KING RAT'S COMPUTER DEN
PACMAN
Pac-Man is one of my favourite games. I don't always get the chance to play it, but it's a nice time-killer. Despite my hatred of most mobile apps, I have the game on my phone and play it when I'm bored. Somehow over time I've found myself essentially collecting various ports of the arcade classic, so I thought I would talk about them. I'm not gonna talk about them all, mostly just the ones I find interesting.
Currently, I only have ports for the C64. I'll be pointing out platform despite this, just in case I end up covering more.
GAMEPLAY
PACMAN (ATARISOFT, 1983)
Publisher: ATARISOFT
Platform: Commodore 64
Rating: 3/5
One of what I would assume are the first few ports for the game on the Commodore 64. It runs just fine (my emulator was being a bit buggy), though feels pretty overwhelming. To my recollection, there are no cutscenes, but it would be a great time waster. I believe they made ports for multiple other Pac-Man games.
GAMEPLAY
PACMAN (Arlasoft, 2022)
Publisher: Arlasoft
Platform: Commodore 64
Rating: 5/5
A much more recent port of the game, with an attempt to be as arcade-accurate as possible. While I'm not going to be able to tell how accurate it is, I do really enjoy playing it! My only complaint is that the screen is like the Gameboy 'scroll mode' version of Pac-Man, but it's a pretty quick thing to get used to.
GAMEPLAY
PACMAN (Majestic Software, 1983)
Publisher: Majestic Software
Platform: Commodore 64
Rating: 1/5
I found this one while hunting on the Internet Archive. It's definitely... Pac-Man... but it deviates so much from any other port I've seen that it's quite difficult to play. Their AI (or lack of it) makes it difficult to know where to go, as well as the ghosts being separated, rather than in the ghost house. While I don't like it, I could see someone finding it an interesting challenge.