Pac-Man (1980)

An interesting thing that I noticed is that of all the games I've reviewed already, Adventure and this game, Pac-Man, are the only two that don't involve you shooting the hell out of people/aliens/tanks/missiles. I've also noticed that everything else about Pac-Man doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

You tell me about one Pac-Man interpretation, and I'll show you ten more.

I'm not sure where to begin with Pac-Man. You're a yellow ball running around munching on smaller yellow balls or various fruits while evading multicolored ghosts. Unless you can get to the bigger yellow balls that apparently lets you eat the ghosts, these ghosts don't just pass through and leave you sitting on the ground covered in ectoplasm. You actually become possessed and eat yourself alive. Or something to that tune.

I was not prepared for this anarchy!

Why is this game fun? Because we like being the mice running around in the maze looking for the cheese? If you ask B.F. Skinner we are. We like being rewarded (getting a high score, reaching the kill screen, etc.) for certain actions (playing the game) especially if our reward is given in random increments (or just not guaranteed unless we try again). Dying in Pac-Man is easy because there's only one way to combat the enemy; problem is it's limited to four times a round, for a short window of time, and only practical in situations when you're cornered or need a way across the maze. On top of that, eating an enemy doesn't even put them out of the game. They just return to their starting box and come right back out for revenge. That makes evading enemies that much more necessary and that requires you being able to watch the movements of four enemies simultaneously including when they're close to using the warp tunnel that can put them in real close, real fast.

Run, little dude! That's all you can do! Run!

Pac-Man has such a simple yet original concept in how the only goal is to collect all the dots but the phantasmic tormentors are, for all intents and purposes, invincible; this game becomes much more complicated and requires more coordination and strategy than initially thought because of this. It's for this reason that Pac-Man belongs in the pantheon of classic games.

That and reading into it too much is just fun as hell.

Final Judgment: 7/10