Reviews

Although basically a Pac-Man clone, this was a highly addictive game - especially at a higher 'Tempo'.

I remember my Brother first completing this, with the game slowing down to a complete halt. The immortal words, "you're too good" were then displayed. Simple but effective gameplay...

Interesting Pacman variation from 1982.

Whilst the game is clearly influenced by Pacman it's not an exact clone. OK, so you have to eat food from a maze to clear it and you are pursued by four "chasers". In this version however, your character is a stickman rather than a pacman-like sprite. The stickman doesn't move continually in one direction until hitting an obsatcle, like Pacman does. Instead, he is moved one square at a time, but at least auto-repeat is enabled so you just hold the key down to keep him moving. Although, this makes it a bit fiddly to turn corners on the higher speed settings (or "tempo" as the game calls it). There are no power pills, but you do have a limited if generous number of "lasers" available that simultaneously fire in all four directions from the player until hitting a chaser or a wall. The laser causes a chaser to move back to its home corner. So the usefulness of the laser is severely limited when hitting a chaser which is already near its own corner as it will hardly move it, if at all.

The game is implemented in machine code allowing it to run at a high speed, although screenshots of it would make it superficially appear as if it was a BASIC effort. The game does look nice with a pleasing and varied colour scheme though. Sound effects, being in machine code are arcadey and quite good. There's also a funky rainbow BORDER effect when the game ends on achieving a new high score.

There are 15 user-selectable mazes available adding to the replayability value. Some of them are quite a bit more difficult than the default starting maze. There's a plethora of game options that can be selected before playing, but the game states you must POKE it if you wish to redefine the keys. So it's a little surprising there is no redefine-keys option in a game with so many other options. I'm not mad on the default cursor key setup but at least I can get around it with keystick emulation.

Overall, it's a reasonably good game from the early days of the speccy and the style shows it. Like many games of the time, machine code is used to speed things up and to add a couple of snazzy effects, but by keeping the character grid limitations and employing UDG-like graphics, it still seems like it's developed with a BASIC mindset.

Not the most original concept, but at least the variation of having a "laser" weapon and the potentially high playing speeds makes it worth a look.

A poor and badly aged variation on the Pac-Man theme. Has some interesting ideas but the global realization is simply too basic and sketchy. The bleeping noises are also quite irritating. Avoid.

A poor Pacman clone.
Funny thing: I think that the graphics of this game were used for inspiration for IKEA's SLINGRIG pillow.

An old rather crude Pac-man clone made by Campbell Systems firstly released for the ZX80 in 1982 , that actually plays better than it looks. Probably one of the most enjoyable games in the ZX80 era.

You'd think of this as yet another Pac-Man clone, but while it share the same kind of gameplay it actually has differences from a standard clone. Yes you're controlling a man around a maze eating things, in this case eating fruit in place of pills, yes there's enemies to avoid, in this case grumpy chasers in place of ghosts, and yes there's four of them. But here, rather than a power pill or fruit to eat to get rid of the baddies, you have a laser to fire at them, but it only works when you're close to them and when you do hit them they return to their corner, even when you are directly at that corner, meaning you can hit him and still lose a life because he still managed to hit you. The controls don't really work so well leaving you in a spot of bother especially with a grumpy coming after you. It's not a terrible game, it's just badly aged.