Personal Computer News


Pacmania
By Mr. Chip
Commodore 64

 
Published in Personal Computer News #087

PACMANIA

The old favourite, Pac-Man, is now available for the Commodore 64.

The game has options for one or two players and you can use either the keyboard or joystick to manoeuvre your munching man around the maze. The game can develop into quite a competition.

In the end you develop a vendetta against the ghosts and have to play it one more time to see if you can reach a further screen before they gobble you up. The danger is developing blisters on fingers and thumbs from holding the joystick too tight, too long.

Pacmania

In case you haven't come across the game before here's a brief outline. You move round the maze eating up the dots which gains you points, and avoid the gnashers of the ghosts.

If you manage to eat a power pill (which appears as a flashing red dot in each corner) the ghosts turn blue for a period of time, and you can eat them for extra points. Once you've eaten a ghost its eyes return to the ghosts' den and a new ghost comes after you.

The eight different makes are available and 64 levels of difficulty in this version, and not to be outdone by the space games there are also hyper-maze ports. These can be quite handy until they sit you right on top of a ghost.

It would be better to have the choice of whether to have these in the maze. You may be doing quite well without any ghosts being near you, then run into a hyper-maze port and end up somewhere different.

As well as eating the dots and ghosts there is a selection of fruit which appears randomly for Pac-Man to eat. It has a bad habit of disappearing just when you've struggled through a throng of ghosts to reach it.

Susan Cooke

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