Game Review: Ms. Pac-Man (Master System)

Game: Ms. Pac Man
Console: Sega Master System
Developer: Midway
Release Date: 1991

The history behind this game was too interesting to pass up on writing about, so here's a little about it before my review. A year after the success of Pac-man in arcades, Midway (who had been Namco's distributor of the American version of the original game) decided to buy the rights to and modify a similar game into what became Ms. Pac-Man without any consent from Namco, who later aquired the rights to it, in a legal battle between themselves, Midway and Ms. Pac-Man's original designers GCC.

The game itself is incredibly similar to Pac-Man, for the most part, sharing many features and ideas. Changes to the original formula include slightly different mazes, more intelligent AI, Clyde's name being changed to Sue and different cutscenes of a romantic nature, targeted at female gamers between some levels. As the most popular american produced arcade machine, it's porting to several home consoles was almost inevitable and it fell to Tengen, producer of many an unlicensed game for the NES to convert Ms. Pac-Man for the home console market.

Graphically the game is very simple, owing to the fact that in 1991, the game was already 10 years old, and the art style of the original game. There's some flicker issues at times when interacting with ghosts, but as the player spends most of the game attempting to avoid doing this, its not too much of an issue. Audio-wise there's not as much noise as the original Pac-Man, but the game still features a significant amount of sound effects and some 8 bit tunes inbetween levels. Its fairly forgettable stuff and the sound effects can get old pretty quickly.

The game plays well on Master System, however and there's some new features not in the arcade version. Pac Speed Boost gives Ms. Pac-Man a much needed burst of speed to escape ghosts in pursuit of her, there's also different maze types (Large, Small and Crazy), and 2 player capabilities (Turn taking, Competitive and Co-operative). There's also only 32 levels compared to the 255 of the arcade original (although due to bugs in the game, it was difficult to make it that far).

The two player modes are an interesting concept, with one player as Pac-Man, and the other as Ms. Pac-Man. Colliding will result in repelling each other at speed across the screen (which can be used to your advantage in competitive mode), and it's possible to move so that both players are off screen, due to the maze being bigger than the screen area. While it's a different concept to the Pac-Man series, the two player modes don't feel too much more fun, and there's enough issues with playing in that way to give serious question to their inclusion.

All in all, if you're going to buy a Pac-Man series game, chances are you know what you're getting; Pellet Eating, Ghost Chasing, Yellow Sphere controlling retro arcade action. It gets repetitive, sure, and its more classic than it is great fun, but this port to home console adds a decent amount of new features, controls pretty well and doesn't look too bad. Ultimately there's some fun to be had with this, but it's not massively addictive.

Rating: 45/100
Grade: D