Pac-Man

Arcade 1980
Publisher: Namco
Developer: Namco

This is a good time to be writing about Pac-Man because this summer he is turning forty. Pac-Man has been a cultural icon for forty years. That’s not easy to do. There aren’t any older video game characters with that kind of staying power. He’s never really been out of the public eye either. There’s been a consistent flow of games, cartoons, and toys almost from the start. Practically every major game console has at least one Pac-Man game on it, and the original game has been ported dozens of times. You can even still find the game in arcades. It’s still there in the movie theater next to the crane machines. Pac-Man has endured when so many other great games from the early days have been mostly forgotten. It’s also a franchise where simplicity works in its favor as more complicated later editions never had quite the same impact even if they were better games. It’s an interesting phenomenon. So just how good is this game anyway?

I think it’s safe to say that Pac-Man will always be fun to play even if it’s not perfect. I know I always have fun with it even if I’m not very good. I am much better at many of the sequels, but the original has always been a bit elusive. I almost always die in the first level at least once. Of course this game isn’t so much about the levels as it is about the points, so the thing that makes it an icon is also the thing that makes some gamers turn away from it. This game is all about the ghosts and their predictable patterns. To do well you have to learn how each ghost behaves and lure them near the power pellets to get the big bonus for eating them. They can be worth 6,400 points if you eat them all which is much more than what the dots are worth. I know plenty of gamers who are turned off by the game because it requires so much memorization and repetition. To do well you have to do things the same way every time. In a lesser game it would all get old fast. Luckily Pac-Man is a strong enough game to survive its own mechanics.   

What makes the game an icon is that most people who play it probably don’t even know they are supposed to be memorizing patterns. They are more interested in the presentation. You have those great colorful ghosts and that well crafted maze. You have the classic sound effects and fruit that pops up in the middle of the screen. After this became a hit every game started to have fruit in it. That’s one of the strangest ways Pac-Man influenced gaming. For the casual gamer it could be even more exciting because they don’t know what’s coming next. It’s an icon because it appeals to both the hardcore and the casual gamers. You can memorize ghost patterns or you can  react quickly and try to survive long enough to see what the next fruit is. Both play styles are valid in my book.

So Pac-Man is obviously a great game, but it’s a little bit tricky to rank. It’s a franchise that has topped itself many times over the years. I don’t want to rank it higher just because it is famous and important. I want to judge it on its own merits. It is fun, but there is only one maze and so little within the game changes that is can get tedious after a while. Luckily I’m not good enough for that to happen, but I could certainly see that happening. I am going to put it right behind the underrated Pac-Mania. I hate putting games from the same series right next to each other, but it’s more well crafted than Mickey’s Racing Adventure so it can’t go below that one. I am also excited because now I have a top 20. That means that I can start saying games are going in to the top 10 and the bottom 10. Hey welcome to the top 10 Pac-Man!

1. Super Mario Odyssey

2. Galaga

3. Exodus: Ultima III

4. Pac-Mania

5. Pac-Man

6. Mickey’s Racing Adventure

7. Metro-Cross

8. Gaplus

9. Dragon Spirit

10. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)

11. Red Sea Crossing

12. Baraduke

13. Gamma-Attack

14. The Legend of “Valkyrie”

15. Galaxian

16. Evoland

17. Defunct

18. Gyruss (2600)

19. Looney Tunes Racing

20. Birthday Mania

Defunct

Nintendo Switch (3), 2018
Developer: Freshly Squeezed
Publisher: SOEDESCO

If you play Switch than you know that every week they have a sale. They usually have some good games that are half off, but the ones that really interest me are the one that cost less than a dollar. They will often have games that are just a few pennies. A ten cent game is practically a free game. How can I pass on that? Some of the games are pure trash, but some of them are at least interesting. Then there are ones like Defunct that almost play like tech demos. It’s a good concept with very little game.  

Defunct is an adventure game where you play as a unicycle robot trying to find its way home. The gimmick is that you can use the terrain to get some very high speeds. This is both the game’s strength and weakness. Of course going really fast is always fun, but it also makes it easy to miss what’s going on. They compensate for this by having plenty of empty space. Most of the terrain can pass right by without much consequence. It’s also a game light on challenge as your mostly just getting to the end of the level and on to the next one. There are a few puzzles to solve, but they mostly involve going fast in the right direction. The game looks nice, but it’s still pretty empty. It’s also light on story with a dialogue free robot starting out somewhere and then ending up somewhere. That’s about as deep as it gets.

