Pac-man after the accident can only eat lines...
Man no wonder this contributed to the vg crash, I definitely would stop having faith in home consoles after playing this awful port. The publishers didn't even try to lie in the cover art. They knew.
E.T. can't be worse than this right?
Man no wonder this contributed to the vg crash, I definitely would stop having faith in home consoles after playing this awful port. The publishers didn't even try to lie in the cover art. They knew.
E.T. can't be worse than this right?
An example of trying too hard when you really should have just given up. There was no way to make this game work on this hardware. They flew too close to the sun, and got burned for it.
Attempting to seriously review every game I've played #7:
2 years late and barely recognizable, Pac-Man hit the Atari 2600, a system which it probably never should've touched. The attempt is admirable, but the VCS was clearly showing its age by 1982, and it was not suited to ports of the games that were popular in arcades. At the time this was pretty much the closest you could get to Pac-Man at home, but just a year later the Intellivision got its own port of the game, which is much more arcade accurate, and even the cancelled Coleco port holds up better.
This game is semi-often cited as one of the causes of the crash of 1983, and while it's far from the worst 2600 game on the market at the time, it's an easy one to pick on. The 2600 simply was not good enough at this point to handle the types of games that it was being tasked with, and if a console that was already 5 years old was propping up the entire North American video game market, it's not hard to see why it would crash.
I've focused a lot on this game's historical context, and not very much on the game itself, and that's because there really isn't much to say. Everything about this game feels like a weird bootleg version of itself both mechanically and visually. The maze is heavily simplified even compared to the original game, the ghost AI is less interesting, and it's just generally much easier.
Unless you have a strong desire to, don't play this version. The arcade version is available on pretty much every system nowadays anyway, while the only way to play this port legally is on the original hardware.
2 years late and barely recognizable, Pac-Man hit the Atari 2600, a system which it probably never should've touched. The attempt is admirable, but the VCS was clearly showing its age by 1982, and it was not suited to ports of the games that were popular in arcades. At the time this was pretty much the closest you could get to Pac-Man at home, but just a year later the Intellivision got its own port of the game, which is much more arcade accurate, and even the cancelled Coleco port holds up better.
This game is semi-often cited as one of the causes of the crash of 1983, and while it's far from the worst 2600 game on the market at the time, it's an easy one to pick on. The 2600 simply was not good enough at this point to handle the types of games that it was being tasked with, and if a console that was already 5 years old was propping up the entire North American video game market, it's not hard to see why it would crash.
I've focused a lot on this game's historical context, and not very much on the game itself, and that's because there really isn't much to say. Everything about this game feels like a weird bootleg version of itself both mechanically and visually. The maze is heavily simplified even compared to the original game, the ghost AI is less interesting, and it's just generally much easier.
Unless you have a strong desire to, don't play this version. The arcade version is available on pretty much every system nowadays anyway, while the only way to play this port legally is on the original hardware.
Terrible port of the arcade classic
This is not a very good version of Pac-Man. It takes too long to get to the part of the board that you want to be and also just looks unappealing.
Good lord the sound effects from this one still haunt me 20 years later...
Hand-me down console from my parents, think I played this in the early noughties? When I was younger than 7, at least.
Hand-me down console from my parents, think I played this in the early noughties? When I was younger than 7, at least.
I don't blame the game's programmer, Todd Frye, for the way this port turned out at all considering the hardware at the time but dear LORD this is an insult to the original in every which way.
It's like an executive walked by a Pac-Man arcade game once and tried to describe it to someone trying to recreate it. And, programming limitations aside, I still don't get why Pac-Man has an eye? Or why the portals are on the top and bottom? Or why Atari apparently had a dumbass policy saying that only space games can have black background? WHAT is the point of it? So some confused consumer doesn't walk by and purchase it on sight for thinking it's a space game and they get mad cause it's not?? I really wish I knew what was going on in that time period.
The gameplay itself is...not great either. Pac-Man moves fine but the flickering ghosts give me a headache and they cycle too fast for me to see. Maybe they could have changed up the gameplay so that you have to keep track of all of the ghosts and where they are at all times. I don't know, there was really no saving this game. I need to pop some of those pills that Pac-Man was eating in this port so I can send myself into a coma.
It's like an executive walked by a Pac-Man arcade game once and tried to describe it to someone trying to recreate it. And, programming limitations aside, I still don't get why Pac-Man has an eye? Or why the portals are on the top and bottom? Or why Atari apparently had a dumbass policy saying that only space games can have black background? WHAT is the point of it? So some confused consumer doesn't walk by and purchase it on sight for thinking it's a space game and they get mad cause it's not?? I really wish I knew what was going on in that time period.
