Format: Advance
Genre: Arcade
Developer: Human Soft
Publisher: Namco

Avoid this game. On the surface pacman and pinball might seem like a match made in heaven, but all things good go awry. This game is fairly shallow in all aspects. To start out, the story of the game is something akin to "all the residents get kidnapped, go save them by becoming a pinball". The game doesn't explain it all that much, but basically, you have to do some stuff on the pinball field to make the pac resident spawn, then get a power pill, and destroy the ghost in time. The issue with this game isn't that it's poorly designed to keep you in the dark about this goal, but rather, that the mechanics of the game itself are shoddy at best. You, the player, have about as much control over the ball as you would if you played pinball on the NES. That is to say, almost none. There are 2 fields in this game as well, and "night time" versions of them for some reason. There's zero difference in the night time versions of the boards. All aesthetics. The music for the second board "haunted boardwalk" is probably the highlight of the game. There's just not much here simply because the mechanics are so stupidly designed, that no amount of play or expertise will produce better results. You can go look up any video of this game, or play it yourself, and you will see the exact same movements by the ball, in every source you look at. It's mechanically busted. The controls are actually pretty fitting, but it doesn't much matter because of said busted mechanics. Left and Right control left and right flippers, L and R are for Left and Right Tilts, and B is for down-tilt. Despite having a proper control schematic, there's no high scores in this PINBALL game. There are a few "minigames" inside the game itself, but they don't seem to have much of a purpose other than getting pacman more pellets for his fat yellow ass. The pellets can be used to buy stuff like powerups or extra lives. If you want to play a pinball game, I'd suggest one of the others on the GBA. This one was a low point for pinball.

All in All, a score of 4 is too much for this. Bad mechanics, impossible shots, unavoidable side-ramp losses, bad camera with multiball, bad direction of goals, no high score, unable to read the dam credits because of the font used.