Unlike Pac-Man's other iterations, like Ms. Pac-Man or Pac-Man Jr., Super Pac-Man visibly changes the mechanics of the original Pac-Man game while maintaining the same look and feel. Instead of chewing up little white dots, you're now tasked with taking in food items that are locked up in the middle of the map. To unlock these, you'll need a key, which are scattered throughout.

Still, the challenge is to do get the keys and collect the food without being touched by the various ghosts around the grid. To deter the ghosts, you can still get the power-ups in the corner (although they are now locked by key) to start chomping on the ghosts. If a ghost is following you into an unlocked chamber, you can grab the food and the power up and do a 180 to get back at the hapless enemy. There is also a super power up in the form of a green dot. This will enlarge Pac-Man to gargantuan size. You can still chomp away at ghosts but the key, pardon my pun, is to use the power to break down doors without the use of keys.

If these changes to the original Pac-Man formula are not enough, there is also an enhanced mode which lets you unlock even greater powers like throwing a double Pac-Man for the ghosts to chase. In between levels, you'll also encounter bonus stages that are time limited runs at food without ghosts involved.

Clearly, the designers of Super Pac-Man knew the franchise was getting derivative (and copied) by many, so the changes to Super Pac-Man help make a familiar icon seem new. Because the title is from Namco and they own the Pac-Man franchise, all of the graphics and sounds are authentic enabling your cell phone to reproduce the classic coin-op arcade. It's definitely different from previous versions of Pac-Man so if you haven't gotten Pac-Man, I recommend Super Pac-Man be the one you get as the additional game modes introduce new strategy to give Pac-Man more variety. If you already have Pac-Man, you're in a bit of a dilemma. Although Super Pac-Man is a departure, at the end of the day, you're still chomping at bits in a grid so whether you think paying full price for more power ups and some food icons instead of white dots is up to you. Still, all of this beats putting quarters into a machine.