Namco’s iOS games have been underwhelming, with little imagination and a tendency to trot out the same old properties they’ve been reselling since the days of the GBA (at least). That said, Pac-Man games work nicely on iOS: on the iPhone, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man: Championship Edition are all great games, if often rather ambitiously priced.

On the iPad, Pac-Man was, disappointingly, an upscaled version of the iPhone game (no universal updates in Namcoland!), with nothing added—until now.

Observant readers will notice that there’s a less-than-subtle ‘thing’ on the screen grab above, which certainly isn’t part of the original Pac-Man arcade game. Namco calls this ‘Pac-Man for iPad [being] equipped with Namco’s online community powered by UniteSDK’. I call it something rather different: a hideous monstrosity.

Whatever compelled Namco to ruin its pixel-perfect Pac-Man port for iPad with this nasty button that you cannot remove, I’ll never know. It’s ugly, and it’s a distraction; worse, it’s totally unnecessary. Did someone at Namco really think: “You know what? When I’m mid-game, fleeing Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, the one thing I really need to do is tap on a social network icon, just to check on my ‘achievements’ and messages”?

This now-aesthetically-ruined game now merely serves as a lesson to other iOS developers: by all means integrate gaming social networks into your games, but don’t have them ruin things with permanently on-screen graphics or irritating notifications.