Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions for Nintendo 3DS features six different games, including (clockwise from top left) Pac-Man Tilt, Galaga Legions, Pac-Man Championship Edition and Galaga 3D Impact.
Screengrabs courtesy Namco Bandai

Setting a new high score on your favorite game should be a killer gamer high, but Namco’s latest take on Pac-Man and Galaga sucks all the joy out of it.

Pac-Man & Galaga Generations, released Tuesday for Nintendo 3DS, is a collection of six twists on the company’s two classic arcade games. From 3-Dified versions of the 80’s originals to wholly new concepts, a half dozen distinct game are packed onto this one cartridge. To Nintendo 3DS owners hurting for more content, something new on the shelf will likely be a welcome sight.

But Generations is kind of a mess, and when I got hooked on one of its games I started to realize why. Pac-Man Championship Edition is the standout star of this package. Originally released in 2007 for Xbox Live Arcade, it’s an amped-up, high-tension riff on the maze game everybody’s already familiar with. Rather than try to clear successively more difficult mazes, your goal is to rack up as many points as you can by screaming around a maze, eating power pellets and chomping up ghosts with reckless abandon before five minutes run out.

If you can pull off some fast escapes and never hear Pac’s familiar, tragic beeeeyooop of a death rattle, you’ll probably beat your own high score. Generations does let you log on and compare your high score to your friends’ (and the rest of the world’s), but what it doesn’t do is let you compare it to yourself.

As near as I can figure, having pored through the game and its documentation, Generations doesn’t have a high score table. Once you set a new high score, it’s written to the cartridge and all records of your previous high scores are gone forever. This is a total kick in the dots. I want to be able to see my progress: By how much did I obliterate my previous personal best? Are my scores hovering around a certain number? Are there any outliers? I can try to remember this in my head, but why when keeping track of high scores is so trivial that even the first Pac-Man (1980) was able to do it?

It also means you can’t share your cartridge. What if I wanted to have a high-score competition with a friend, passing the 3DS back and forth? What if two people wanted to play the game and have their personal scores on the record?

On that point, I’ve looked all over, even going so far as to ask a Namco Bandai representative, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to erase the game data. This caused mild controversy last month when it was found that Capcom’s 3DS game Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D had a similar perma-save, which seems to be aimed at killing off the secondhand market.

This could be annoying for Pac-Man & Galaga Generations owners because the game features an ersatz Achievements system, in which you are rewarded for accomplishing goals in the four remade games (the arcade originals, Championship, and another Xbox Live port called Galaga Legions). I’m a fan of the idea, not the execution, since you can’t delete the awards and start over.

What if I wanted to have a high score competition with a friend?

The other games on the collection vary in quality, but none match the addictive quality of Pac-Man Championship. The arcade games don’t display well on the 3DS screen. The minimal 3-D effects that have been added don’t really make up for the fact that the vertically-oriented games are shrunk down to comical tiny size on the widescreen 3DS display.

Legions takes the Galaga formula and adds more complexity, filling the screen with massive green swarms of winged space aliens. The 3DS exclusive game, Galaga 3D Impact, is a straightforward 3-D shooter in which you move the 3DS around, using the motion control to change your view out your ship’s cockpit. It’s not bad, just unmemorable — built more around the gimmick than a unique gameplay concept like Legions was.

The final game in the package is Pac-Man Tilt, a basic platforming game in which you can tilt the playfield by moving the 3DS. Of course, since doing this would ruin the glasses-free 3-D effect by throwing the pixels out of alignment with your eyes, the 3-D effect is automatically switched off when you play Tilt.

In short, Pac-Man Championship Edition is the one game I wanted to keep playing after a couple of test runs with everything on this cartridge. But even then, Generations‘ head-scratching approach to high scores is a real buzzkill.