The gameplay itself is...not great either. Pac-Man moves fine but the flickering ghosts give me a headache and they cycle too fast for me to see. Maybe they could have changed up the gameplay so that you have to keep track of all of the ghosts and where they are at all times. I don't know, there was really no saving this game. I need to pop some of those pills that Pac-Man was eating in this port so I can send myself into a coma.
Pac-Man on the...Atari 2600. It is passable in that it absolutely is Pac-Man- but it is a huge shame because this could have been so much better.
I mean it’s not the best but how much better could they do lol? it meets the standards of the rest of the system.
I have to give credit to E.T., at least it was not this!
This isn't Pac-Man, it's Abomination-Man
Oh gosh, Pac-Man was a successful arcade game, so they had a brilliant idea of porting the game to the Atari 2600, and the rest is history. Don't you dare play this game ever. Thanks. Play Ms. Pac-Man (what a horrible name, huh?) on SNES or Genesis/Mega Drive and you'll be fine.
Pac-Man já era sucesso nos arcades e fizeram esse jogo porcamente pro Atari. Nunca jogue essa bomba, sério. Jogue o Ms. Pac-Man (meu Deus esse nome ficou horrível) de SNES ou Mega Drive e vai ficar tudo bem.
Pac-Man já era sucesso nos arcades e fizeram esse jogo porcamente pro Atari. Nunca jogue essa bomba, sério. Jogue o Ms. Pac-Man (meu Deus esse nome ficou horrível) de SNES ou Mega Drive e vai ficar tudo bem.
This version is horrible. You can barely stay alive and even see anything.
"We know that millions of people all over the world just love the PAC-MAN arcade game. PAC-MAN has won the hearts of men, women and children everywhere. We also know that PAC-MAN has traditionally been an arcade game. Well, we at ATARI know all about arcade games. After all, we make some of the greatest arcade games In the world, and we know now to bring the same dynamite game play into your home. Our PAC-MAN has all of the excitement and challenge of the standard arcade game, and you get to play in the comfort and convenience of your own home. This is especially advantageous if you still plan to make an occasional appearance at the arcade to show off your great playing skills. (Little do they know that you've been practicing at home all along.)"
-Page 1 of the Pac-Man Atari Manual
at that point in 1982, you could probably argue that those words in the manual were the biggest lie ever told in gaming. When it comes to converting arcade games to the ol' 2600, obvious compromises need to be made in order to crunch out that game essence. Some games, like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Berzerk, etc, make the conversion relatively unscathed. But sometimes you just get some absolute nonsense like Pac-Man. While this game is in literally no means an accurate conversion of the arcade classic, it does show some interesting insight into Atari history both in a cultural and gamedev sense.
So like, the game pretty much shares gameplay similarities with the arcade version and that's kind of it. You eat dots and avoid ghosts that chase you, but compared to the arcade the ghost AI is different, scoring is different, the hitboxes are different, the maze is different, you get the idea. The maze isn't even like a bastardized facsimile of the original, it's just a bunch of circles in a grid. The hitboxes for actually eating thepellets video wafers seem to be a lot smaller and more precise than the hitbox for touching ghosts which makes things feel kind of inconsistent since you gotta be further forward towards pellets video wafers in order for them to actually count as eaten whereas the ghosts touch any pixel of you and pac man dies right then and there. At least on the control front things still feel responsive and snappy. There are only 8 different game variations here, and they just change how fast Pac-Man and the Ghosts can move to somewhat alter difficulty. I found that Game 6 is the fastest for both and even then it's still not that fast, so that's my rec if you want the most engaging Pac-Man gameplay. The slowest ghost speed is designed for younger children apparently, and at that speed the only way the ghosts will ever get you is if you actively try and get yourself killed which is awesome. Also this is probably just a me thing but using the stiff Atari joystick to try and quickly maneuver Pac-Man definitely hurts my hands after a little while. If there are any boomers on this site reading this please let me know of any proper Atari controller holding tech because I still haven't figured out how to use it in both a comfortable and consistently functioning way just yet.
