Pac-Man (Game Boy) Review

For the young ones amongst you who have never played Pac-Man before, the concept of this game is to control a yellow ball (that's Pac-Man!) inside a maze-like map, eating pac-dots that pave the corridors, while avoiding the ghosts that roam within them, eager to catch the greedy dot gobbler. With this basic idea in mind, add into the mix that some of these dots are bigger, power pellets. Eating one turns every ghost blue, making Pac-Man temporarily invulnerable and capable of eating those ghosts' sheets. Victimised ghosts will retreat to the centre of the maze as floating eyeballs to get themselves together and pick up another coloured sheet to return to the chase.

Pac-Man progresses after completing each maze, by eating up every dot on the screen. The mazes all look the same; the only difference is that the speed of the game increases, making things more difficult as you go on. You win only one extra life when you reach 10,000 points, and the game goes on until you lose all your lives. The whole point is to stay alive as long as possible and score as many points as you can. Fruits also appear sometimes, gifting even more points if they are chomped down.

Monitoring the ghosts’ behaviour is key to succeeding in staying alive. As the game speeds up, you won't have as much time to react when they come close to you, and thankfully, their moves aren't completely random. Each coloured ghost - Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde - has a different general behaviour which, if understood, can help you predict where they'll go in the maze, helping you in keeping them at bay. While this applies to this Game Boy port of the arcade original as well, there's a problem though: the original Game Boy was incapable of rendering colours. For example, in this port, telling Blinky from Inky is impossible, so this makes predicting where they'll turn left or right equally unachievable, unless you can tell from their behaviour who they are.

Unfortunately, another problem arises making this even harder to achieve, if it ever was possible. The low resolution of the original Game Boy screen narrows the view of the whole maze to a fraction of it, so you can't see where all the ghosts are at the same time. This isn't too much of a problem if you don't seek to break records and play for hours on end, but don't expect to be able to play Game Boy Pac-Man competitively like you would on the arcade version or most home console adaptations. The graphics are close to the original, despite being in black and white. Even the cute intermissions of the original are present. However the visuals lack the appeal that the flashy colours of the original had. The same goes for the sound. While the sound effects and couple of chiptunes are okay, they don't have the legendary addictiveness of their arcade counterparts.