Pac-Man

The Good
It's Pac-Man and you can't possibly go wrong with Pac-Man unless you try to do something stupid with it. The goal is to eat dots and avoid ghosts, optionally you can also eat the big dots, so you can eat ghosts and it doesn't get anymore complicated then that. It looks, plays and sounds exactly the same as the original arcade and I bought it for only ten euros (which means it's also incredibly cheap). It's one of the best ports from an arcade game to a home console I have ever seen, god bless the NES.

My memory may betray me, but I don't remember the cut-scenes at all which leads me to believe that Nintendo added them on their own. Every few levels you get a cute little cut-scene with Pac-Man and the ghosts doing something funny, it's good for a quick laugh after you spend a few minutes dodging ghosts, but it's no Ninja Gaiden either. I actually loved/love to not tell people about these little animation until they finally completed the level, the surprised look on their faces was and still is priceless.

The Bad
I am a bit disappointed in the fact that there is only one level, I am not sure if more show up as you make progress, but I doubt it because they would have at least shown you that there are more levels at the start. The only thing that really changes after you complete a level is that the rules change slightly; ghosts spawn faster, the ghosts go faster or the special dots last shorter. This makes the game fun, but not something you'd probably play for longer periods of time.

Having a multi-player mode is pretty sweet, but here it's rather odd. Tell me: what would you make the second player do if you designed the multi-player for this game? Would you:

A. Make them control one of the ghosts? B. Make them play as a second Pac-Man? C. Make the player both play their own game on the same screen? or D. Have them take turns playing?

If you chose D, you're incredibly stupid. I just don't see the point in having people take turns playing, you might as well play the Single-player and pass the controller around, we don't need a separate mode for that.

The Bottom Line
Pac-Man for the NES is a brilliant port of an almost flawless game and if you are a collector then this one should definitely be in your collection. If you just want to play some of the best games on the NES, then this one is also worth a look, but I highly recommend avoiding it in that case. Why? Well because every eight year old with a computer and Flash can make a Pac-Man game nowadays. I may have only paid ten euros for it, but you can find much better versions of this game on free websites like Kongregate and those probably have much more variety in the levels.