The pill-popper's back!

Producer: Grandslam
Fruit and Pills: £8.95 cass, £12.95 disk
Author: Steve Marsden

After being inflated into full 3-D for Pac-Mania (82%, Issue 59), everyone's favourite pill-popper has now grown legs and arms! After using these to finally escape his famous haunted mazes he returns back home to the island of Pac-Land. Pac's never been one for the quiet life though, and when he happens on a lost fairy he resolves to take it home to Fairyland.

But no sooner than Pac sets off on his trip, the ghosts Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are on his trail. Having never been pill-poppers they haven't suffered Pac's limb-growing side effects, but that doesn't stop them driving cars and piloting planes. Once again Pac is on the run, this time across a flick-screen landscape - jumping fire hydrants and tree trunks, but not the ghosts who float upwards to gobble him up.

Pac's trip to Fairyland will take him through four sections, including a town, forests, desert and a mountain pass with moving platforms. As one would expect of Pac-Land there's plenty of food to gobble for extra points and quite a few power pills - so you can eat up the ghosts for a change. But all this exertion is tiring, and if your energy runs out you lose a life.

The rotund Pac has undoubtably won a special place in most gamesplayers hearts and has starred in some excellent coin-ops, Pac-Land being one of them. It's a pity, then, that the conversion is so poor. After some pretty neat scrolling of an isometric landscape in Pac-Mania, Grandslam now have the gall to offer a bland, totally colourless game with a flick-screen technique which severely limits the playability. Then there's the weird credit system - you can select up to a hundred credits but they don't give you extra lives! For the character alone it's fun to play for a while, but with no colour, no scrolling, and no Fairyland sequence this is a bit of an insult.

MARK [63%]

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: monochromatic but characterful
Sound: catchy 128K in-game tune
Options: one or two players

Pac-Land is one of the most gorgeously endearing games I've seen in ages! The sound is excellent; a catchy (annoyingly so!) tune plays throughout. As happens so often, it gets a bit garbled when the spot FX try and play at the same time, but this is a minor point. The graphics are great - the monochrome is a bit of a disappointment, but the well-animated characters and equally attractive backgrounds more than make up for it. Playability, though, is Pac-Land's real strength. Varied levels and entertaining presentation all add to a jolly good basic game.
MIKE [84%]

Grand Slam
£8.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Perhaps I'm going slightly bonkers (I always thought you were 10 pence short of a phonebox as it was. Ed). but I'm sure that this game has been on the stocks since, well, the beginning of time, or thereabouts. Certainly that tell-tale '©1984 Namco Ltd' under the title reveals that this is a conversion of a very old coin-op indeed. And sadly, it shows.

Pacman, of course, was so successful as a coin-op that it entered the language in a way that even OutRun can't hope to rival (try asking your parents which 'video games' they've heard of and you can bet your Viz T-Shirt they won't say Afterburner). It's hardly surprising that Namco tried to eke out every last variation from this winning formula, but even by the standards of most sequels, Pac-land is pretty bizarre. While the basic formula - running about, picking up cherries, avoiding the ghosties - has been retained, the gameplay could not be more different.

Pacman has been whipped out of his little grid, given some legs and dumped in Pac-land, which looks like a sort of nursery rhyme country full of pretty little houses and fluffy clouds (if you're going to be sick at the back there, Jenkins, please remember next time to bring your own bucket). Moving from left to right, Pacman whiffles through this ghastly countryside, occasionally jumping to collect mid-air cherries which appear just before he passes them. Some cherries appear only if you have jumped on something first (it could be a hydrant, it could be a cactus, or indeed anything about a sprite high). And power pills are there as well - jump and grab one, and all the ghoulies start flashing and running away from you, just as in Pacman. As in the original, you get points for the ground you cover, although here there's no maze, just a strict left-to-right track to follow.

What this all sounds like - and versions on other more colourful computers even look like - is sort of Super Mario Bros with a few teeth missing. Shorn of the complexity of that magnificent old classic, Pac-land soon degenerates into formula action - avoid this, pick up that, jump over the other - and unfortunately the gameplay is balanced so that when you do eventually get to use the powerpill, you get to chase your foes only for the briefest possible time. Even then there isn't the satisfaction to be gained when you nab the fleeing ghoulies in Pacman - you don't even get to see how many points you've got for it.

The conversion's by no means a bad job - it's as professional as most these days - but it's the game at fault here. Once again a game that probably looks amazing in the arcades (and no doubt on the ST) simply doesn't cut it when deprived of its graphical advantages on the Speccy. Pacman was, I know, one of the Ed's favest games ever (she still outscores virtually everyone she knows) I doubt Pac-land will take its place.

Label: Grand Slam
Author: In-house
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

They're all friends of Pacman in the Pacland. No, they're bloody not! They're all horrible vicious little monsters so far as I can tell, hellbent on the downfall of everyone's favourite gobsplit lemon.