If you look at this game solely through the lens of how accurate of a conversion this is, it's pretty dire. But ngl this game is pretty cool to look at retrospectively. Atari crunched the fuck out of one guy in 6 months to make something they KNEW would sell millions on brand alone (and sell it did, this is the best-selling game on the system), and so within those constraints the guy likely chose to go for preserving what he believed to be the essence of Pac-Man, rather than trying to make a straight conversion with no proper time or resources. Honestly, the essence still comes through pretty well even in this conversion, and there are probably a solid amount of the 8 million copies sold were probably satisfied casual customers just trying to get their fill of eating dots and chasing ghosts without much care towards the details. It's also just that by 1982 the Atari 2600 was already roughly 5 years old, and Pac-Man was already 2, and many other people had understood standards of what they should be expecting from a first-party conversion of an immensely popular arcade title, and this definitely wasn't up to those expectations. Gaming wasn't a fad anymore, the market of core gamermen had bloomed by this point, and if there's anything we know about those guys it's that they have quite high standards for their gamin. As a result, this game (and it's partner in crime that would release at the end of the year, E.T.) could be described as one of the first games known to the general public as a "bad game", and are frequently cited by historians and fans alike as a major cause of the great American video game crash of '83 as well as being touted as some of the worst games ever made in the later internet sphere of things.
Do I think this game really deserves that kind of reputation though? I mean, kind of? It's not nearly as ambitious as something like E.T. and is a pretty blatant result of Atari cutting corners to get as much easy profit on their grubby hands at the cost of making a quality product for their consumers, so it's not exactly like this game is great or misunderstood or anything imo. The Atari could absolutely have done a more direct conversion of Pac-Man, as both the Ms. Pac man port and plenty of 2600 homebrew can prove, so it's not like it was entirely the hardware at fault either. I just think that the end product is such a fascinating result of so many factors that it's hard not to be curious about it. It will obviously never happen, but I do wish Namco would reference this bizarro version of Pac-Man or include it in compilations as a historical curio or something. If they had a 2600 pac-man skin in a championship edition game or something I would absolutely pop the fuck off ngl. I definitely still wouldn't really recommend it to anyone outside of the curious gaming historians out there in this day and age, but an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel irredeemable worst-game-ever-made this game is certainly not.
-Page 1 of the Pac-Man Atari Manual
at that point in 1982, you could probably argue that those words in the manual were the biggest lie ever told in gaming. When it comes to converting arcade games to the ol' 2600, obvious compromises need to be made in order to crunch out that game essence. Some games, like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Berzerk, etc, make the conversion relatively unscathed. But sometimes you just get some absolute nonsense like Pac-Man. While this game is in literally no means an accurate conversion of the arcade classic, it does show some interesting insight into Atari history both in a cultural and gamedev sense.
So like, the game pretty much shares gameplay similarities with the arcade version and that's kind of it. You eat dots and avoid ghosts that chase you, but compared to the arcade the ghost AI is different, scoring is different, the hitboxes are different, the maze is different, you get the idea. The maze isn't even like a bastardized facsimile of the original, it's just a bunch of circles in a grid. The hitboxes for actually eating the
If you look at this game solely through the lens of how accurate of a conversion this is, it's pretty dire. But ngl this game is pretty cool to look at retrospectively. Atari crunched the fuck out of one guy in 6 months to make something they KNEW would sell millions on brand alone (and sell it did, this is the best-selling game on the system), and so within those constraints the guy likely chose to go for preserving what he believed to be the essence of Pac-Man, rather than trying to make a straight conversion with no proper time or resources. Honestly, the essence still comes through pretty well even in this conversion, and there are probably a solid amount of the 8 million copies sold were probably satisfied casual customers just trying to get their fill of eating dots and chasing ghosts without much care towards the details. It's also just that by 1982 the Atari 2600 was already roughly 5 years old, and Pac-Man was already 2, and many other people had understood standards of what they should be expecting from a first-party conversion of an immensely popular arcade title, and this definitely wasn't up to those expectations. Gaming wasn't a fad anymore, the market of core gamermen had bloomed by this point, and if there's anything we know about those guys it's that they have quite high standards for their gamin. As a result, this game (and it's partner in crime that would release at the end of the year, E.T.) could be described as one of the first games known to the general public as a "bad game", and are frequently cited by historians and fans alike as a major cause of the great American video game crash of '83 as well as being touted as some of the worst games ever made in the later internet sphere of things.
