![]() ![]() Due to the A2600's limitations, only one ghost could be displayed at a time. To make matters worse, the ghosts flicker badly. To me, it looks like Atari used only the one ghost, duplicated him three times, and selected random paths for them. In the A2600 version, however, all the ghosts are the same color so you can't tell them apart. In the original game, the ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde) have different colors so that you can tell them apart. It is as if he does not look for corners at all. When he travels north or south throughout the maze, his head does not turn vertically. However, he is a bit blocky and looks like a moving wrench with an eye. As you expect, Pac-Man looks like a filled yellow circle with a slice cut out of him. Instead, what they got was a rather poor conversion of the game which suffered from many flaws in its design. When gamers got a chance to play it, they expected it to be faithful to the original game as much as possible. There was much hype surrounding the Atari 2600 version. This was supposed to be the flagship title for the best 8-bit system for its time. The only good thing that I can say about Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 is that it at least stars one of my favorite characters ever since he was born in the eighties. Once all the dashes have been eaten, Pac-Man is warped to the next maze. If the ghosts are too much for him, he can go through the escape tunnels that are located at the top and bottom of the screen. He must do this in a small amount of time before the ghosts turn back to normal. However, if he eats the squares that hide in each corner of the maze, the ghosts will turn blue, allowing him to gobble them up. If he does collide with one ghost, he will lose a life. Pac-Man must eat all dashes in a maze of corridors, while avoiding the four ghosts. I can't recommend seriously playing it for a Pac-Man fix, but it is an interesting footnote in how a gaming empire crumbled. The most "authentic" of the versions is found in Pac-Man Collection for Game Boy Advance.Ītari 2600 Pac-Man is at best a novelty item for classic gaming or Pac-Man enthusiasts. Still, it seemed that Pac-Man was a hard game to accurately port for the longest time. Not only for the game being this way, but for Atari allowing the game to hit the shelves looking like this. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Jr., but as far as Pac-Man goes, the ball was dropped. They corrected this mistake (in a very big way) by introducing near-arcade perfect versions (for Atari) of Ms. But it came with a terrible price to Atari's future. This was one of those "the name will sell it alone" moments in gaming history, and they were right. One of the biggest selling games for the Atari, and also one of the biggest disappointments. ![]() Gamers played the same maze, over and over, without stopping. He always floated around the maze facing the side, no matter where he was going.Īnd of course, no intermissions. Nothing even close to the original sounds.Īnd the greatest mystery of all: Pac-Man could never point up or down. Dot eating, ghost noises, chasing the ghosts after eating an Energizer. There was a grating four-note tone that replaced the original Pac-Man theme, and it was awful. ![]() Not that they would miss much from the muted colors of the regular game. Setting the game in black and white mode allowed the player to see them clearer. You left them alone when the tone stopped that signified you could chase them. They didn't even flash when they were about to change back. They wandered around the broken maze aimlessly, and sometime, you might get caught. Hard to see, as they blended in with the maze, and devoid of the personality traits from the arcade game. They were all the same flickering, pastel color. And don't even get me started on the "vitamin" that replaced the fruit. There were no clever maze parts to lose ghosts, on a series of angles that looked like broken squares. The escape tunnel was no longer on the sides, but on the top and bottom. The maze was built nothing like the arcade's version. However, as I got older, I soon wised up that this game was almost NOTHING like my beloved Pac-Man that I loved in the arcades. I also liked the illustrations found in the game manual, as they had that sleek, rounded style that Atari's illustrator was know for doing with several of Atari's games. That's Pac-Man, right? Can't argue that the basic premise of the game was there. After all, you did control a yellow dot through a maze eating pellets and running from ghosts. Because it was Pac-Man, and to me, that was enough. Even rolled the high score back to zero, I played it so much. As a six-year old when the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man came out, I was more excited than anything to have my favorite video game come home. ![]()
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