Pacland is a strange place to be sure. It's made up from fluffy looking buildings with fruit that hangs in the air and maniac ghosts that drive cars and fly planes and kill you without hesitation.

Your objective is to explore (make it to the end of left-right flip screens) the Pacland, scoring as many points as possible on the way. Bit simple, don't you think? Well, yes, but the life of a tennis ball with a Chelsea smile is far from easy. The ghosts from the previous games are still as much of a menace these days and with no more than left, right and a jump key at your command you've got to avoid horrible propeller slice death or a nasty bump from a drink-driving lemon.

Graphically things are very basic indeed. This, it has to be said is simply a faithful conversion of the coin-op style, but emphasizes the fact that Pacland is more to do with playability than awesome visual appeal. And it's pretty good too. The ghosts on foot prove no problem on the first level, since you can outrun them and it's only by getting caught on an obstacle slightly off the current screen (sometimes there are posts and blocks at the start of the following screen which prevent your entry) that they catch you. In fact, the ghosts seem to be here as a bit of a token gesture, and they're worth bonus points if you eat the power pills.

The most common form of fatality in Pacland are unfortunate timing incidents when in the process of vaulting an oncoming spookmobile, you pitch yourself into the whirring propellor of a ghoulplane. So quite a bit of timing needs to be used. While you can change the direction of your jump in mid air, there's no way you can duck down once you're up there. Too much jumping usually ends in death.

The Pacland is split into lots and lots of stages - far more than I could really be bothered to complete. There are buildings in the background at first, from which you gradually make your way through the Pacforest, avoiding the menacing treestumps, and onto the hilly bit. This is when life gets really tough. You have to negotiate huge off-screen jumps - leaping off one screen and trusting that you've judged the location of the landing spot correctly.

All along the way, of course, there are bonus power pills and fruit to collect, but they're far from essential, they simply enhance your score. Eating a power pill, as well as making the ghosts edible, takes away the planes and cars for a while, giving you free passage. A point that I thought was slightly naff was that - just like the coin-op - there is no need to collect anything in order to make it to the next level. It there had been the obligatory token to collect, life may have been a bit more interesting.

The only places where Pacland falls down are the same as the coin-op. The graphics are a bit twee in the same way, the planes and cars sandwich you in the same, slightly unjust fashion. It's also got the same inexplicable playability and latent addictiveness. While you never find your blood boiling with frustrated determination to beat the ghosts into the ground, you end up just playing again and again. Very odd!

Certainly this is far from everyone's cup of tea. The Write Stuffs will pour in saying how hopeless or brilliant Pacland is. All I can say is that it's a very faithful conversion of a game you'll either love or hate.

Grandslam, £8.95cs £12.95dk

The Spectrum version of this unusual Pac variant follows the arcade game pretty closely, lacking only in decent collision detection. The coin-op was not really that hot in the first instance, but Grandslam have produced a truthful and playable conversion, which might have more of an appeal to younger gamers.

Grandslam Entertainments
Amiga/ST disk £19.95, C64/Ams disk £14.95, C64 cass £9.95, Spec/Ams/MSX £8.95

Pac-Man is possibly the world's most durable computer game character. Of late he's enjoyed something of a rebirth as Namco have developed a few new game concepts around the basic idea: Pac-Man eats powerpills and fruit to keep him going and bump up his score. If Pac-Man eats a BIG pill, then the ghosts run away 'cos they know he can now eat THEM! But after a while the BIG pill wears off and they can chase him again. It is a brilliant game design, always was, and it's odd how even today it con still be given new life by a few inspired Japanese game designers.

In Pac-Land, the scenario is viewed from the side, and a little Pac-Man in a hat runs through Pac-Land whilst being pursued by ghosts, only this time the ghosts have got little cartoon cars and planes and can bomb him with smaller ghosts it's weird but you get the idea.

So that's the Namco design, what about the Grandslam conversion? Well it's as faithful as you can be an 8-bit computers, really. The game design is so simple it would take a complete aardvark to program it wrong, and so even the Spectrum version I looked of was playable and addictive, in the way that all simple and cheerful games are.

The graphics are monochromatic in the Speccy version, naturally, but not bad for that. Well drawn and although not animated in a lot of frames, the animation is appropriate and smooth with it. Obviously when the screen is full of sprites, the program slows down, but then again I always said the Spectrum should have had hardware sprites like the 64. It's been optimised so that it's not too noticeable though, so even at its most juddery it doesn't get you into trouble with the enemy ghosts.

Easy to play? You can do it with one hand. Easy to beat? Think again. It looks easy but the timing is critical, and you have to know what's ahead. On the whole I thought it an above average conversion on the Spectrum and one I'd come back to again.