Apparently this won game of the year at the 2014 Swedish Game Awards. I find it a bit odd that a game that passed me by with so little impact could be a major award winner. That just goes to show you that different people are looking for different things in their games. However I have never heard of any of the other nominated games so it might just be that they didn’t have much to chose from. Either way it’s not going very high on the list. It’s too short and uneventful to leave much of an impression. It’s just barely squeaking into the blue section right above Gyruss. Still I didn’t feel like I wasted my nickel. That counts for something.

1. Super Mario Odyssey

2. Galaga

3. Exodus: Ultima III

4. Pac-Mania

5. Mickey’s Racing Adventure

6. Metro-Cross

7. Gaplus

8. Dragon Spirit

9. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)

10. Red Sea Crossing

11. Baraduke

12. Gamma-Attack

13. The Legend of “Valkyrie”

14. Galaxian

15. Evoland

16. Defunct

17. Gyruss (2600)

18. Looney Tunes Racing

19. Birthday Mania

Exodus: Ultima III

DOS (1), 1983
Developer: Origin Systems
Publisher: Origin Systems
Genre: RPG (2)

Exodus is one of the most ridiculous games I have ever played through. I still can’t believe I didn’t give up halfway through. How crazy is this game? If your party dies it autosaves and you have to make a brand new party to save up money to resurrect the dead people. You raise your stats on a hidden island only accessed by sailing into a whirlpool. You can earn a resurrect spell but it sometimes turns your party member into ashes which in turn can be cured by a spell that uses actual stat points. Have you ever played a game where spells cost actual stat points? Because I certainly have and I sure feel accomplished now that it’s over.

Exodus is an important game for several reasons. The most signifigant is that it was the first Ultima game, and one of the first overall, to use a party of multiple characters. The party has four characters and I probably spent three or four hours just getting together a party that could stay alive. As soon as the game starts you start running out of food so you have to be able to earn money quickly. Luckily the normal battles are actually one of the easiest parts of the game. Yes this is a game where the battles are no problem but walking around kills you. Still there’s something exhilarating when everything starts to click and the game really gets going. For the record I went with two paladins and two wizards. Ranged attacks will save your life in this one.

This is a very old school RPG in that it gives you almost no information on what you’re actually supposed to do. The land is much smaller than in the first two Ultima games but to compensate the quest is even more obscure. The only true goal is to defeat Exodus, but to do that there are items to collect. Several of them are hidden in the game’s well designed dungeons. This is a good game if you like old-fashioned dungeon crawling. They are all a uniform size and easy to map, but small enough to not get super lost in. The second main key for beating the game is character building, and as I already mentioned it’s kind of a pain. Levels are gained by talking to Lord British in his castle every 100 experience points, but this only raises HP. To raise stats you have to go to the city of Ambrosia and pay 100 coins per point. Of course to get there first you have to find a boat. The only way to do this is wander around the shore waiting for a pirate ship to show up. Then you have to sail with the wind and find the whirlpool. When your ship is docked the whirlpool will come and destroy it like nobody’s business, but when you actually want to sail into it the whirlpool suddenly develops a boat phobia and runs away. Then you finally get to Ambrosia and have to find the shrines which are well hidden and spend all your money. It’s that easy folks! I did the math and if I wanted to max out everyone’s stats I would’ve needed 120,000 gold. With an average of about 40 gold per chest that’s 2,800 battles. I wonder how many battles it takes in something like Dragon Quest? Luckily people in towns drop treasure chests just like monsters and respawn as soon as you leave the city. It’s frustrating but a lot more fun than it sounds.

I’d say the hardest part for me was getting used to the controls. I do not have very much experience with PC games so there was a bit of a learning curve. It didn’t help that many things that would be automatic in later games had to be keyed in. For example you have to pick a direction when you want to talk to someone which means more keystrokes. The characters all have individual gold, so when you are in a shop there can be some money juggling going on. A trip to the store which would just be pushing X in a modern console game might look more like J,1,T,down arrow,B,N,F,Esc. It doesn’t help that some commands are split. The command for equipping weapons is R but the command for equipping armor is W. You push E to enter a town but B to board your ship. Every spell has a different letter which you have to memorize. I am so used to drop down menus which show all the spells at once. As time goes on the commands will become more streamlined, but in 1983 it was still a novelty to use as many keys as possible. It certainly looked impressive in the manual, but in practice it could get frustrating.

If I sound like I am ranting a bit that’s mainly because this game left a strong impression on me. It’s one that I will be thinking about for a long time. I felt like I had to struggle for every inch of progress. This all adds up to a game that is going to be ranked fairly high even though it is absolutely ridiculous. It may be frustrating but it is also distinct. It may be vague but it also fun and exciting. Somehow all the individual frustrating pieces come together to make a great game. I would’ve felt like hot stuff if I got this game for Christmas in 1983 when my console gaming friends were getting the first wave of Atari shovelware. Oh your controller has one button? It takes me more buttons than that just to ride my boat.

