Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

As if dozens of time trial stages and the various score attacks weren't enough to keep you occupied, each maze also houses a Ghost Combo challenge in which you have to gobble up as many ghosts as you can in one go without the ghost state time bar running out. Set against a 10-minute time limit, each maze plays out to a specific pattern, and the trick is to figure out both the best route around all the sleepy ghosts and the optimum moment to strike.

Sometimes the pattern of the dots gives you precious little choice but to take a pellet before you'd ideally like to, but if you can allow yourself to build up the conga line again, an even better opportunity might present itself – albeit at an insanely high pace that will probably mangle your poor, battered thumbs. Such is its incessant one-more-go allure, Ghost Combo is the kind of game you'd happily pay for on its own. The fact that it's just a small portion of an equally brilliant package leaves you shaking your head at the genius of the whole thing.

On top of all this gameplay magic, Namco Bandai has had the presence of mind to allow you to customise the look, feel and even the sound of each maze. You can tailor the colour scheme to your own whims and cycle through various styles of Pac-Man and ghosts, from the pixellated retro style to the plastic PacMania era or a more modern neon look. You can even tinker with the thumping soundtrack options, each designed explicitly to ensure that you'll wind up a palm-sweating wreck after a few sessions.

Whatever audio-visual option you plump for, you can't lose, as your living room is swiftly bathed in the glorious phosphor glow of a 1980s arcade, accompanied by the kind of frantic electronica that may even have neighbours nodding along in approval. At least, that's the idea. Thanks to this greater variety, the DX version is even more of a visual feast – aided no end by the explosive fizz of the smart bomb and the accompanying sight of cascading ghosts doing an airborne conga all the way back to their base.

But in amongst the chaos, you may not even notice how good it looks. What matters more than ever is your performance on the leaderboards. With so many of them to take into account now, you can either break things down to a granular level of detail or view your performances combined across the entire game. For once, even if you're not that brilliant at specific mazes or modes, you feel like the sum total of your efforts can get you somewhere if you play all of it – and that's where Pac-Man Championship Edition DX really grabs you, and one of the main reasons it's certain to torment you for months to come.

To say that this is a must-buy is doing it a disservice; it's a game you'll want to instantly evangelise to anyone with even the vaguest sense of what makes a game good. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX takes everything that made the original so successful, twists and refines it in a relentless and thrilling new direction, and then adds a plethora of new mazes and modes for good measure. When we look back at the great score-attack games of this generation, this will be right up there at the top table. Like Trials HD and Geometry Wars before it, it's touched by true design genius. The hardest part will be knowing when to bloody well stop.