In my defense, I've been pretty busy during the majority of last week doing touristy things in the great state of Chicago, so I've only had a few moments here and there to play games on my 3DS. Even so, I clearly need to stop doing this to myself.

I don't know what keeps drawing me to portable pinball games on the GBA/DS, but I guess my craving for a good game of pinball from arcades every now and then has stayed with me, and transformed into this morbid curiosity to play every spinoff pinball game of major franchises that I can get my hands on, regardless of how shovelware it looks. Unfortunately, in comparison to Mario Pinball Land and Pokemon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire, Pac-Man Pinball Advance just straight up sucks. There are two boards that basically have the same scoring and objectives from what I can tell, though the board on the right (the boardwalk) has an additional flipper on the left hand side a bit further up so you might just want to stick with that board so you have more excuses to press buttons. You can switch between a classic pinball table view with rails and a more "Pac-Man World" adventure table view, but as far as I can tell, they're functionally the same as well. And to be fair, maybe I'm just misinterpreting this mostly forgotten spinoff title that you can pick up for 10 bucks on Ebay, and it's just a classic case of rack up as many points as you can to break high scores, but I found the experience extremely limited and quite bland, with some very baffling design decisions:

- Hitting any of three targets on the left hand side will cause a cannon to shoot out a super pellet, which you can collect to start up ghost chase mode (that is, the ghosts turn blue and you can shoot the ball into them to get points). However, if you activate this mode while your ball saver is still active (for the first 30 seconds of each ball), then the ball saver's time is superseded by however much ball saver time you get while ghost saver mode is active, and since it's noticeably less than 30 seconds, it's a real bummer losing this important boon from a supposed advantage state.

- The flippers are notoriously underpowered at very certain angles; namely, they do not produce powerful trick shots at the very thin tip of the flippers, which is very odd to me because that should be the most powerful section of the flippers (due to producing the most acceleration at those sections), so good luck shooting anything outside and including the 45 degree angle of an outer cone trajectory. It's also extremely frame tight near the center of the flipper for some reason, so if you're playing on the Pac Village board, there's this certain pellet behind the well that is extremely difficult to collect.

- Multiball (the Ms Pac-Man item in the shop) is just a bad time; the camera does not attempt to scroll up or lengthen the vertical perspective to include both balls, so chances are if you shoot one of your pinballs during multiball up, you won't be able to see it interact with bumpers or other obstacles at the top of the board until it comes crashing down whenever and you have to react on the fly to make sure it doesn't fall through.

- The win condition of the entire game is pretty unclear; it tells you to collect pellets, and you can do so both on the main board and infinitely in "minigames" where you enter the circular cellar or a linear infinite up and down autoscroller (where you must dodge ghosts while collecting power pellets and pellets to rack up score). But as far as I can tell, you can't actually progress the board by collecting pellets alone, because the only significant change besides score when collecting pellets is regenerating pellets when all on a board are collected, forever and ever. I think instead you have to light up all the letters in PAC-MAN by (slowly) collecting fruits or lighting up all three adjustable lights above the upper bumpers, but I never got this far because...

- It is so easy to lose your ball in this game. Once the ball saver is gone, the ball can very easily roll into the side chutes and into the abyss from simply falling out of the corridors at the top of the board due to lack of momentum from underpowered flippers (or be shot into these side chutes from the flippers themselves). In addition, the bumpers at the bottom of the board are very good at launching the pinball into the side chutes, and there's very little you can do about that as well. You may have four balls to play with, but significant "progression" isn't really a thing when they just melt away from interaction with the board's inherent elements.

It is rare for me to play a portable pinball game that makes me go "Mario Pinball Land was less frustrating and more fair than this," so congratulations Pac-Man Pinball Advance, I guess you've accomplished what I once deemed impossible. At the very least, I can tell the game empathized with me on a deeper level, as this Pooka bumper's expression was basically me IRL. Oh well, you can't win them all I suppose; the Pac might be back, but not because of this.