1. Super Mario Odyssey

2. Galaga

3. Exodus: Ultima III

4. Pac-Mania

5. Mickey’s Racing Adventure

6. Metro-Cross

7. Gaplus

8. Dragon Spirit

9. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)

10. Red Sea Crossing

11. Baraduke

12. Gamma-Attack

13. The Legend of “Valkyrie”

14. Galaxian

15. Evoland

16. Gyruss (2600)

17. Looney Tunes Racing

18. Birthday Mania

Super Mario Odyssey

Nintendo Switch (2) 2017
Publisher & Developer: Nintendo
Genre: Action platform (2)


So far I have been trying to avoid ranking Mario games because they are almost all going to the top of the list, but Super Mario Odyssey is just too much fun to not talk about. I wanted to write about it just so I could relive some of the memories. Say what you will about Nintendo, but they know how to sell a system. They had two era defining masterpieces in the early days of Switch. The first was The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild and then a few months later they released Super Mario Odyssey. These are two games that fit the new console perfectly and are almost all you need. If you only bought these two games the console would still be worth it. They also compliment each other perfectly. Breath of the Wild is the ultimate exploration heavy adventure game. It’s full of puzzles and requires concentration. Super Mario Odyssey, however, is gaming’s ultimate celebration.

(Look at how wacky this is!)

Odyssey is the most full game I have ever played. It’s an open world game split into several individual worlds. Exploration is a major part of its identity, and there is something to find practically everywhere. If you like to ask yourself “hey is there something over there”? you will rarely be disappointed. I’ve never found more stuff in more places in a game. Liked getting 120 stars in Super Mario 64? How about collecting 999 moons? That’s right, 999. That means that the levels are just crammed full. Some moons and collectibles are just gonna be laying there but some require great skill. It’s no kiddie game. 

(It's so colorful!)

It’s also just plain fun. A feeling of celebration runs throughout. I know I previously complained about firework shows in games, but this game is practically one big firework show. Every level is a well crafted nod to familiar Mario settings. There’s a ghost level, a desert level, an ice level, and many more classic environments. There is a party beach where everyone seems to be in a good mood. There is a food level with a big celebration in the works. There is a big city level featuring the return of a triumphant Pauline from the original Donkey Kong. There are a bunch of silly costumes to unlock which only serve the purpose of making the player smile. It may be the ultimate feel good game, and what could be better than that?

Well at this time there is nothing better than that. Super Mario Odyssey is easily going to the top of the list, and I predict it is going to stay there for a while. This is one of those rare cases where the game I am talking about is actually one you may want to go out and buy. Well if you still can’t decide than just look at where it is in the Ironclad List of Correctness. It is truly one of the all time greats.

1. Super Mario Odyssey

2. Galaga

3. Pac-Mania

4. Mickey’s Racing Adventure

5. Metro-Cross

6. Gaplus

7. Dragon Spirit

8. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)

9. Red Sea Crossing

10. Baraduke

11. Gamma-Attack

12. The Legend of “Valkyrie”

13. Galaxian

14. Evoland

15. Gyruss (2600)

16. Looney Tunes Racing

17. Birthday Mania

Evoland

Nintendo Switch (1) 2019 (Original Release 2013)
Developer & Publisher: Shiro Games
Genre: RPG (1)

Sorry, I couldn’t write about Air Raid because I couldn’t get the game to work. Enjoy this RPG review instead!

Do you enjoy it when video games reference other games? Sure, everyone does. It show’s we’re all part of the same club. I think it’s required by law for every game to say “it’s a secret to everyone” or “it’s dangerous to go alone.” So if you like a game that has a few references to older games than you should love a game that’s nothing but references. What, that sounds lazy and kind of obnoxious? Too bad you didn’t tell the makers of Evoland. In their world every reference to another game is clever and necessary no matter how obvious it is.

The basic idea of Evoland is a good one. It’s a game that goes through the evolution of RPGs from the early 80s to the modern day. However, it falters in the execution in a couple of key areas. The first is that it goes through the evolution far too quickly. As you move around the overworld you will find treasure chests that upgrade aspects of the game like graphics and menu screens. It’s fun in the beginning to collect chests and see what’s going to change. However by about a fourth of the way through the game it pretty much looks and plays like it’s going to for the rest of the game. If, like me, you are a fan of games from the 8 and 16 bit era than you are going to be disappointed. The game moves through these eras way too quick leaving most of the game to have graphics more in line with a low-end 3DS game. If I’m going to play what is basically nostalgia the game I want to spend more time with Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy VI than I want to spend with a digital 3DS game. I feel like they were missing the point.

