Today, I'm taking a look at Pac-Man on the NES. This game had 3 releases in the US: Official Tengen release, unofficial Tengen release, and Namco release. All of them are based off Namco's 1984 Famicom port, and they're all the same, bar the copyright information on the title screen.

This port screams NES. The colors, the sounds, everything. It's faithful to the arcade version rather nicely- if you've played Pac-Man, you probably know that it's about a yellow circle named Pac-Man. Pac-Man has to eat dots and avoid ghosts. If Pac-Man eats all the dots on a maze board, he gets to go to the next level(tip- all the mazes are the same). However, each maze has four Power Pellets. If Pac-Man eats one of these, the ghosts, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, turn dark blue and can be eaten by Pac-Man. But beware! It's only a small amount of time before the tables turn back.

Now, on to port differences. Along with the sounds sounding very... NESish, there's something odd about the graphics. Can you guess what they are? I don't know, maybe it's that THE CHARACTER'S BODIES DEFY THE LAWS OF MAZE WALLS. Seriously, Pac-Man and the ghosts stick through the maze, and it looks weird, but it's not really that distracting, but it looks a little weird when you think about it. However, that obviously wasn't the goal of this port. The goal of this port was to provide a great gaming experience close to the original arcade version of Pac-Man. Did they do that?

Well, what do you think. Of course they did, and while this isn't held in regard as a nice Pac-Man port, because, let's be honest, no one has ever really bothered to look at all of them, this port is great. I give Pac-Man on the NES a 7 out of 10.