.style3 {color: #00FFFF} --> Pac-Land Mutha F$&*er!
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Total Recall Dud of the Month!
PAC LAND
(Namco, 1989)

Introduction and Story:

Since a big, well known company like Namco was on board for the Turbografx-16 it was only natural that they would bring a Pac Man (and once Starsoldier Game of the Month of course) game to this grand 16-bit powered machine of awesomeness here. Let's face it; Pac Man is just a cool character and I couldn't wait to play this new take on a old franchise. Sadly, Pac Land is your standard jumping platformer and not a fun maze game like the old arcade Pac Man games that most people seem to remember.

In this game Pac Man find some stupid fairies that get lost and he's risking his life through ghost invested towns, forests, and haunted mansions trying to get these dumb things back to fairy land.
The game play and bottomline:  
Unlike the original arcade legend Pac Man, your little round yellow hero here isn't collecting tons of pellets to pass each stage but he's trying to return each fairy by running through 3 ghost filled levels. Once one of those little sluts is back home some princess chick gives you the ability to fly so it's easier to jump over certain obstacles on your way back to your home where Ms. Pac Man is waiting for some action. Pac Man is pretty much defenseless throughout most of the game unless he gets a Power Pellet but those only last for a few seconds and don't show up too often.

Despite some rather nice colourful graphics the basic run and jump game play is quite unremarkable and it may be too hard for its intended target which is young children since the ghosts comes from everywhere. I also didn't like how this hardly played like the original Pac Man at all, where as a game like Galaga 90 remained faithful to it's first arcade incarnation. In the end Pac Land here is hard to control, it sounds awful, you can't can't play the original arcade game in here and ultimately the game gets the thumbs down.
Here is my weird 4 minute video review of Pac Land too!
Warning: there is some swearing in it because it got me pretty mad:

Conclusion:

 

PAC LAND
overall rating: 40/100
Find Pacland on eBay here!

For 1 player only
graphics: 7/10
sound: 4/10
gameplay: 2/10
replay: 4/10

-StarSoldier1
(Ryan Genno) 2008

See the other Dud of the Month

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