Chris Plays - Pac-Man

Entry posted by atari2600land in Chris Plays various 2600 games. August 30, 2022

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This whole blog topic started when I was looking through my Atari 2600 manuals and found a Pac-Man one. It listed the ghosts as being GHOSTS and the pellets have turned to wafers. So after reading the manual I decided to take a new approach on 2600 Pac-Man. I wanted to see what it was like with the "walking" ghosts and the "fast" Pac-Man.

I was not born when Pac-Man first came out. So I can't remember playing Atari 2600 Pac-Man for the first time back in the day, probably was around 2006 when I got my first Atari 2600 console used. It probably came in my first batch of games that came with it. So first, I played a "regular" game of Pac-Man, which would be game 1.

My final score on game 1 was around 1,100 points. So then I tried game 3. My score jumped up considerably.

So did I have fun? I found out the game 3 is much more enjoyable than game 1. The fun came in eating the power pellet and then getting the four ghosts. It was kind of easy to avoid them, although it would have been much more easier if the controls would work better. That is my only complaint with this Pac-Man version.

Sure it doesn't look like Pac-Man. The background is not black, the walls are not blue. The pellets are wafers, and the ghosts flicker. But I found it somehow magically retained feeling like a Pac-Man game. It felt like the NES game (I don't remember playing an arcade version ever. I was not an ARCADE kid, basically because there weren't any.) There's just something I can't put my finger on about the fun of going really fast and eating wafers and eating and avoiding ghosts. They could have worked on the sounds a lot more, especially the starting four-note ear rape. I noticed there is some animation of the ghosts. Their eyes roll around. And I would think having a different maze layout would make the game a little more interesting. I can only imagine knowing the one maze like the back of my hand, then getting the Atari 2600 version and it would be like "Wow. The maze is different."

I would like to hear your comments on the 2600 version of Pac-Man. I could have made this a YouTube series, but there's too many YouTube series like this, and my voice is real annoying. And I don't care about subscriptions. So there wouldn't be me bugging you about supporting my Patreon (whatever that is.)

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TrekMD 7,581

Posted August 31, 2022

I was always disappointed with how the game looked but I played tons back then. That changed when Ms. Pac-Man was released. As a maze game, it is a fun game and it becomes quite challenging. I've said for a long time that 2600 Pac-Man is just a clone of the arcade Pac-Man as it retains many of its features but not everything from the arcade is here.