Do I think this game really deserves that kind of reputation though? I mean, kind of? It's not nearly as ambitious as something like E.T. and is a pretty blatant result of Atari cutting corners to get as much easy profit on their grubby hands at the cost of making a quality product for their consumers, so it's not exactly like this game is great or misunderstood or anything imo. The Atari could absolutely have done a more direct conversion of Pac-Man, as both the Ms. Pac man port and plenty of 2600 homebrew can prove, so it's not like it was entirely the hardware at fault either. I just think that the end product is such a fascinating result of so many factors that it's hard not to be curious about it. It will obviously never happen, but I do wish Namco would reference this bizarro version of Pac-Man or include it in compilations as a historical curio or something. If they had a 2600 pac-man skin in a championship edition game or something I would absolutely pop the fuck off ngl. I definitely still wouldn't really recommend it to anyone outside of the curious gaming historians out there in this day and age, but an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel irredeemable worst-game-ever-made this game is certainly not.
Not much to say, although if people used to say this game was a breakout I can’t see it. I can see how playing it can get “addictive” but it’s not for me.
very ambitious design choice to make it so the ghosts flicker so much that they're basically invisible half of the game, and then make them still able to kill you while invisible. Absolutely incredible stuff
bem feitinho até para a época (apesar dos bugs do pacman não comer esses pequenos retângulos).
Poderíamos vir com argumentos que o 2600 não suporta um jogo igual ao Pac-man, mas aí você vê que logo depois saiu MS. Pac-man e Pac-Man Jr., além de dezenas de outras cópias de labirintos que conseguem ser muito melhores do que este.
Mais uma vez, a pressa em conseguir dinheiro rápido e fácil fez a Atari lançar algo meia boca só pra ter algo pra mostrar no Natal. E de certa forma até deu certo se olhar que é o jogo mais vendido do 2600, e apenas 2/3 foram retornados.
Quanto ao jogo em si, não digo ser totalmente ruim, ele entretém por uns 5 minutos, até você se dar conta que tem jogos melhores e trocar a fita.
Mais uma vez, a pressa em conseguir dinheiro rápido e fácil fez a Atari lançar algo meia boca só pra ter algo pra mostrar no Natal. E de certa forma até deu certo se olhar que é o jogo mais vendido do 2600, e apenas 2/3 foram retornados.
Quanto ao jogo em si, não digo ser totalmente ruim, ele entretém por uns 5 minutos, até você se dar conta que tem jogos melhores e trocar a fita.
I remember my Mom told me once that she owned an Atari 2600 back in the day, and she remembers playing this version of Pac-Man a lot and loving it so much. With that in mind, I can now say with confidence that my Mom had a shitty childhood.
Game #117
Game #117
Pac-Man if he was a rabbit in a cosmetics testing lab.
My biggest gripe with the game is not just the sound design or graphics. It's the missed potential. Just check out a few homebrew versions and you can easily see that this could have run fine on 2nd-gen hardware. But instead, Atari shat the bed. At least later Pac-man games had cartridges with twice the power to make them look actually presentable.
My biggest gripe with the game is not just the sound design or graphics. It's the missed potential. Just check out a few homebrew versions and you can easily see that this could have run fine on 2nd-gen hardware. But instead, Atari shat the bed. At least later Pac-man games had cartridges with twice the power to make them look actually presentable.
Playable kind of but yeah this shit sucks. Made by one guy but yeah this does not hold up.
If there's a hierarchy of Pac Man games, I'm nearly 100% sure that this version is at the bottom.
Of course, I did play it for literally hours. So much so that the terrible sounds are embedded in my brain, from the wild siren that starts the level, and the "bok choi" sound of eating a ghost, to the weird "donk" sound when you eat a pellet (well, dash, really).
While the sounds are pretty bad compared the arcade, the tragedy does not end there. The map is different (the wraparound is at the top?), the colors are despicable, everything is square, there are only two ghosts, and THERE ARE ONLY TWO GHOSTS. Look, everybody agrees this version is vastly inferior to the arcade version and probably even the google doodle version. This isn't a hot take. However, I'm not going to give it 1 star because if I had an Atari hanging around and this cart appeared...
I'd probably still play it again.
Review from thedonproject.com
Of course, I did play it for literally hours. So much so that the terrible sounds are embedded in my brain, from the wild siren that starts the level, and the "bok choi" sound of eating a ghost, to the weird "donk" sound when you eat a pellet (well, dash, really).
While the sounds are pretty bad compared the arcade, the tragedy does not end there. The map is different (the wraparound is at the top?), the colors are despicable, everything is square, there are only two ghosts, and THERE ARE ONLY TWO GHOSTS. Look, everybody agrees this version is vastly inferior to the arcade version and probably even the google doodle version. This isn't a hot take. However, I'm not going to give it 1 star because if I had an Atari hanging around and this cart appeared...
