"If you felt left out because Pac-Man didn't have enormous eyes like the ghosts, this game is up your alley."

Once upon a time I worked with this clown(maybe he was a yutz. It's so tough to tell these days) who'd find what other people remember or like or believe and try to convince them that he remembered, liked or believed it even more than they did(when he was clueless on a subject, he made stupid arguments to contradict people as well. We also rooted for archrival universities and went to archrival high schools, and he found several ways to annoy me on that account. I mention this because I don't want to peg him as being one-dimensional.) I'm pretty sure he did it to give people distaste for something he vaguely liked. Turn enough people off and he's king of the hill. Fortunately he spent most of his time telling a woman from Japan details about her culture, but for a change of pace he would assault me with hopelessly ill-informed opinions of old games, half of which he couldn't name. Occasionally I'd half-agree grudgingly so he'd stop pestering me only to be zapped with a Well-Informed, Open-Minded ''and yet...''

Lock N Chase, having one of those vaguely catchy names that float in the consciousness of people acquainted with the classic game scene, would have been an ideal game for him to recall, and thankfully, he never did, or maybe I spent a few minutes banging my head on a wall after any discussion on the matter, blocking out my short-term memory. Fortunately he got accepted at law school, making it that much safer for me to play video games during slow periods at work without the risk of interruption, and if he is lucky he'll become a well-paid underling and back-slapper and maybe even be able to pay off that law-school loan by the time he's forty. I can just picture him saying ''Ah, Lock N Chase.'' Whether or not his opinion would be favorable, he would find a way to make it painful. Hopefully I can avoid that as I convey my description to you and even provide some useful details.

Simplistically, Lock N Chase is a Pac-Man rip-off, with enough of the sort of details that are easy to vary so that you can't apply the rip-off label directly. It will fool you for a couple of minutes. You're on a six-by-six grid of streets with a tunnel off to the sides. There's no pen, but the monsters whose eyes take up half of their bodies come out from small conclaves shortly after you move around a bit. There are also Scylla-and-Charybdis doors that open and close, and there are two spots where prizes appear in the middle. You've got nothing like a power pill, but by pushing a button you may cause a wall to pop up behind you for a bit. This may cause your pursuers, who are always on the move, to bounce away from you, and apparently you can even get points for trapping them between your allotted two temporary red walls. Once you've gobbled all the dots, you need to exit so that you get to the next level, which is the same, except it has new gizmos appearing near the center and different locations for the doors.

Now for the details. First, you get money instead of points. That's right, there's a $ before your score. That's because you seem to be a bank robber who, before entering the maze, pulls up in the sort of car that looks like it should have a tire on the side to boot. Instead of resembling a pie Cousin Elmer snuck a piece out of at 2 AM but he isn't fooling anyone placing the blame elsewhere and now Thanksgiving is ruined, oh my, the fellow you control is a red ball with green legs and a Dr. Seuss hat(brilliant disguise there) and eyes that wobble between the two diagonal directions adjacent to how you are facing. Four blobs in cornflower policeman's uniform, who may be related to the Fry Guys, seek to catch you and flatten your hat and all. Roll call: Stiffy is red, Smarty light blue, Scarey light green, and Silly yellow. The maze itself has the dots arranged oddly; frequently there will only be a couple of dots between rows, leaving an odd space. This inevitably makes the screen look barer than it is, although you can nip in for a stray dot, as you are slightly quicker than your pursuers.

The graphics are rather cute, with the objects you need to get at the center being irrelevant but amusing. You can get a hat or a telephone or the much more valuable money bag just above it(doubles with each collection per level,) with each appearing several times in any maze. The game freezes and the cops even cry when you get the money(along with you chuckling and jumping up and down, it's a cute scene) or when you manage to leave the maze. You also can escape the monsters if they just touch your hat, making for one of the earliest hit-detection controversies in gaming. The end-scene where you register your initials for a high score is also something you didn't see in Pac-Man, but you probably did in Bump N Jump, where the elevator seemed more realistic than a little blob running back and forth. It's too bad there aren't any skits, though.

Only one classical music tune was butchered in the creation of the tune at the beginning of each scene, and an offbeat ''Clementine'' chimes in when the money bag at the center appears. Get it and you're treated to the standard early-arcade scrambled musical scales. At other times, there's a four-note cycling police siren, and you get a sort of vroom as you drive your car in. The bouquet of noises is more than acceptable for the time.

Overall, Lock N Chase isn't a shameful effort. It's nowhere near as tedious as a certain techie-cum-law student trying to bring an allegedly humanities-inspired counterpoint to various long-established physics theorems, but it's not exactly spectacular and doesn't have enough variety. You can even be nostalgic about it if you know the details, although after a few games most men will be lost through carelessness. In a pinch, the minor variation it makes on Pac-Man and some of the cute graphics are good for a shot of nostalgia, but overall it's a minor production and just about deserves its recognition as a game many that people know of some don't even know is a Pac-Man clone, and few really savor.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/11/01, Updated 12/11/01