. I've been buying and playing games since Atari was still running T.V. commercials for the 2600. I've never spent less money per year on gaming than I have since I got my first iOS device. I think this whole freemium trend has been pretty rad, to be honest. Your mileage may vary.
Wizard Mike, You make a lot of great points! I'm just waiting for the IOS version to come out, and I hope that it's not plagued by crashing issues with playing 'Pac-Man and Friends.'
Was anyone able to beat the challenge levels that open the gate after level 40 - without buying extra time? After the last couple of updates I was hoping they might balance it so it's difficult yet fair, yet this doesn't seem to hold.
But I don't want to play for free. I want to pay my way so the developer can feed his family and make more games. And I don't want some poor sap with no self control to be suckered into paying my way either. Lastly, I don't want to rent games on my personal devices. You can engage in apologetics all you want, but at the end of the day a premium "buy it once and play it as much as you want" game is always going to be a better experience, and a better value. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to playing the original Pac Man Championship Edition that I bought for $5 a few years ago and have been playing the hell out of ever since.
Then don't. Cool. Go for it. In fact, under the freemium model, you can support the developer and his family far more than you ever could under the premium model. Then you should become an activist and start fighting against all forms of addictive marketing. Seriously, if you're going to turn this into a moral argument (to which I say more power to you, if that's your angle), then drop the rest of your arguments against the freemium trend and get out there and start doing something about it. Otherwise, your "no self control sucker" argument is nothing more than an appeal to emotion to win a debate, rather than a heartfelt and honest sentiment. I've got some bad news for you, then. Technically, everything you download from the app store is basically a rental. Even the premium stuff. You don't necessarily "own" any of those apps, in the true sense of ownership. You've simply payed for the ability to download them. Have you ever "owned" an app that has been removed from the app store? And I mean fully removed, as in it doesn't even show up in your purchased list anymore. If you don't have that app backed up somewhere, it's simply gone forever. You don't have any actual ownership rights to demand a copy from apple. Think about that for a while and let it sink in. "Purchase" does not mean ownership, as they can remove access to a purchased app at any time and have no legal obligation to compensate you for doing so. "Better experience" and "better value" are pretty subjective. Take this pac-man game, for instance: What if I only enjoy it enough to play a level here and there? What if I'm simply too busy to play more than one level at a time and I only get a few chances a day to fire it up and play? What if I were regularly playing a lot of different games each day, and this one was so low on my priority list that I only played a couple of levels each day? In any of those cases, the free model is the "better" value, because I didn't have to pay a dime and the freemium model itself doesn't get in my way since I don't play it very much. You can tell people what's "better" and "best" all you want, but at the end of the day, each person determines how good the value and experience of something is for themselves. I'm not even disagreeing with you, either. I'm not saying I wish everything were freemium, or anything like that. I would be pissed if my Batman Arkham games on PS3 were freemium. It would totally kill the immersion if I had to stop playing or refill my PSN wallet every hour, or some crazy shiz like that. But that doesn't mean freemium is bad in all situations, either. I've already given my thoughts on the positive side of the freemium model, so I won't restate that here. Uh, sure. Ok. Have fun? I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make with this statement is. If anything, you only enforce the idea that premium games are less profitable for the developer. *shrug*
That's quite the manifesto, Wizard Mike. I can understand why you would want to play for free, and I can also understand that you don't want to face the fact that you're doing it on the backs of others. I simply don't share that outlook. I want to pay a reasonable price for a game and have an unrestricted experience thereafter. It seems to me that the best possible thing that could happen would be for your philosophy to catch on. It's the only way I can think of to put and end to this particular business model.
Now you're just throwing ad hominems. Your accusation is unfounded, first of all. I pay for the games I play, even the freemium ones. I can't think of the last freemium game that I've downloaded and enjoyed that I didn't spend money on. If I download a freemium game that I don't feel is enjoyable enough to drop some money on, then I generally don't find it enjoyable enough to even keep on my device, so it's no different than downloading a trial and never purchasing the full version. Second, the idea of free players doing it "off the backs of others" is not only a backhanded remark, but holds no actual relevence to the discussion at hand. We're discussing the freemium model, not the moral standings of the players. Besides, even those who don't ever spend a dime are still advertising the game to others, through facebook, twitter, gamecenter, or word of mouth, and are still generating revnue for the developer if the game has ads. In addition, if it's an online game, like clash of clans or the like, and the game lost all of its free players, then it would appear to be dying and all of the payers would be rluctant to spend any more on what looks like a dying game. The free player is often integral to the business model for some games, so they aren't playing at someone else's expense. They are part of the life of the game. Cool. Nothing wrong with that, by any means. That means this game isn't for you, though. There's nothing wrong with that, either. Not every game is for everyone. My philosophy? You mean try any game that looks interesting (because hey, it's free!) and if it's enjoyable, drop some cash to make the experience even better? Yeah, that kind of thinking will totally crash the entire freemium model...
