Essentially, Atari 2600 Pac-Man was a rush job, and the shipped game shows it. Horrifically bad placeholder sound effects, difficult-to-see flickering graphics, buggy collision detection, a maze that didn’t look anything like the original. Granted, the 2600 wasn’t a powerhouse, but it could have done better given more time.
For an example of how a Pac-game can be done on the Atari 2600, check out the 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man. I hear that Jr. Pac-Man is even better, but have never seen it played so I can’t confirm firsthand.
What does it mean that Vectrex is absent from list?
The platform was launched and abandoned in the space of a single year.
Coloured transparancies for the black & white screen, crappy controllers, pitiful sound, buggy behaviour – it was a disaster. Hell, the built-in “Asteroids” clone consistently crashed if you got past level ten – which wasn’t much of a problem, because it rarely held anyone’s attention for that long.
I had a friend who got one to replace his old (and much-mocked) Leisurevision console. We continued to play Leisurevision games. They were crude, but they were better than anything on that stupid Vectrex.
The 2600 version of Pac-Man seemed just like a ripped off version of Pac-Man. Different (horrible) graphics, different (horrible) sounds, different maze. Only similarity was that your guy ran around eating dots in a maze chased by ghosts. Why couldn’t they use the same sounds? Why couldn’t they use the same maze? Why couldn’t they use the same (or similar) graphics? Pac-man famously didn’t turn as you went around corners…and his mouth kept opening and closing even when you didn’t move. It was like they were afraid of being sued if they made it too much like the arcade Pac-man…but this was the authorized version!
I liked my Dreamcast. As you say, it suffered from punters hanging out for the PS2, which was also backwards compatible for the old PS1 games, but there was also a dearth of decent games for it: I was in Japan when it was released, and the initial buzz was good, but dried up pretty soon when no decent games appeared. Vicious circle, really: no games, no console sales. No console sales, no games.
It did, however have one great feature: it had a built-in modem, so you could purchase a keyboard for a few bucks, insert a disc, and voila! It was a dumb terminal, fully ready for internet and e-mail, and with its own chatrooms and everything. I don’t know if this feature was offered in the States or elsewhere, but it was handy in Japan, where computers were fairly expensive then: if all you wanted was internet and e-mail, it could be had for a tenth the price of a regular computer. I used to lurk on the SDMB on my Dreamcast, back in the day.
I must also raise my eyebrow at the inclusion of Planescape: Torment. I suppose if you look purely at the number sold while it was in print, it certainly didn’t bust any blocks. But when the subject of great PC games comes up, PS: T is always mentioned. Also, I doubt the sales numbers take into account the number of people who have bought the game secondhand, or borrowed it from a friend, because a) it’s no longer available in stores and b) even as complex a game as PS: T has a limited number of playthroughs before you put it back on the shelf to gather dust. It is, after all, a single-player only game.
Plus, how many PC games of that vintage (1999) are still talked about and played these days? I can think of Starcraft (1998) and Diablo II (2001), but as a Blizzard fan I’m a bit biased. There’s also the Fallout series, which is often mentioned in the same breath as Torment. When the 1999 graphics have totally been blown out of the water by modern games, it takes quality to retain playability with the majority of today’s players. And I’m saying that as someone who’s been a gamer since my family first got a VIC-20 with a handful of cartridges.
Yes, but they could at least have used a similar color scheme! The 2600 version was blue and orange. Even if you can only use 4 colors, why not black and white and blue and yellow? Couldn’t you at least TRY to replicate the famous wakka wakka wakka sound from the arcade version? And it doesn’t take any more system resources to make the maze the same, even if you tip it on its side.
It’s not that they tried to replicate Pacman and failed due to the wimpyness of the 2600 console. It’s that they didn’t even bother to try to replicate Pacman, it’s not even close. How hard could it be to make the dots into dots? Why make them into dashes? Fine, the graphics are gonna suck no matter what you do, but you could at least replicate Pacman with crappy graphics and sound, instead of the travesty they shipped.