Jolt Country

Pac-Man World: Re-PAC



My nephew is two and a half and one of the ways we are bonding is by playing computer games. I have him on a cheap 8BitDo gamepad - which works well, the Steam gamepad I usually use has a USB connector to allow it to be wired, and the thing constantly disconnects with the unpredictable moves from a little guy.

Pac-Man World: Re-PAC has a problem in so much as they want the four ghosts in Pac-Man games to be cute and kawaii or whatever, not murderous spectres of Pac-Man and his Pac-Family. So we see some giant monster that looks like a robotic Pac-Man thing be the real bad guy. It's like when a villain gets too much charisma and they have to come up with an even worse person to be the REAL antagonist. Cobra Kai and such.

The game is OK for him to play - he is not 100% able to navigate a 3D world. He is starting to get the combination of pressing a button to jump and use the thumb control on the left side of the gamepad to move. I am hoping he learns "A" and "B" due to the gamepad, although he also reads entire words to me sometimes, so who knows where his English comprehension is, it's probably really good.

Something I have seen work is when the a little kid has trouble with a section of the game, they give it to an adult, and we do that - there are skeletons in this game and they are easily disposed of. He has asked me to "find more skellys" and I try to do that, bouncing our Pac character around.

The plot of the game! The plot is that the ghosts kidnapped many Pac-Man characters, like Baby Pac-Man, Pac-Man Jr., Professor Pac-Man and "Pac-Mom", who is clearly Ms. Pac-Man, but Namco I guess didn't want to pay the creators a fee SO GODDAMN DESPERATE. HAVE SOME FUCKING DIGNITY. I don't say that part out loud, loudly, to children.

The game itself for an adult is fine, it's one of those that I am sure I could spend 80 hours with, but I am able to figure out what it is doing in the first ten minutes and that would have been it, sitting installed but unplayed on Steam forever, but it gets new life here. I like that he knows who Pac-Man is, any time spent with those characters is a good time.

So the things I like about it:

- There are numbers on the screens and writing, so we'll get to the point where I read it to him.
- It's not really violent. I am ok with him watching cartoon violence, which isn't violence.
- The first check point is waaaaay too far into the game, and then it gives you like four of them. He doesn't care about check point saves, but it is something for my sanity.
- It's not TOO bad getting to the actual game. After about 30 seconds, if a game hasn't started, he will get a little restless, although we get better at that all the time, and he's got an idea that these things need to load.
- You can pretty much play most of the game so far with the "A" and "B" keys, which are jump and "throw a dot at a bad guy", which he likes doing.

We both seem to like this one.

We played the above Pac-Man game today, but right before I had to take my nephew home, we thought we would try to find something we could play together. I was inspired to try the "Atari50" release in Steam, which is essentially a front end for a lot of Atari games spanning systems and platforms.

I was going to pick something from the arcade area, when Wyatt held the gamepad's stick to the right and sent the UI flying into 2600 games. "Outlaw" came up, randomly. Outlaw for the 2600 is a game where two stick-figure cowboys try to shoot each other while -- at least in "game 1" for this cartridge - a cactus is between them. You can move your outlaw around the screen, but I could not find a way to move past the cactus.

Through Atari50, Wyatt picked up the idea of the game pretty well, on an 8BitDo gamepad. Player two wasn't moving, but does start out exposed, so he was able to move his guy around and shoot him. I don't know if I have ever played this game before. We certainly did not have the cartridge growing up. What I was DELIGHTED to see is that you can ricochet shots off the game's rectangular border! When Wyatt saw that happen, I encouraged him to basically try trick shots to shoot the other guy.

We couldn't figure out how to get Atari50 to recognize a second player using the keyboard... but...

Flack sent me a 2600 a few years ago, and it is hooked up to my television at all times. I also bought the Harmony flash cart for the 2600 last year. I paused the game on Steam, grabbed the Harmony cartridge, copied the .ROM file to it from a directory on my computer, and within seconds Wyatt and I were playing in the other room on a real 2600 with two joysticks and a television!

There is only so much fun to be had with the simple nature of the game, and it wasn't until I was doing a tad more research that I saw that Outlaw has other game modes. Atari was always saying "50 GAMES INSIDE!" (not really). But still, huge thanks to Flack for the amazing 2600, which we love in this house.

I hope it goes without saying that for just about every game of this gunfight simulator we played, my nephew won. I don't feel too bad at losing to a gunslinger named "Wyatt."

Yars' Revenge still da best 2600 game? Or Berzerker, it's a toss. Too bad they didn't think to do Wolfenstein 2D on Atari.

I think Warlords is the best Atari 2600 game, personally. I think it's fun and holds up when you're the one guy versus the computer, and it's on a level all its own when you have 4 people playing at once with the paddles.

There have been a lot of modern "homebrew" 2600 games which just blows everything out of the water. I have a physical cartridge for the game Zoo Keeper which is near arcade perfect. It is hard to argue that it shouldn't be in the top 5. But I think I read that the cartridge itself contains hardware that the 2600 never did. Okay then. You can't really put that up against Pong.

Totally off my head and in no order, the games that I think still hold up are:

Warlords
Kaboom!
River Raid
Yars' Revenge
Berzerk
Spider Fighter
Pitfall!
Super Breakout
Adventure

I can't beat the 2600 version of Chess, but also when I was playing all computer Chess games and getting crushed, I think I encountered a game killing bug, so I dunno.

One of the Bruces did a Lord of the Rings text adventure, and I think the .ROM works on a standard 2600. I should put it on the Harmony cart and check. That's as good a text game as is ever going to appear on that system if it works with a basic cartridge. There are others that I think two people can have fun with, with the AI removed from the equation.

Casual Observer wrote: Sun Jun 09, 2024 8:38 pm Yars' Revenge still da best 2600 game? Or Berzerker, it's a toss. Too bad they didn't think to do Wolfenstein 2D on Atari.

Yars Revenge was SO FUCKING GOOD.