Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 is considered to be the single most disappointing home conversion of an arcade machine in the history of video computer electronic entertainment. No matter how bad any other home port turned out, it didn’t contribute to the near-decimation and annihilation of the North American video game market. Is that a bit of stretch? I’d like to think so, but others do believe this statement and looking at Pac-Man as ported to the 2600, it’s not hard to see why.
While the original Pac-Man was something of a disaster, the same cannot be said for Ms. Pac-Man, which got a fantastic port on the Atari 2600. It still got that strange color scheme with the blue background, but the game somewhat resembles Ms. Pac-Man as it appeared in arcades. The sprites are a little more refined (even though there’s still that flickering issue), the mazes are almost similar enough, there’s fruit bouncing around and not vitamins, the sound effects are fairly close to matching the original sounds (as opposed to the previous port’s strange deviations), and the gameplay and functionality is similar to the arcade version. Everything still looks blocky, there are no dots but dashes, but that’s to be expected considering the system. The important thing is that when you pop this in and you look past the visual differences, you know that you’re playing Ms. Pac-Man and not some perversion of computer programming that tries to pass itself off as genuine.
Much like the arcade version, Ms. Pac-Man sports up to four different mazes, which increases the variety and challenge in the game and is an overall improvement over the original Pac-Man, which only had one static maze. Your main goal is to eat all the dots, lines, whatever the case may be and move onwards. You don’t have the intermission sequences that play every couple levels or so, but the core elements are there and… again, it’s a huge improvement over the previous port… which wasn’t very good.
There’s not much more I can add to the matter; it’s Ms. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 and it’s the port that people wished Pac-Man got. Everything that went wrong in that game is done right here and you can’t ask for more than that. Not mention that this is just a fun game to play. Ms. Pac-Man is a game you can find all over the place and deserves a good home among your Atari library if you have one. Great game, give it a go.
BREAKDOWN
Graphics: 8/10 (more refined sprites, closer accuracy to source material)
Sounds: 7/10 (sounds closer to what you’d get at the arcades)
Gameplay: 8/10 (plays and functions similarly enough to the arcade game)
Challenge: 8/10 (four mazes provides more variety, challenge)
Replay Value: 6/10 (plenty of fun to be had here)
OVERALL: 8/10
dtm666 