Pac-Man is brill. Along with Space Invaders, I can play this for hours. I’m not very good at it, having never been past about level 10, but I think it is an excellent game.

This version is…. well, ok I suppose. As with all “conversions” it has good points and bad points. The good ones are that the characters are instantly recognisable.

The bad ones are that the console needs a light source to work, much like the Tomytronic games. It also doesn’t scroll smoothly, which you can’t really expect from an LCD game. Plus it is a flip-screen game, so you can only see a small section of the overall game board until you get to the edge of the screen on the left after which you appear on the right but with a different section of board.

I was discussing Pac-Man with a friend, called Canadian Dave, while we were walking back to work one afternoon. Canadian Dave said something that I hadn’t considered, and it changed the way I thought about Pac-Man completely.

He said “I don’t like playing all these overhead arcade games…”

Up until then I’d always assumed that when we were lookng at Pac-Man we were looking at him side-on. What Canadian Dave highlighted is that we’re actually looking down at the top of Pac-Mans head. This means that his mouth is actually a slot that goes vertically all the way down his body.

And don’t get me started on how the Ghosts actually look…