Pac-Man

"This is NOT the Arcade Version of the Game--Not Even Close!"

Pac-Man! One of the most recognized characters in video game history. Just like every other version of Pac-Man, you get past each level by eating all the dots on the screen... except the dots are lines in this game (the instruction booklet calls them ''wafers''). Well, it can't be perfect--it IS the 2600 Pac-Man, after all, and of course, the 2600 is known for its blocky graphics. But people who want an arcade-perfect port won't be happy--for that matter, most anyone else won't be happy either. Atari rushed this game for the Christmas season, and they got what plays like a bad online Pac-Man clone out of it. The maze looks NOTHING like the original arcade maze. They even screwed up the escape tunnels, which are now at the top and bottom of the maze rather than the sides.

Graphics: 0/10--Yes, yes, I know it's a 2600 game, but this is bad even for that. You remember the ghosts, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde? Well, you won't find them in this game. All four ghosts are yellow-tinted, and they don't seem to have any distinct personalities anymore. The dots are now lines, as mentioned above, which isn't too bad, considering it's a 2600 game, but the color of the maze isn't right. The maze is orange, and the background is blue, whereas in the arcade, the maze is blue, and the background is black. Pac-Man wasn't a perfect sphere in the arcade, but in this game, he looks more like a diamond. And he has an eye! Pac-Man isn't supposed to have any eyes! Perhaps the worst thing about Pac-Man himself, however, is that he can only look side to side. Even when moving up or down, Pac-Man still looks side to side! And whenever he eats a ghost, he looks to the right, even when he's going left. The fruits are gone as well, replaced by some ''vitamin,'' which looks like an orange square with yellow in the middle.

All this is bad, but what really makes the graphics worthy of a zero is the flicker. I can't think of any video game ever that had a worse problem with sprite flicker than this game! Ms. Pac-Man for the 2600 has flicker as well, but it's not nearly as bad as the flicker in this game, even though Ms. Pac-Man can sometimes have an extra sprite, the moving fruit, in her game. But in this game, only one ghosts is on the screen at a time, so three of the ghosts are invisible. The one ghost on the screen is constantly rotating, so you can see all 4 ghosts, but that means that you can only see the ghosts for one of four frames of animation. It gets REALLY annoying, especially when you're trying to eat the ghosts. They get a blue tint when they're edible, but they get a pink tint when they're about to become the dangerous yellow tint again. With all the flicker, and since the light-colored tints are hard to distinguish if you're more than a foot away from the TV, you'll be dying often if you try to swallow ghosts at the last second.

Sound: 2/10--Well, it's a step up from the graphics in this game. The opening sequence sounds nothing like the arcade--rather, it sounds the same as if you were to press 2323 on a touch-tone phone. The sound it makes when you eat a line, it makes an awful buzzer-like sound. When you eat a power pill (shaped like a box), it makes a strange high-pitched sound 10 times, and a little after that, the ghosts get their yellow tints back. And it's 10 times in every level. Unlike in the arcade, the power pills last the exact same amount of time in every level, which is a pretty good while. The sound when you eat a ghost is the only sound that's somewhat faithful to the arcade version--not bad, except when you hear all the other horrid sounds. The sound when you die, although not what you hear in the arcade, is pretty good as well. Unfortunately, for most of the game, all you hear are the awful buzzer-like sounds from eating lines, and the bad power-pill sound effect.

Fun: 3/10--In all honesty, before I got an NES 13 years ago, I played this game quite frequently (although I played Ms. Pac-Man for the 2600 much more often). It can be fun in small doses, but it's not mind-numbingly addictive like its arcade counterpart.

Overall: 2/10--You're not going to enjoy this game very much unless you don't have any consoles except a 2600. Even then, I'd recommend you get Ms. Pac-Man for the 2600 instead. If you have an NES or a Game Boy, you'd be better off getting Pac-Man for one of those. Or you can get Namco Museum 1 for the Playstation for an arcade-perfect version of Pac-Man.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/18/01, Updated 01/18/01