Pac-Man

This much-loved game was released on a variety of platforms, including the Atari 2600 version, which was released on an unfinished state. This review only covers this port, which is considered as one of the worst video games of all time, but unlike popular belief, only has a micro portion of the video game crash of 1983. The objective is to traverse a maze, consuming all the wafers within while avoiding four ghosts (duh!). Unlike the arcade cabinet, the layout was changed to fit on the Atari 2600. The maze has a landscape orientation, the warp tunnel is located at the top and bottom as opposed to the sides and the prize at the bottom of the ghost box is a square called a vitamin worth 100 points. It's supposed to be the fruit. This port was developed from an unfinished prototype, making an abysmal method to release games in the way (as this became a trend decades later), which leaves unfinished content, major problems, bugs and glitches, and poor polishment in the quality. However, Atari gave the developer only five weeks (similar to E.T.), exactly 38 days to program and work on it, when most Atari 2600 games took at least 3-4 months to make. Atari made over 12 million cartridges, when there were only around 10 million Atari 2600 systems sold. This lead for the poor and overly-ambitious quality control of the library. The depiction of Pac-Man on the cartridge art as seen above looks unfaithful to the source material, he also looks very weird and uncanny. Later releases of the game had the same box art but with a more faithful-looking depiction of Pac-Man about to devour a wafer. For some reason, the game's manual changes up the names of several things. For example, the Dots are called Wafers, the Power Pellets are called Power Pills, and the Fruits are called Vitamins. The graphics of the game look very fugly, poor and amateurish, there are very few palettes in the game, even for the Atari 2600 standards. Older games had better graphics and more colors than this game. The sound effects are horribly ear-bleeding. Every time you eat a "Wafer", it plays an electric buzz that can be tiresome, and when you eat a "Power Pill", plays shooting stars that can be very annoying to the ears. To make matters worse, the start sound is very high-pitched and easily unpleasing. Speaking of sounds, one of the game's commercials that was only used in Australia used sound effects from the arcade version, rather than the actual sounds from the port. The cartridge and box arts of the game are also misleading since it features all four ghosts (one eaten with only his eyes in the safe zone), but there are only two in the game. There is only one screen in the whole game, even after completing the same level multiple times. Which is pathetically stupid for the Atari 2600 standards for such this little content, even E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial had more screens and it was released in the same year. The maze is completely different from the Arcade version, most likely due the technical limitations of the Atari 2600. Pac-Man's sprite never faces up or down, meaning while moving up or down the sprite would remain facing left or right. By that, Pac-Man would eat the Wafers by his forehead or jaw, which doesn't make sense whatsoever. There are only two ghosts instead of four, due to flickering (likely due to hardware limitations). Technically, there are supposed to be four, but two of them stay invisible most of the time. Also, due to the sprite limit of the Atari 2600 system, the ghosts always flicker and sometimes they become invisible, so you can never see them on the screen. This can lead to many cheap deaths. The "Power Pills" only stay on screen for a short time and last for a short time too, even if the difficulty switch is set to B (Easy). The game is merciful, as the player gets an extra life every time they beat a stage. Overall, this is an example of how to not make an amazing arcade release. It's so fake and sad.