Chomps

You wave the cursor across the screen and wait for the game to finally respond. Chomps from 1983 is just a minor note in the history of home computers—that kind of game only a few found and that you can't easily play today without an emulator. Old DOS demands patience.

It's something between Pac-Man and a maze where you control a character running around a dark space. You collect what comes your way and avoid enemies, some dotted creatures constantly chasing you. The rules are basically banal—hide in a corner, wait for them to come get you, grab some food and finish the next level. There's little room for innovation here, it's a pure copy of popular entertainment everyone knew from arcade machines back then.

Control is primitive, which was standard back then. Four-direction movement, nothing more. Graphics? Either monochromatic torture or very simple character art—no colors, no smooth curves. Sound practically doesn't exist. The game will stop interesting you quickly, simply because there's no reason to stick with it for twenty minutes. Levels repeat, difficulty rises only by speeding up the creatures, and that's all.

Chomps is more a time curiosity than genuine fun. It's interesting mainly because you touched something most players never fired up. The programmer apparently wrote it quickly, released it without much effort and moved on to something more useful.

Today you fire it up from curiosity, not to play. Emulators handle it fine, so you'll run it briefly, understand why it was quickly forgotten, and return to something with real substance. It's one of those titles whose name you never heard—and after twenty minutes you understand why.