I am happy to announce that Namco Bandai Games is releasing PAC-MAN Championship Edition for PSN tomorrow! You will be able to find it in the PlayStation mini section of the PSP system’s PlayStation Store for $4.99.

We are excited to bring this title to the PlayStation family as it has certainly made an impression on the gaming community over the past few years. For everyone who downloaded last year’s PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX for PS3 and was blown away by the changes made to the fantastic PAC-MAN formula, PAC-MAN Championship Edition will educate you on where some of those changes sprang from.

PAC-MAN Championship Edition was originally designed for 2007’s PAC-MAN World Championship in New York as a special commemoration of PAC-MAN’s 27th Anniversary. The title was also the last game PAC-MAN’s creator, Toru Iwatani, designed before his retirement from the video game industry. In his final sendoff to his original creation, Iwatani-san and the PAC-MAN Championship Edition development team were able to take everything that made PAC-MAN what we know and love for three decades, and refine it into a game with enough nostalgia for gamers who have grown up with PAC-MAN, along with modern gameplay enhancements to make it fresh and new for a younger generation. In the end, they succeeded with flying colors, creating the benchmark of how classic arcade remakes should be done.

PAC-MAN Championship Edition plays similar to the original PAC-MAN arcade game. You’ll find Pac-Dots, Power Pellets and four ghosts spread across a variety of mazes. The major additions to the PAC-MAN franchise introduced in Championship Edition are time limits, Pac-Dot multipliers and dynamically shifting mazes. The timer is easy enough to understand. Get the highest score you can within a certain time limit. Easy! Points are earned by eating ghosts and Pac-Dots. The more dots you eat, the more points they are worth. If PAC-MAN loses a life the number of points per Pac-Dot is reset. The real magic is when the maze rearranges itself to repopulate itself with more Pac-Dots. When PAC-MAN consumes all the Pac-Dots across one half of a maze, an item appears on the opposite side of the maze. When PAC-MAN eats that item the side of the maze without Pac-Dots seamlessly reorganizes itself into a new configuration with more Pac-Dots and Power Pellets to chomp.

For those of you whose first experience with PAC-MAN Championship Edition series was Championship Edition DX, say goodbye to your ghost trains, bombs and slowdown. This is a relatively more traditional take on PAC-MAN and the only thing that will save you this time around when you’re stuck between a ghost and a hard place is going to be razor sharp reflexes.

We hope everyone enjoys the game!