It looks like the original Pac-Man, and plays an awful lot like it too, but once you see the titular yellow hero chow down on a line of ghosts 33 deep like some kind of insatiable, eyeless animal, it's clear the classic formula has been juiced a bit. It's Pac-Man 99, Nintendo Switch's new 99-player online battle royale, and I've been low-key obsessed since it came out in April. My first encounter with Pac-Man was pretty typical for the 1990s. It was a lonely vintage game in the corner at my local Aladdin's Castle arcade at Countryside Mall, a quiet machine in the glory days of TMNT, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter II. I tended to play it because there was never a wait (it was already considered a relic in 1992) and unlike the fighting games, I could actually survive for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

On Wednesday, publisher Bandai Namco is launching "Pac-Man 99," an online game for the Nintendo Switch where you are among 99 players competing in the arcade classic. The game is free to play if you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online, a subscription service offering incentives such as online play and access to classic Nintendo games. It costs $4 a month, or $20 for the year. Pac-Man 99 plays like a traditional version of the game, as players chomp down dots while escaping ghosts. On both sides of the screen, players will see smaller screens representing the boards of online opponents.

In 2019 Nintendo launched Tetris 99 as a free battle royale game for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers before trying out Super Mario Bros. 35 temporarily, and now it's following those games up with Pac-Man 99. Available exclusively on the Switch for people with the online subscription, the game lets players eat Power Pellets to make ghosts vulnerable. Once players eat them, the ghosts turned into a Jammer Pac-Man, that goes after opponents and slows them down, as the field is slowly winnowed from 99 entrants to one winner. The base game is available at no additional cost for subscribers, while optional DLC adds CPU mode, time attack and various custom themes, with some of the themes referencing classic Bandai games. The themes are available for $2 each, while players can buy the additional modes in a $15 add-on, or just get all of the extras at once for $30.