Mappy is an excellent 80’s arcade title, sure it’s no PAC-Man but it’s as close as you could possibly get!

I just had a kick around with the NES port and half an hour flew by, I got through one or two loops (16 stages, repeated). There seems to be a major potential for point scoring on strategic door openings, grabbing the artefacts in the right order and so forth.

But just being the mouse on the run is fun enough for me, addictive in an evasive side-scroller sense - I get a real Hanna Barbara feeling from it… no less because it sorta is like Tom and Jerry (but not at all).

Recommended to pal around with, I’m again impressed with Namco’s output and are sorta upset that most forget there’s more to them than PAC-Man

Flicky outsold, go home gurl. No, seriously, I genuinely prefered it to Mappy. It has better cat sprites, that's all it takes. Graphics matter in this new age of gamers (we started popping up 20 years ago). But unless you're a soulless pool of ideas like Tower Of Fantasy or Palword, comparing games from different minds doesn't suit me. What Mappy does is not too crazy, the bite-sized gameplay loop they had to choose worked well enough. It's not intuitive, but you get the hang of how things work eventually. Whatever buzzwords people used back then probably conveyed the floatiness of the game better than I ever could, but "sigma" will have to do. Staring down these cats as you soar or dive past them is the first sign of alpha activity in Mappy's career. All of that digested neatly as you spend quite some time in the air. I never seen no rat come out of a redbull commercial like that.

Secret's out, I always fumble the bonus stage at the last possible moment. I've started to recollect Flicky's bonus stage and replacing my memories of Mappy with that one as coping mechanism. The comparison makes itself at this point, as unstoppable as an angry hippo you don't wanna mess with, though not as dangerous. Outside of the odd reference and a surprising new entry by the former devs, we won't see Mappy in meaningful roles, but people still know who he is to this day. His... name is Mappy, right? The mouse, I mean. He's a dilf that's all I know for sure I'm just assuming that's his name. I just can't shake this bad feeling. He looks like a Mitch or a Bruno to me, fine names if I do say so myself, fitting for a cop in duty indulging in intense physical activity inside what I hope is his own house.

One of the most charming 80s arcade games, this game oozes with character and personality with its cute and memorable characters and music.

too bad I can't really say I like the gameplay as much as its charm. I don't even know what genre this would fall under. Maze? Action? Platformer? Since mappy can't jump, the only way to avoid mewkies are to stun them with doors/traps, or juke them out with the trampolines, and I never really felt like either are very satisfying to do. Long hallways without any doors are death sentences so if there's a treasure there good luck not getting flanked by an offscreen mewkie. I'm also not sure how the hell you are supposed to get the safes in the last set of levels without sacrificing a life, they are literally in dead ends. It feels like the main way to play well is just to continuously camp the trampolines over and over until the one chance to move shows up, ESPECIALLY if you are trying to score high by getting all the nyamco score bonuses in the correct order, and that's assuming you dont accidentally get read by a mewkie exiting the trampoline at the same time, instantly costing a life. You can do some funny shenanigans with the doors when they exist though, as Mappy's door opening reach length is "yes", but it's not something to really be relied on as the mewkies definitely go for the hoard tactic of overwhelming you with speed and numbers that the sluggish door opening controls won't really help much with as the game goes on.

Despite my various complaints towards the gameplay, I do find this game genuinely impossible to hate. The charm alone absolutely carries here and even if the game is meh I'll always give it a play if i see it and get excited every time namco references this goofy lil game.

You play as a mouse cop, who goes through houses with a bunch of cat burglars in it, collecting a bunch of stolen items, jumping on trampolines and killing the cats along the way. If that isn't the best premise in game history, I don't know what is.

Oh yeah, game is also pretty good, and the music is a banger.

Game #113