9/10/2023 0 Comments Pac man vs ms pac manYears before Hulk Hogan made it a catchphrase, Pac-Man was saying his prayers (because ghosts, duh) and eating his vitamins. The ghosts are remarkably dumb, which means it’s not very hard unless you limit your speed deliberately via the difficulty switches. The “vitamins” in the centre of the screen are nearly as big as you are, which leaves me wondering how Pac actually manages to eat them. You’re a blocky Pac, but the colours of the ghosts only have the mildest variance, with ugly flicker when you’ve eaten a power pellet. Which is all well and good, but even now, some (gulp) 34 years later, it’s not hard to see why the gamers of 1981 were more than a little ticked off with the 2600 version of Pac-Man, because while it’s got the ostensible parts present, they don’t really fit together in a way that feels like Pac-Man. Still, it’s amusing, and amusing is always a plus for simple games. Sir! Sir! The ghost is cheating! He’s not even in Mazeland, but floating on top of it! Mazeland? A Pac-Man with nutritional needs? Why do I get the feeling that the manual writers were being forced at this stage into some kind of kid-friendly-let’s-not-focus-on-the-pill-popping-aspect-of-things scheme? (text via Atari Age, because I only have a loose cart version, sadly.) ![]() Everytime PAC-MAN eats all of the video wafers on the maze, he earns an extra life and a new maze full of video wafers.” You also score points when PAC-MAN eats power pills, vitamins, and ghosts. You score a point for every video wafer that PAC-MAN eats. The longer he survives, the more points you score. PAC-MAN starts the game with four lives(turns). “The object of the game is to keep PAC-MAN happy and healthy in his home of Mazeland. You didn’t know it needed one, right? Well, according to the manual, It also amusingly tries to cram a plot into Pac-Man. Being a 2600 title, you can muck around with selection switches to change up either your speed or the speed of your foes, as well as the specific difficulty, but this is still a relatively sedate title with just a single maze to contend with. There’s something relatively meditative about Pac-Man on the 2600, because the genuine urgency of the arcade version is all but absent in the base game. The one thing that actually depresses me about retro gaming, stupid rising prices and annoying “collectors” notwithstanding, is seeing copyright dates on games. Pac and the ghosts are all very basic and blocky, because this is, after all, running on the finest technology money could buy all the way back in 1981. The 2600 version of Pac-Man works quite nicely as a while-I’m-waiting-on-hold phone game, because it’s Pac-Man boiled down to its absolute essence. ![]() I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently playing the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, something I wrote about recently over on Kotaku Australia. Which was all fine and good when it came to the arcade, but when it came time for Atari, which was at that time a juggernaut of immense proportions, as distinct from the IP Lawyer types that now infest that name.īecause what happened was the creation of two very different games. It’s probably some kind of deep metaphor about the futility of life, or, as so many wits have put it, why so many kids of that era grew up popping pills and listening to electronic music in darkened rooms* Long before Mario was chasing Daisy (or Peach - he gets about a bit, that lad), the Pacs were engaged in gaming’s first tryst, all while chasing (or being chased) by ghosts through mazes. So here, have two at once, starring gaming’s first couple: Pac-Man and Ms Pac-Man. It’s been ages since I’ve written a retro games review.
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