Pac PC II

Pac-Man and his clones — that was the whole of nineties computer gaming. When someone downloaded something with that name from a BBS back in the '90s, they knew what they'd be doing for the next ten minutes. Pac PC II from 1995 is such a classic attempt by a homegrown developer to grab a piece of fame. DOS, black screen, a little creature chasing dots through a maze.

It's a standard copy of the famous original — you move through a maze, collect dots, avoid ghosts, and occasionally grab a power-up that lets you turn the tables. The logic is thoroughly worn out, already ancient. Here there's no innovation or twists — just pure classics, exactly as they knew them back in the eighties.

The mechanics work as well as they can. Movement is straightforward, the game's response free of dramatic surprises. I can't really complain about difficulty — the ghosts simply speed up and multiply gradually. What's depressing, though, is the visuals. Letter-based characters, monochromatic colors, tiny sprites without any spark. Even the sound from the computer speaker isn't cheerful — it's more of a reminder that ancient computers actually did this better.

There were literally dozens of such copies in the nineties. Every indie coder thought it was enough to take the concept and throw a few levels at it. Pac PC II gets lost in that crowd — it's not bad, but it's not interesting either. I have no idea what was supposed to set it apart from hundreds of other attempts.

Today? If you want to remember what it was like to be bored on DOS and games had to fit into kilobytes, you can run it. But you're better off choosing the real Pac-Man. This junior isn't worth lingering over.