Another one? So soon. Well, that's odd. But hey, I'm playing a Speccy game again!
Classic Muncher is a Pac-Man clone for the ZX Spectrum commercially released in 1987 as a budget title. Pressing 1 on the keyboard will start the game, but pressing 2 will let you either switch to a joystick or change the keyboard controls, which are displayed on-screen if you leave the attract mode running long enough.
From here, you're playing the game. There are six screens in all in this game, and if you go through all of them, you'll play through them all again, but this time the ghosts (of which there are four, just like in the game this is based of) will move much faster.
As always, you just move around with the keyboard or joystick, and the fire button does nothing. There are power pills that make the ghosts flash all sorts of colors to show they are vulnerable, and you can eat them for bonus points. There are also random fruits and the letters for the word "Extra" that you can pick up for big points and extra lives, respectively...assuming you're patient enough to get the latter. Your score as well as the amount of lives you have are at the top of the screen.
The game looks pretty good, and what little music there is sounds alright. However, just like with the recently-played Mazemunch for BBC Micro, not only do I have problems with the game that keep me from really enjoying it, the problems are the exact same ones!
Once again, you have to hold a direction on the keyboard or joystick to continue in that direction instead of just tapping a direction, and once again, that means having to fine tune your position to take a corner. This can be bad if you have multiple ghosts on your tail. While being able to play with a joystick makes this a little easier to deal with, as you aren't forced to keyboard controls that may make you feel like you're operating a construction crane, it's still pretty annoying.
Also, you get no audio warning that the ghosts are going to turn back to normal from eating a Power Pill. You'll have to pay close attention to the ghosts to know when they're going to stop flashing. Another interesting thing to mention is that the Power Pills lose effectiveness the further you get into the game. You can easily eat all the ghosts for big points early on, but once you're halfway through the game, you're better off eating the Power Pills to get the ghosts away from you so you can focus squarely on eating the dots you have yet to run into.
Because of this, it makes me wonder: which game would I rather have? Both games look alright, but they have the same flawed gameplay and the BBC Micro game was a type-in game out of a magazine while the Speccy game was a commercial release. It makes me pick the BBC Micro game more, because it was a type-in game from the very start, you didn't have to pay money for it (well, sort of, considering you had to buy the magazine the code for it came from) and if you knew how to program BBC Micro games, you could improve on it a little bit. Not so with this one.
Is this still a fun game? Absolutely. Even though I ended up playing it for only twenty minutes, it was pretty easy to set up, pick up and play. At least you have varying boards to play through before you loop through them all again with much faster ghosts. However, I found it a little quaint that the improvements that I wanted for Mazemunch also applied here. At least the ghosts' faces are a little more detailed and don't look like something out of Space Invaders. You may end up playing this for a couple of minutes before picking up another better, more popular game, but you can do better - and worse - with this Pac-Man clone.
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