I'd probably still play it again.
Review from thedonproject.com
alright I may have (probably needlessly) defended the ET game as something that gets way too much criticisms than it rightfully deserves, but even I'm struggling to think of what exactly can be defended over this port of Pac-Man.
I'll have to read more into its development but from a quick read, despite having a six-month period, it still faced issues cause Tod Frye didn't get any sort of specification about the arcade classic, and so had to spend 80 hours a week over the course of previously stated six months, not helping was having the 4KB cart being chosen for manufacturing reasons, meaning an already watered-down port was getting more bitten off cause of the limitations of the 2600's CPU and RAM. I'll admit, it's still exactly hard to call it a "bad" game considering the circumstances once again, but even still I kind of wonder how much could've been avoided and how much was unfortunate circumstances. Granted, I am theorizing early 80s development and design philosophies with my modern upbringings as well as my inexperience with the console and its full history, so the truth may be deeper than I think.
Now as for the game itself... I mean it's just a shoddy port of Pac-Man. Controls are sluggish and laggy, the AI is random rather than easy to figure out, it's even more repetitive due to the stage layout staying the same each time, and visually it's just boring and, cause of the constant flickering from the ghosts (which in fairness, was probably done so you'd figure out where they are exactly), a bit nauseating. Again, probably not one of the worst games ever cause even as borked as it is, it's still the arcade classic at the heart, but I will say I understand the claim concerning this game more than I ever will for ET.
I'll have to read more into its development but from a quick read, despite having a six-month period, it still faced issues cause Tod Frye didn't get any sort of specification about the arcade classic, and so had to spend 80 hours a week over the course of previously stated six months, not helping was having the 4KB cart being chosen for manufacturing reasons, meaning an already watered-down port was getting more bitten off cause of the limitations of the 2600's CPU and RAM. I'll admit, it's still exactly hard to call it a "bad" game considering the circumstances once again, but even still I kind of wonder how much could've been avoided and how much was unfortunate circumstances. Granted, I am theorizing early 80s development and design philosophies with my modern upbringings as well as my inexperience with the console and its full history, so the truth may be deeper than I think.
Now as for the game itself... I mean it's just a shoddy port of Pac-Man. Controls are sluggish and laggy, the AI is random rather than easy to figure out, it's even more repetitive due to the stage layout staying the same each time, and visually it's just boring and, cause of the constant flickering from the ghosts (which in fairness, was probably done so you'd figure out where they are exactly), a bit nauseating. Again, probably not one of the worst games ever cause even as borked as it is, it's still the arcade classic at the heart, but I will say I understand the claim concerning this game more than I ever will for ET.
I 100%'d this game in hardcore mode on Retro Achievements just to be a contrarian.
Anyway it's a bad port of Pac-Man and I already don't like Pac-Man THAT much (it's okay and I respect its place in game history). Is it as bad as everyone says? I dunno, probably not, I mean it's still basically Pac-Man at its core, it's just worse. There's lots of bad copies of Pac-Man, and honestly, this is not even the worst of the maze games that are like Pac-Man that I can think of.
But is it good? No, not really. To summarize the problems for you, it's graphically unappealing, repetitive (as is a problem with even the original Pac-Man), and generally made people mad because it's just such a stinky port of a game that people liked.
But if you play this, you'll get an appreciation even in 2021 for how tired people were getting of the Atari 2600 and how they were surely longing for a system that would bring something new and better to home gaming... and the NES is still 4 years away in the US... poor 1980-ers.
2.5 - Above Average: slightly fun, good, or unique in some ways
Anyway it's a bad port of Pac-Man and I already don't like Pac-Man THAT much (it's okay and I respect its place in game history). Is it as bad as everyone says? I dunno, probably not, I mean it's still basically Pac-Man at its core, it's just worse. There's lots of bad copies of Pac-Man, and honestly, this is not even the worst of the maze games that are like Pac-Man that I can think of.
But is it good? No, not really. To summarize the problems for you, it's graphically unappealing, repetitive (as is a problem with even the original Pac-Man), and generally made people mad because it's just such a stinky port of a game that people liked.
But if you play this, you'll get an appreciation even in 2021 for how tired people were getting of the Atari 2600 and how they were surely longing for a system that would bring something new and better to home gaming... and the NES is still 4 years away in the US... poor 1980-ers.
2.5 - Above Average: slightly fun, good, or unique in some ways
Never. Ever. Play. This. Game.