I remember my mother taking me along with her to her bowling league every week to Paragon Lanes in Grand Rapids. At first, I was too young to be allowed on the main floor, and had to instead hang out with all the other little kinds upstairs in the nursery. But, a couple of years later, I graduated out of the daycare room and got to sit and watch my mom and her friends bowl, and sometimes even bowl a bit myself. But the one thing that I remember most about these days was that Paragon Lanes had a Pac-Man machine.

I was so crazy about Pac-Man that it began to define who I was. We’d take family trips to this huge swimming pool, and you’d more than likely find me in the tiny game room next to the locker rooms, where they had Pac-Man. For my birthday, I’d get Pac-Man themed cards with little slots that held quarters.

Eventually, video games outgrew the simplicity that is Pac-Man, and my friends and I moved on to Impossible Mission for C64, Jump-Man, Adventure, and then to Super Mario Bros., Metroid and Contra on NES, and so on and so forth. But Pac-Man kept popping back up at different stages in my videogame-playing life. There was Pac-Man for Atari 2600, the tabletop Pac-Man, Pac-Land for my TG-16, the seriously poor translation of Ms. Pac-Man for Genesis… when I bought my Neo-Geo Pocket Color last year in Austria, Pac-Man was one of the games I picked up along with it. NGPC Pac-Man was just a straight arcade port, playable with a scrolling field or a zoomed out, full-screen maze. It was perhaps the best version of Pac-Man I had played since the original arcade game.

And now Namco has given us Pac-Man Collection, which brings together four Pac-Man games on one cartridge. You get Pac-Man, with the full-screen or scrolling option, Pac-Man Arrangement, Pac-Mania and Pac-Attack.

Pac-Man is a straight arcade port, right down to the patterns and that trick that lets you phase right through the ghosts. Pac-Mania is the weird, isometric version of Pac-Man that allows Pac-Man to jump over ghosts. Pac-Attack is a Tetris-like puzzle game that incorporates ghosts and Pac-Man into the mix. Pac-Man Arrangement is the reason that this collection is worth $30.

Arrangement is top-down, classic Pac-Man, with updated graphics, new mazes and power-ups. This is a more recent version of Pac-Man, too, so it’s the only game on the cart that looks like it’s taking advantage of the GBA’s power. It’s colorful, the animation is very well done and there’s lots of motion… even the dots bounce up and down to the music. You’ll also get a different sets of mazes, each with a different theme, and updated remixes of the classic Pac-Man theme song.

As a whole, Pac-Man Collection is the best compilation of Pac-games I’ve yet seen, and a must have for fans of the series.