Pac-Land (NES)
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| Pac-Land (NES) | ||||||||||
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 Pac-Man is probably feeling disappointed at this game's port.
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Pac-Land is an arcade game released by Namco in 1984. It is the first platformer in the Pac-Man series, and based on the television series by Hanna-Barbera, as it features the series' soundtrack.
A year later in 1985, it was ported to the Famicom. Developed and released in Japan by Namcot, the game is somewhat faithful to the arcade version, though due to hardware restraints, some gameplay mechanics are simplified or removed entirely.
We're focused on this port, which is considered the worst Pac-Land port.
Why It Doesn't Deserve Magical Boots
- The graphics are terrible and too small for the screen to see even for a 1985 Famicom/NES game. Pac-Man has no nose, and the ghost except Sue don't wear hats. It should be noted that the same console version of the original Pac-Man had way better graphics than this and was released in 1984, here the graphics look like they we're draw by a 4 years old kid, the backgrounds and other sprites lack details, games such as Super Mario Bros. came out the same years and look way better than this.
- The color palette is also extremely awful and look like it was made to be downgraded from the other versions, we get it that it's a 1985 NES game but lot of games of 1985 had better colors than this, such as Ice Climber.
- Absolutely horrible controls that are some of the worst you might see in a NES game, instead of jumping with A or B and move with the D-pad, instead this game work with the D-pad as a jump button and the A and B buttons to move, which is extremely confusing and this will make this port an absolute nightmare to play because of that, and it is mostly the reason of why this port is so bad.
- Despite Mother Fairy appearing on the front cover of the box. She doesn't make an onscreen appearance.
- Pac-Man's family isn't featured in this port of the game either.
- Terrible level design, in which now it doesn't work quite as well as the original arcade version which had good level design, the problem here is that the levels aren't designed with the awful controls in mind and instead, they are designed for normal controls, not to mention that some of the levels are placed with lot of hazards, and because of this, the game is very hard to play and might be unplayable.
- The soundtrack is nicely translated from the arcade game but the problem is that it sound very ear bleeding and because of that, it completely ruins the fact that the soundtrack is faithful to the one from the original, however some might still like the port soundtrack.
- Awful sound effects that sound very ear bleeding, one example would be when the ghosts move, and they do a nose that is horrible to listen to and of course you will listen to it for a lot of times.
- Much like most of Namco games back then, there's isn't any continues.
- The levels where you need to jump over the water are extremely frustrating and is even worse than the other versions, not helping is that doing the high jump is very difficult and even worse than the other ports of the game.
- The maze-like levels that are in a end of a area are absent in this port, possibly because of the limitations of the console at the time.
- There are only 4 songs in the entire game, one for the start of a level, one for all of the levels, one for the end of a level and finally for the game over screen, and two of it had an extremely short loop.
- When they released this port to the Wii U virtual console for celebrating the apparition of Pac-Man in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, it is almost insulting that they didn't released the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16 version that is way better than this awful port.
- To make this worse, there was going to be a Wii U release of Pac-Man Museum which contains the arcade version of this game, but it got cancelled due to "delayed development".
The Only Redeeming Quality
- The game can be enjoyable if the game is not being atrocious.
Reception
This port received very negative reviews by critics and players, and is considered to be the worst port of Pac-Land ever made, it currently had a surprisingly high score of 3.11 based on 114 users on Gamefaqs[1]
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