Platinum




is
Be PAC-TIVE from
Pac-Man Museum+.
At ~63 hours this is now my most time-intensive platinum (although
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 and
Streets of Rage 4 were close). There were some very, very grindy trophies in this game, but I finally knocked it out.
I'm particularly proud to have cleared the mission-based trophies of
Super Pac-Man and
Pac-Land without using save states (I also more or less did for
Pac & Pal, but I did technically restart an early stage after stupidly losing a life). Getting to the later screens of those old arcade titles is tough, and it was rewarding to work out their ins and outs in order to do so. I may revisit
Pac-Man and try to clear 15 screens of it without save states (I made it 14 before finally giving up!), since I really like drilling that one and getting my high score up little by little.
At $20 this is an easy compilation to recommend, and I'm sure I'll continue to play it from time to time basically forever (or until they put out another one). It covers a range of titles and genres, and although there may be minor emulation hiccups here or there in a couple games, it's nothing show stopping (to me, at least).
On a related note, I look forward to seeing what Namco does with the
Pac-Man World remake coming out next month. I wasn't crazy about the original, but I think a lot of its frustrating bits could easily be remedied by smoother performance and tighter platforming, both of which I would *hope* they would offer. We'll see!