Waka Waka isn’t just a Shakira song. It’s the thing that will make you fall in love with Pac-Man all over again.
Finding Waka Waka may be a teensy bit tough — blame Shakira for that — but once you get there, it’s as addictive an online PC game as you’d ever find. This fancy, over-the-top, jazzed up version of Pac-Man promises hours of gameplay which can end in you wanting to kill yourself every time you miss that high score by ‘that’ much.
Mindjolt Games hit paydirt when they released the game on Facebook a few years ago, but that version was subsequently pulled and Waka Waka Reloaded made it to the screen. It remained in relative oblivion until, well, nostalgia beckoned and we got on board.
If you’re wondering what the big deal about a Pac-Man reboot is, playing the original game (which was first released in 1980 by the way) is a little depressing — the background is black, the monsters and the Pac-Man are pixellated and the sound is, well, 1980. In sharp contrast, Waka Waka is chock full of colours that will make a bubblegum baron blush. The gameplay is fast and nippy and the monsters are either squids, one-eyed trucks, aztec heads or jelly blobs with faces.
There are only five level formats to the game; after this, the same levels repeat themselves with your speed and the monsters’speeds also increasing by the bucketload. The only hang-up is that there is no way to gain lives on a level-up or any other completion bonus.
So you’ve got 4 lives to begin with and you’ve got to make do with them.
The music and sound effects (as you eat up the dots in the grid to complete the level it makes the Waka Waka sound) are way out and tend to keep you from drifting off. That’s a real godsend because after a while playing the game over and over again, you tend to play with muscle memory.