Back in the 80's Pac Man fever was huge and Atari thought they'd cash in on this phenomenon by making a port of the game for their 2600 console, resulting in one of the worst arcade ports of all time. Along with E.T. this game helped ruin Atari's reputation forever and was also a leading factor of the video game crash of 1983 and almost destroyed the gaming industry forever. If it hadn't been for Nintendo stepping in that probably would've been the case. I'm now going to give a review for this travesty of a game. This is going to be one of my shorter reviews but hopefully it'll be good enough to help explain why this game's so awful.

Graphics: 1/10 The biggest problem with the graphics for this game was way that the ghosts looked and the fact that they keep flickering for some reason. All the flickering hurts my eyes and there's no excuse for that. Also it's hard to tell if you can attack the ghosts because it's hard to tell what color the ghosts are which really hurts this games enjoyability which I'll get to later.

Sound: 1/10 The audio for this game is absolutely awful compared to the original Pac-Man. All the sound effects were completely butchered. Everyone reading this review should watch a video of the arcade version and the Atari 2600 version and you'll see what I mean. The sound is atrocious so for that reason I give the sound a 1.

Addictiveness: 1/10 Pac Man for the arcade is one of the most addicting games of all time. Pac Man for the 2600 is the total opposite. Some reasons for this include the graphic problems that I mentioned earlier and the awful audio. These 2 issues combined destroys the Pac Man experience. This game is not fun at all and there are not very many games out there that are less fun than this abomination. For that reason I give the addictiveness a 1.

Story: N/A Pac Man doesn't have a story therefore I'm leaving this category blank.

Depth: I can't really give the depth a fair rating because Pac Man games don't have depth they usually have addictive gameplay that makes you want to keep playing. For this reason I'm leaving this category blank as well.

Difficulty: 10/10 Pac Man for the Atari 2600 is more difficult than it's arcade counterpart mainly because of the problems with the ghosts not having enough diffference in color between when you can and can't eat them. This makes playing this game much harder because at times you have to guess whether you can attack or not... For this reason I give the difficulty a 10 it's too hard to play you're better off playing another version.

Overall Score: 1/10 Pac Man for the Atari 2600 is the worst arcade port of all time because of it's terrible audio, terrible graphics, flickering (or flashing) ghosts and it's uncanny ability to take one of the best arcade games of all time and turn it into one of the worst games ever. There are few games out there that I'd be willing to say are worse than this game. One of them happens to have been made on the same console: E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL FOR THE ATARI 2600! I'd like to know what you think about this review.

I'm not sure really about "ataris downfall" Their main downfall was that the the market was flooded with a ton of non-descript games that no one really knew anything about because they had no sort of system in place for controlling who developed games for their system. Something which Nintendo figured out for the release of the Famicom/NES.

I will agree though that this is easily the worst game on the console. A really cruddy port of an arcade classic slapped together as cheaply as possible in order to cash in on one of the few popular franchises at the time. Everyone knew what Pacman was, so they had one poor schlep code away in a closet and hurried it to production.

One thing I noticed you forgot to mention was how horrid the controls are in this game. How can you mess up the controls for a PacMan game?? Why are the dots huge retangles? Why is the level layout so bad?? All questions I have been asking myself for 30 years or so lol

I know that many people play the lame argument "It's the 2600 what can you expect" but I don't buy it. Want proof that PacMan can be well done on the system? Play MS Pac-Man for the 2600...it's like night and day. 1000x better than this game.

Jordanv78 : I agree 100% of everything you've said here. Also, Tom Guycott was one cool skeleton.

Yeah, you simply can't imagine how disappointed I was when I put this cartridge in the Atari and switched it on. I was like....where's Pac-Man and what is this mess? I still played the heck out of it because I'd spent so much allowance on it.  I was ten or so and 30 bucks was 3 months worth.

Let me give a short little critique of your review. I only want to see it improved, so please don't take anything said here personally.

Your grasp on the English language doesn't seem to be the strongest. Run-on sentences are definitely your biggest problem. Let me give an example of a run-on sentence present in your review: "Back in the 80's Pac Man fever was huge and Atari
thought they'd cash in on this phenomenon by making a port of the game
for their 2600 console resulting in one of the worst arcade ports of all
time and along with E.T. helped ruin Atari's reputation forever and
also was a leading factor of the video game crash of 1983 and almost
destroyed thing gaming industry forever."

If you were to correct this, it would look something like this:"Back in the 80s, Pac-Man Fever was huge, and Atari thought they'd cash in on this phenomenon by making a port of the game for their 2600 console, resulting in one of the worst arcade ports of all time. Along with E.T., this game helped ruin Atari's reputation forever, and was also a leading factor in the video game crash of 1983, which almost destroyed the gaming industry forever." Take notice of the changes. I split it into two different sentences, and placed commas where they were needed, along with changing bits of awkward wording and correcting a typo.

Other than that, this review is decent enough, and your stance on the game is definitely one that most people can agree with.

NovemberJoy : I'm glad you pointed out those mistakes I made especially that awful typo. Normally I proofread my reviews before I post them but this time I didn't proofread it long enough. I was trying to finish the review as fast as possible so I could go to bed. From now on I'll make sure I proofread my reviews more thoroughly before posting. Also don't worry, I'm not the kind of guy who takes critiques personally. If there's anything you see in my future reviews that you think I can improve on please let me know without making insults such as "Your grasp on the English language doesn't seem to be the strongest". That was completely unnecessary.

If there is anything that I have learned over my few years of life that means anything, it is this, "If it 'aint broke, don't fix it!"  The original release of Pac-Man was simplistically beautiful, and I think you hit the nail on the head with 'travesty of a game'  Quality review!

Jordanv78 : Oh wow I can't believe I forgot to mention the controls! Thanks for pointing that out.

Jordanv78 : Yeah, that was mostly the main cause of Atari's downfall and the Great Crash of '83, mostly because Atari had way too many homebrew and hacked games for the Atari 2600 that it made the main games not get any sales and plus with the horrible mix of Atari's Pac-man and Atari's ET 2600, all these mix cause the Great Crash to occur in 1983. Nintendo seen the mistake that Atari has made and made their own console and make it so it can only play Nintendo games.

Ainstrings : thanks man! I'm glad you liked my review.

Ferdinand : You're right, I couldn't imagine expecting a game to be great at 10 years old only to find out it's horrible. I was fortunate enough to not have any games that bad at that age.

gamerforlifeforever2 : Yeah, I think that the big companies leaned their lesson with that one. There have been other hyped-up games that fell flat, but that takes the cake. (and no one really expected E.T. to be spectacular in the first place to be honest, they just hoped it would sell)  Right on man.

gamerforlifeforever : Look whose judging; the guy who likes Bayonetta. Also, your grammar (specifically the punctuation) is very flawed. There are many instances where commas should have been used, and the sentence "The biggest problem with the graphics for this game was way that the ghosts looked and the fact that they keep flickering for some reason. All the flickering hurts my eyes and there's no excuse for that." is a bit stilted. It's "was the way", not "was way". Did you even spellcheck this review before posting it?

Also, where's the Gameplay section? It's the most important part of a video game review. There's no excuse why it shouldn't be there. Whoever designed the default review standard for this website really frigged it up badly! What the hell was he thinking!?

Honestly, I played this game here on Vizzed.com and it plays just fine. All four ghosts are always present, though I admit the flickering is an issue, but it isn't as bad as people like you say it is unless you have the eyes of an 80-year old.