No need to mince words – I don’t have to tell you that Atari really screwed up when they ported the popular and excellent arcade classic Pac-Man over to the Atari 2600. The legend goes that Atari received a incomplete prototype of the game to test out and was so excited that they released the game as is. The end result was one of the contributing factors to what would eventually be known as the Great North American Video Game Crash of 1983. While the game did sell, the people who bought it generally hated the game and word of mouth eventually slowed the game’s sales to the point of nothing.
Now how about the game itself?
Well, Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 thankfully has the same premise as its arcade counterpart. Your main objective is to clear the single maze of dots (er, blocks) and avoid the ghosts that are chasing you. On each corner of the screen, there is a power pellet that you can gobble up and turn the ghosts blue for a brief period, allowing you to eat them for points. At least, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, the flickering of ghosts is what makes the game more difficult than it deserves to be, because sometimes it’s hard to tell when they’re blue or not. Also, they tend to be hard to see as they seem to blend in nicely with the blue background of this puke-colored maze. Everything tends to have a blocky appearance (as is the case with a majority of 2600 titles), but at least Pac-Man somewhat resembles a circle… but that’s about it.
The sounds are decidedly ear-grinding and the game is best played with the mute function of your television activated. Seriously, I couldn’t imagine anyone who could have sit through this game having to listen to those awful, awful sound effects. Not to mention that none of the jingles in this game resemble the familiar Pac-Man jingle from the arcade game, which every other home port has gotten right. I clearly don’t get that.
As for the gameplay itself… well, you control Pac-Man with your joystick, you eat dots, you avoid ghosts… I suppose I could give them a bit of credit. They managed to get the core gameplay mechanics right and the controls are actually fairly responsive for the most part, so the game isn’t a total loss. I mean, it’s pretty playable and considering there weren’t any better ports available, I suppose this could have served as a decent offering of Pac-Man.
But now that there are better ports… there’s really no reason to play this one now is there? You could probably find this one cheap if you’re actively looking for it, but even then… what’s the point? Every console in the world has at least one version of Pac-Man in some form or another these days and almost all of them are better than this. Just get one of those instead.
BREAKDOWN
Graphics: 3/10 (unappealing color scheme doesn’t help the subpar blocky graphics – flickery sprites doesn’t help the cause)
Sound: 1/10 (the Mute button is your friend… trust me)
Gameplay: 4/10 (just like Pac-Man… almost, somewhat, not quite, but the gameplay is somewhat similar)
Challenge: 5/10 (moderate difficulty made worse with flickering, indistinguishable ghosts)
Replay Value: 2/10 (almost none present)
OVERALL: 2/10
dtm666 