Mastery #16: Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

 

        

        I don't have that much to really say about this game. Many people know just how terrible of a port this game is compared to it's arcade counter-part. One of the most difficult parts about playing this game is that the ghost flicker on screen so much sometimes you can't really tell if they are blinking to where you can eat them or if they are just flickering normally. The arcade game made it very clear when a ghost was eatable, even had a sound effect to tell you when they were edible. But the Atari 2600 version nah, it does play a sound effect but even when the sound ends you still have maybe like 2-3 seconds still you can eat the ghost. I died so many times because of this. 

https://retroachievements.org/game/13094

    Most of the achievements to this set was fairly simple with the exception of 2 that caused me a lot of problems. Some of the cheevos were slightly difficult like the getting 5 lives total, or the reaching 5k score. Normally it doesn't look that bad and truth be told it wasn't really now looking back on it. But what really caused me the most trouble was the 10k points & the 9 lives. And those only proved difficult because of one reason. It was because what level I was on playing the game on. 

    

    For anyone that didn't know the Atari 2600 had a switch on the console that controlled different difficulty levels for games. Most of the time it would just change the speed of the game or just throw more enemies your way, but in the specific case to Pac-Man it would just speed up Pac-Man. Which in hindsight now is an ABSOLUTE MUST to earn the two cheevos that caused me the most problems. As you progress in this game the ghosts move faster but Pac-Man remains the same speed the entire time so when you get to the later levels the ghost move faster. So in mode 1 or I guess on difficulty 1 Pac-Man moves rather slow. So getting through the first 3 levels is fine but once you start getting to level 5 it become just way too difficult.

        

    

    So after I moved up the difficulty of the game the last two cheevos became much easier cause Pac-Man could actually keep distance from the ghosts. The other huge factor I used to master this was the "CC Pattern". This is a pattern in the map that you can move to avoid the ghosts almost every time. This pattern was created by Casey Coenen and can be found on the gamefaq page for Pac-Man. This pattern only applies to the Atari 2600 version too apparently. But it frustrates me that it says if you stick to this pattern you can go on forever, that's not true. Not true at all. I am sure they didn't actually mean it that it can work forever but still I didn't think there were going to be so many hiccups with it still. I died a handful of times, most of the time I had to go off the normal path just to avoid death. But I must say once I got the hang of it & understood what the path was doing it's not that difficult adjust. 

    

   

    Overall the achievement set was good set & the game was well not the greatest but if you turn off the piercing sound it makes & pop on a 80's arcade remix it's not nearly as bad.