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.