WorldMags.net PAC-LAND CONVERSIONS Unsurprisingly, Pac-Land turned up in an impressive number of ports…
SHARP X68000 On Sharp’s Japanese super-computer, Pac-Land looks and plays like a dream, with proper joystick control for Pac. We actually prefer this to the coinop, as the water jumps seem a lot less fiddly to get across now, making for a more enjoyable game.
PC ENGINE/TG-16 Although far superior to the Famicom outing, the TurboGrafx-16 version shares the Famicom’s da control scheme, but thankfully there’s an option to change it to ‘lever control’, which is much better. Almost as good as the X68000 port.
AMIGA You’d think that the Amiga port would be superior to the C64 version, eh? Surprisingly, while the C64 had lovely smooth scrolling and near-perfect controls, here everything’s way too juddery to be much fun. A real wasted opportunity.
FAMICOM
SPECTRUM
Pac-Land never made it to the Westernised NES console, remaining a Japan-only release on the Famicom. It plays fine, but suffers from bland looks and awkward controls that used the buttons to run le and right and the D-pad to jump.
The coin-op’s colourful vistas were always going to problematic for the Speccy, and as with the Amstrad version, it ended up being a flick-screen adventure. It’s more like Dizzy than Pac-Land, and unless you have 128K there’s no music either.
I think I got the easy gig as the C64 hardware was so straightforward to program Alan Ogg
warps and bonus lives hidden in tree stumps and cacti to discover, and even the ability to turn invisible and invincible to Inky, Pinky, Clyde and his gang. Extra fruit and collectables can also be summoned by jumping on certain items and areas, and even the Flagship from Galaxian turns up as a bonus item. There’s certainly plenty of scope here for players interested in upping and perfecting their high scores, as with the earlier Pac-Man games. And there’s a nice amount of variety in the stages, from towns, forests and deserts to castles where Pac needs to pick up keys to progress through locked doors – later on these are played in 72 | RETRO GAMER
complete darkness with a torchlight effect around Pac. Luckily these castle areas are always skipped in the return trips. The home computer and console conversions of Pac-Land are a bit of a mixed bag, with the frantic button-bashing of the coin-op translated to desperate joystick-waggling over those water jumps. In the UK, publisher Quicksilva was lucky enough to grab the rights from Namco, leading to the C64, Spectrum, MSX and Amstrad CPC ports, converted by Scottish developer Gannon Designs. Despite a few tweaks, like the inability to jump on the heads of the ghosts, the C64 version was a
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standout. The game was never as popular as the original Pac-Man, but Pac-Land ’s legacy is more important than you might think. In our interview with Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani back in issue 61 of RG, he told us that he felt the game – which he was also involved with – pioneered horizontally scrolling arcade games, something perhaps evident in later titles like Ghosts ‘N’ Goblins, Alex Kidd and Wonder Boy. And according to Iwatani, Pac-Land ’s biggest accolade of all was that it influenced Shigeru Miyamoto to create Super Mario Bros. Not a bad pedigree for a game based on a Saturday morning kids cartoon…