Gobble Man

When you take your little PAC-Man and tell him to get bigger and dumber, you get exactly Gobble Man. It's a colorful mishmash of ideas from the mid-nineties that tries to be funny, but the concept remains terribly simple.

You're a creature that others eat — and you try to eat them first. It barely qualifies as a game, more like literally a moment of turning on and off. You move around a narrow map, collect pellets, avoid enemies or hunt them instead when you somehow transform into something particularly tasty. All in all, it lasts just as long as it takes for you to realize there's no goal, no progression, just endless repetition with gradually duller variations.

The controls are basic, the graphics look like someone drew them on graph paper and then quickly scanned and colored them in Paint. Sound — well, when it's there at all, it damages your brain more than anything, but at least you know the computer's alive. No deeper motivation, no story, no proper content. It's like you take PAC-Man, strip away everything that made him appealing, and leave just the shell.

Today you'd load it up in a browser more out of historical curiosity. Gobble Man represents that part of mid-nineties output when everyone thought that if you had a computer on your desk, you could program games. It's not bad — it's just depressingly empty. A clever idea would be a game about what it's like being eaten by everyone else, but here you take that idea and shamelessly discard it after the first five minutes.