The other problem is that the game itself just isn’t designed very well. The people who made the game obviously thought that we would be so entertained by the references that we wouldn’t care about the weak gameplay. The turn-based sections are especially boring and seem to only exist so you can say “hey, that’s like Final Fantasy.” It’s mostly just pushing the attack button without any of the strategy or tension of real turn-based games. The Diablo section is nothing but a barrage of enemies who drop “funny” upgrades which don’t actually do anything. It’s just button mashing which once again misses what made Diablo so fun to begin with. The Zelda sections are a bit better, but there are hundreds of games that do Zelda action better. The worst part is that most of these sections take place after the evolution has already happened so there’s not even the novelty to enjoy anymore. There’s just shallow gameplay.

I don’t know maybe I’m just getting jaded in my old age, but I think a game needs to do a little more than simply reference older and better games. Any fan of RPGs has already played all the games referenced, and instead of playing a bad version of Final Fantasy they can very easily find the real thing and play. I get that the makers of the game love video games, but that doesn’t excuse lazy design. RPGs have been my first love for almost thirty years no, so I am definitely the target audience with this game, but I enjoyed it less and less with each new objective. I just with the developers had something to say besides “video games are fun and we should talk about them incessantly.”

So as you can probably guess this one is going to rank fairly low. I am excited that it’s my first RPG ranking, but it’s not a very auspicious start. I do like it enough to get it out of the red section, but I would much rather play Galaxian any day. At least the designers of Galaxian understood the fundamentals. Also, I bought this game in a collection with its sequel on my Switch so just be ready. We haven’t heard the last of Evoland!

1. Galaga

2. Pac-Mania

3. Mickey’s Racing Adventure

4. Metro-Cross

5. Gaplus

6. Dragon Spirit

7. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)

8. Red Sea Crossing

9. Baraduke

10. Gamma-Attack

11. The Legend of “Valkyrie”

12. Galaxian

13. Evoland

14. Gyruss (2600)

15. Looney Tunes Racing

16. Birthday Mania

Next time: I think I’ll stick with Switch. Just be warned, I have a lot of cheap boring games for it

Birthday Mania

Atari 2600 (4), 1984
Genre: Action
Developer: Robert Tokar
Publisher: Personal Games Company

For a very brief time in the fall of 1984 you could’ve received a very special birthday gift. If you lived in New Jersey and your parents were reading the right newspaper you could’ve ended up with a personalized video game. As a birthday present it was actually pretty neat. The title screen played Happy Birthday and even showed your name. Imagine having your own name in a video game! I’d get a kick out of that even in 2020. The downside is that being a kid in 1984 you’d probably have no idea that if you held on to the thing for the next 35 years you’d end up with one of the rarest and most valuable collectibles in all of gaming. Grandma’s gift then could almost buy you a car now. So is the game strong enough to get past the novelty? 

(I like that it's a little guy instead of just a square)

As a novelty birthday present it’s just about perfect, but as a game it’s a bit of a wash. The game itself is a simple Kaboom clone. You have candles falling down the screen and you have to blow them out before they get to the bottom of the screen. If you miss too many candles, represented by pounds of air, your game is over. Every candle is worth one point and you get ten extra pounds of air for every 100 candles you blow out. As far as I can tell the difficulty doesn’t change that much. It seems that there were more candles on the screen after a while but that might have actually made things a little easier. With more targets it’s easier to hit something. Unfortunately that’s all I have to say about the game.

I love the story behind this game, but sadly it is dull to play. The candles move too slow and there are too few variations for the game to be much fun to play. It needs something besides one point candles. Even making the candles ten points would be an improvement. Nobody likes getting just one point. That’s like finding a penny on the ground. It doesn’t feel bad, but it doesn’t add much to your day either. So I am sorry Birthday Mania but you’re going all the way to the bottom. You’re actually more boring that Looney Tunes Racing. I feel bad about this one, so hopefully I can find a really bad game to put even lower on the list. I know there are some out there.

1. Galaga

2. Pac-Mania

3. Mickey’s Racing Adventure

4. Metro-Cross

5. Gaplus

6. Dragon Spirit

7. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)

8. Red Sea Crossing

9. Baraduke

10. Gamma-Attack

11. The Legend of “Valkyrie”

12. Galaxian

13. Gyruss (2600)

14. Looney Tunes Racing

15. Birthday Mania

Next time: The king of rare Atari games