Pac-Man (Arcade) review "As I sit here right now writing this review I feel myself urging to get to that arcade, where I pop a quarter in and turn on the Pac-Man machine and play that incredibly addictive game where you control a little yellow creature who goes around eating dots around a small maze, or better yet play it online at 2:00, and then quickly realize that the time has flown to 4:00 oh so quickly. The addictive game never escapes my head and when I sit down and play the game, I'm just letting the hours fly ar..."

As I sit here right now writing this review I feel myself urging to get to that arcade, where I pop a quarter in and turn on the Pac-Man machine and play that incredibly addictive game where you control a little yellow creature who goes around eating dots around a small maze, or better yet play it online at 2:00, and then quickly realize that the time has flown to 4:00 oh so quickly. The addictive game never escapes my head and when I sit down and play the game, I'm just letting the hours fly around my head...

Ah, enough of my nonsense. Pac-Man is an extremely popular video game character, and back in the good old 1980's, people were simply addicts of JUST sitting down at their arcades and playing this game for hours straight, and wasting off their money. Unfortunately, Pac-Man finally died, but we shall always remember that nice game on the arcade, shall we not? And with no doubt, it was one of the most addictive games of all time, and it's a great, fun time killer.

The story is sort of like this: you are Pac-Man, and you and your wife live off eating pellets and dots and stuff like that. Go ahead and sue me, I have no idea why. But they have basically no dots, and so Pac-Man has to go off and get some dots to eat... but he has to go and eat them in the worst possible place: a maze full of ghosts. The story is overall not really that imaginative or anything, but it's perfectly acceptable under all considerations, you know.

Pac-Man is an extremely simple game: you play as a small yellow creature named Pac-Man, and you're in a large maze full of small dots and large white circles. Pac-Man needs to get the dark maze and avoid any ghosts that he finds on the way and eat every dot to be found inside the maze. The ghosts are small aqua, pink, orange, and white blobs. They roam around different parts of the maze looking of Pac-Man, but you have to avoid them, because being eaten by ghosts has never been something that I have personally enjoyed, mind you.

There is, however, a little more to Pac-Man than that. Pac-Man runs on a scoring system; whenever you eat a dot, you get 10 points. There are white circles scattered throughout the maze, and whenever you eat them, all the ghosts will turn into blue blobs. You can get to them and eat them, and then they'll turn into small eyes, and you get 200 to 1600 points, which is really the key to scoring a lot of points, besides just roaming around and eating dots. If a ghost is eaten, they have to return to their ''base'' in the center to restore themselves.

Pac-Man gets three lives in his way through the maze, eating dots. Whenever a ghost touches him, he loses a life. The only way to get one back is to score 10000 points, which can prove to be exceedingly difficult. The ghosts also differ in several ways, a very nice thing for a game made back in 1980. The red ghosts just insists on hunting down Pac-Man and eating him; the orange ghost just wanders around mindlessly and just goes after Pac-Man when he sees him; the blue ghost goes around doing nothing, and the pink ghost is a little slower than the red ghost, but still wants Pac-Man badly. Very nice gameplay.

Perhaps the only bad thing is that when the level goes up, the maze doesn't change! It's still the same with walls around it, and open portals around the left and right that Pac-Man can go through to get to the other side. The ghosts get a lot faster, but besides that there's no difference. There's fruit in the middle that, when eaten, gives Pac-Man a lot of bonus points that changes, but besides that, the maze stays exactly the same, no matter how high a level you manage to get up to. Still, this doesn't hurt the great innovation that Pac-Man offers.

Graphically, Pac-Man is really nothing special. The maze is black, and the walls around it are blue. All of the dots are of a yellow color, and Pac-Man himself is also yellow. Pretty much all that you see of Pac-Man is just a small yellow creature with a huge mouth to eat stuff. The ghosts are in a variety of colors, and they look rather nice. The game also just has a funny look to it. No matter what, it makes me laugh a bit when I see Pac-Man's mouth chopping away at little dots. Overall the graphics are nice, although really nothing compared to that of today.

There isn't any sound in Pac-Man, except the chomping that he does away at the dots, and occasionally when he eats a ghost you'll hear a really cool sound. There's a rather annoying opening song that begins the game that really gets repetitive after hearing it enough, but you can't really expect much from a game made all the way back then. Overall, the sound was pretty good for its time, but don't expect anything impressive, or at all standing up to that of today's standards.

It's not exactly like Pac-Man really starts out challenging when you first sit down to play it. The red ghost will just go slowly around together with the pink ghost, and you'll have absolutely no trouble with the blue ghost or the orange ghost. But once you start eating up all the dots in the maze and start getting a ton of new lives, the ghosts get much, much faster and a lot smarter too. Getting up one level in itself can be difficult due to the fact you have less space, but the difficulty is still quite acceptable, and just right, since it begins very easy.

I don't know why, but Pac-Man is a very addictive game, although not quite as good as its sequels as they were a bit more innovative, they had quite a bit more variety to them, and they were always the best games in the huge series. Still, I definitely recommend that you go ahead and burn a few quarters playing Pac-Man. It's quite addictive with average graphics and sound, pretty fun gameplay, and it's definitely a nice challenge when you want one, not to mention like all the other arcade games, it has very high replay value. Overall, you'll probably enjoy it Pac-Man a lot.

Community review by gbness (April 24, 2004) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.