I GOT PAC-MAN FEVER!!!

I need help, ladies and germs. I recently got one of these bad boys at Toys-R-Us: The Pac-Man Retro Arcade plug-in game for my TV.



This thing freakin RULES. It's got a dozen games on it including original Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Galaxian, Galaga, Rally-X, Xevious, Bosconian and a couple of others that I can't remember off the top of my head. They're all the original games just as I remember them from my youth. And y'know what? I STILL suck at Pac-Man 30 years after the fact. Ms. Pac-Man has always been my game. The pizza place around the corner from me when I was a kid had a Ms. Pac-Man game and I used to piss away my allowance on it regularly, so I can still crush, kill, and destroy on Ms. Pac-Man (unfortunately she's not included on this device, but it is sold separately on a similar game from the same manufacturer), but I have always, (and likely will always) sucked at the original. At the moment my high score on Pac-Man is somewhere around 25K, which is pure amateur hour -- on Ms. Pac Man I can usually get more than that on my first life!! But of course, I keep trying, and TRYING, and TRYING to beat that score, and I continue to suck. Arrrgh. I had almost forgotten how slow-moving original Pac-Man was when compared to Ms. Pac-Man. The gameplay was always much faster/better on Ms. PM.

My kids have a blast watching me play this thing by the way. I come home from work now and my two and a half year old brings me the game and sez "Eat those guys, Daddy! Eat those guys!"

I've been kicking ass on Dig Dug and Bosconian too (whatever that is - it's an outer space shoot-em-up that I don't remember from back in the day) though. I gotta say, this lil' booger is the best twenty bucks I've spent in quite a while. Screw PS3 or XBox -- gimme the old school classics like these any day.

That's awesome! I remember spending a fortune in quarters playing those games when I was a kid.

I always liked Galaga and Moon Patrol. There was also a game called Phoenix that I vaguely remember from around 1982.

Wow, I'm old as hell.

Fat Freddy wrote:

I gotta say, this lil' booger is the best twenty bucks I've spent in quite a while. Screw PS3 or XBox -- gimme the old school classics like these any day.

I did the same thing a few years back, picked up the Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man plug and plays on a whim, and suddenly found myself up into the wee hours trying to top my high scores. The old classics are still video game crack. I may not own an XBox 360, but I can kick anyone's ass at Pole Position.

Up till I bought this "Retro Arcade" plug-and-play thingy, the most up-to-date video game system I had in my house was a Sega Genesis. Newer video games do nothing for me. I'd rather play the oldies.

By the way... I'm still practicin' my ass off on original Pac-Man, and I still suck.

Oh, and Galaxian -- GOD, THAT IS THE MOST FRUSTRATING GAME EVER!!! When I was a kid and I'd play the arcade version, I thought I just sucked at it. But now that I'm playing it again as an adult, I realize it's not just me. That game is programmed to piss you off. Nine times outta ten if you shoot a laser beam up towards the rows of space ships, it just passes right between the rows without hitting any of'em. Then of course, you got the ones going kamikaze and flying down at you the entire time. Couple that with the fact that you can only fire once every two seconds or something like that (there is no such thing as "Rapid Fire" in Galaxian) ... the odds are just stacked against you from the git-go. Of course that could be due to the primitive video game technology at the time (Galaxian was what, 1981?) but my inner conspiracy theorist likes to think that the programmers made Pac-Man and Galaxian damn near impossible to master ON PURPOSE so that children of the '80s would continue to pump endless streams of quarters into the machines.

No wonder I liked Galaga better. At least you can shoot faster/more often on that one so you have a fighting chance.

Pac Man is memorizable, only so many patterns. Ms. Pac Man introduced random patterns into the AI, thus making it more difficult.

I'm sure Galaxian was programmed exactly like that on purpose, the graphics were limited by the time, but all that stuff like how fast you can fire would have been built into the card.

Yea, I'm sure Pac-Man is/was memorizable, in fact when I was a kid I remember there were quite a few make-a-quick-buck paperback "guides" to all the "patterns" in the game so you could "Win At Pac-Man!" ...never bought one of 'em though, and I guess I didn't have quite enough free time to try and figure them out on my own.

By the way, I just finished a round of Pac-Man and my high score now stands at 30,000 and change. Onward and upward!!!

Anybody else remember when Pac-Man had his own Saturday morning cartoon?



It was Godawful...but I watched it when I was a kid!!

The Pac-Man "Christmas Special," "Christmas Comes to Pac-Land," turned up unexpectedly on the Boomerang channel a couple of holiday seasons ago. I damn near died. I had totally forgotten that the show existed till that came on.

I just ordered one of these little boxes so I can play some Asteroids again

I dusted off my Arcade Classics Plug-N-Play gizmo last week for the first time in a while and sadly, it appears that the joystick is F'd up. I went to play Galaga and for whatever reason, the ship would not move to the left. I thought maybe the batteries were goin' dead, so I changed'em, tried again, same result. WTF?? Worked fine the last time I used it a month or so ago.

I'm bummed cuz I had a score of over 178K on Galaga and was hoping to crack 200K before long. Now I may have to hunt up a new one of these!!

Oh sure, blame it on the joystick!