"Pac Man is the devil....truth...."

Another translation of an arcade giant, Ms Pac Man has come to the Nintendo Entertainment System with another instance of near perfection that can be found only in the arcade machine. Featuring the different mazes and challenge that the arcade counter part did, this version of the game is a carbon copy of the original with some slight visual variations that really don’t come up too often if you’re not looking! Taking control of Ms Pac Man, you gobble your way through several different mazes with ghosts that are looking to take you out of the running. Through this, you’ll pick up points and power pellets that will allow you to gobble the ghosts as well as the pellets and can ultimately help you defeat the stage that you’re on. While a simple game that doesn’t have much else but traversing through different mazes, it does have quite a bit of addictive quality and makes up for a classic game that is well worth the hours spent on it!

The game play is really simple in the way that is played. You take control of Ms Pac Man and run her through a few different stages that are set up like mazes. All you have to do is avoid the ghosts that patrol and roam the mazes while gobbling up little white dots that give you points as you pick them up. If you’re set up to where you’re in a corner and the ghosts are coming after you, you can gobble up a larger dot that scares the ghosts and allows you to gobble them up for extra-added points! As you traverse through the game, you’ll see that there is different fruit for each stage that allows you to gain extra points put towards your total and ultimately your high score. While the game really doesn’t change much from stage to stage, the layout is slightly different per act and the ghosts become faster and more aggressive as you go through the game. This only adds more challenge to the already simple game and with two players, you’ll have plenty of competitive game play that will pit you and your friend against each other to see just who is the better Ms Pac Man player!

The control is extremely simple to use and learn with your only control technique that you have to learn being that of moving Ms Pac Man through the different stages and around the ghosts. What you’ll need to learn is that different paths and how you go about traveling through them will change the course of how the ghosts move and where they go! If you to a short run down and then immediately shoot upwards and then back down, they’ll move in another direction in an attempt to intercept you. It’s a small way of moving your Pac lady, but it is something that you can learn to use to your advantage. There aren’t any special moves or anything that you have to do with the buttons so your concentration will remain on just guiding Ms Pac Man through the stages and completing them in order to move on!

Visually, Ms Pac Man is a simple game that only uses colors to show the difference between the different ghosts and that your character is yellow with a bow. There really isn’t much to the visuals of the game and the only thing that looks different per stage is the color of the outlining that the maze walls have. The simplicity of the visuals is compounded by the fact that your goal is to simply eat the numerous white pellets that litter the stages and maybe chase after the different fruits that come through the stage from time to time! The only special effect that really comes forward is when you eat a ghost and the eyeballs fly through the stage and into the ghost box where the ghost is recreated and placed back into the maze to start chasing you again. Other than that, there isn’t much else that really stands out or that makes an impression on the mind, because if you’ve seen a Pac Man game, then you already know what you’re looking at and in all reality, it isn’t much to begin with!

Audio wise, there isn’t any music for the stages and that won’t surprise most gamers who have run into Pac Man or its different versions. The sound effects are also very limited in what they have to offer, with nothing more than the thumping sound of Ms Pac Man wandering around open spaces and the tinny gobble of the pellets being gobbled up as you move! Really, this is more simplicity that the game has to offer and the only music that can be found are in the very short cut scenes that the game has to offer in between the different acts. All in all, it is perfect a conversion of the arcade version of the game.

Overall Ms Pac Man isn’t anything that you haven’t played before and won’t play again in the future. Featuring some impressive porting of the arcade hit, the NES version only suffers from the slight color muting that most games do when they’ve been ported over! Other than that, you still have the same great game play and simplistic control that has made the series such a hit for the past twenty years. Even though there are no improvements on the conversion, this title is worth having a look at simply because it is one of the numerous examples of a good conversion that I am starting to find in the NES section of the video game world. Keeping with the simple format of the game that focuses on avoiding the ghosts, picking up points and offering several competitive game play stage to a two player team. Anyone with a NES will find that this title is worth buying for a couple of bucks and adding to the collection of games!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/26/01, Updated 11/26/01