TOKYO--Some of history's oddest collaborations have been the most legendary: Gilbert and Sullivan, Sonny and Cher, peanut butter and jelly. It's no small surprise, then, that one of the most potentially exciting game collaborations we've seen this side of Kingdom Hearts is pretty strange as well. Namco's latest entrant into its most famous, twenty-year-old franchise has been given a strange twist, and it's called Space Invaders vs. Pac-Man. At the mere sound of the title, Space Invaders vs. Pac-Man might send you through the gamut of emotions. At first you might be perplexed as to how it will work; then you might be excited, thinking of all the possibilities that could arise from a game with such a title. You'll probably end up frustrated, since Space Invaders vs. Pac-Man is simply the original Pac-Man game, using Space Invaders aliens instead of ghosts.

　　You might be thinking that this is just a sneaky way to sneak another Pac-Man game into the already Pac-Man-prolific phone market, and you'd probably be right. From what we saw at TGS, there was no more to this game than the simple graphic twist. If there was any change to the game at all, it was that it didn't run as smoothly as the original Pac-Man has in almost every other iteration released for mobile. Of course, this game is a ways off from release, and currently is not scheduled for North America. This leaves room for tremendous potential, including an array of different mash-ups of the two classic games. We hope to hear that it's being translated, and that Namco pushes this idea much farther than what we saw at the Tokyo Game Show.