Namco today announced that Smart Bomb Interactive is developing an all-new kart racer set in the Pac-Man universe, called Pac-Man World Rally. The racer features Mario-Kart-esque mechanics that gamers will no doubt be intrigued by.

According to Namco, World Rally will employ the fastest kart racing engine ever, one-upping any other similar racer out there. Players can choose between a total of fifteen different characters from the Pac-Man world, including Pac-Man himself, of course. While a large sum of these characters will dwell from Namco’s Pac-Man franchise, the company says many will be re-appearing from other established Namco series. Characters set to appear in the racer, so far, include Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man and Dig-Dug.

The game will share a similar control scheme to that of any other kart racer, using the left analog stick to steer your race kart and character through cartoon-styled race tracks. Meanwhile, players will also recognize some other standard mechanics from the genre, such as a power-sliding system that allows gamers to built boost by sliding around corners. Once gamers have stored enough boost in their boost meter, they can unleash the powerful speed enhancer to blow by other racers on the track.

Also familiar are power-ups and pick-ups. Scattered throughout each course are a number of power-ups that players can use to slow down and disrupt their opponents. One such power-up is a snowman that covers the track in ice, causing other racers to slip and slide out of control.

More fresh, perhaps, is the Power Pellet system Smart Bomb Interactive has pioneered. Each course is littered in a number of pellets, which players can drive through to pick up. Once gamers have picked up enough of these pellets, they’ll earn a Power Pellet. When they have a Power Pellet at their disposal, gamers switch from their chosen racer to a powerful Super Pac-Mobile. The kart allows them to speed through the course, sucking up any opponents they come across for a brief amount of time, devastatingly slowing their progress around the stage.

Course design looks cartoon-esque and colorful. Tracks are full of twists, turns, jumps, obstacles and many other surprises. So far, only select members of the press have had a chance to demo Pac-Man World Rally, in which they were exposed to two of the game’s fifteen courses. The first has gamers racing through a large castle, complete with plenty of twists and turns. The second, on the other hand, took place inside what looks like a volcano swimming with hot, deadly lava.

There’s also a whole dimension to track design here. Traditional Pac-Man fruit pick-ups are included in and out of every track. These pick-ups serve, essentially, as keys that allow players to access time-saving shortcuts hidden within each level. After using a fruit, it drops out of player’s inventory, meaning they can only have one key at a time, thus ensuring gamers don’t stack-up on multiple shortcut keys.



Pac-Man World Rally

Pac-Man World Rally is scheduled to ship to all current-generation consoles, GameCube, Xbox and PlayStation 2 sometime in the summer of 2006. It’ll also be hitting both the PC and PSP, with the latter supporting Ad-Hoc play. We’ll have more on this one as it happens.