PrinceWatercress plays Mazemunch

It's about time I played a Pac-Man clone for BBC Micro. Could have picked a better one, though. It's alright.

Longplay

At the beginning of the year 1984 a mad 17-year-old computer genisu (huh!) produced nightmarish mutant creatures by disassembling the darkest recesses of his 1.2 MOS.

These creatures, obsessed with the task of chasing anything that moved, soon took over his BBC Micro and placed nasty bugs in exactly the wrong parts of the program.

The creatures, designated under the code name of Goojgies, ran riot and after a year of feverish work on school micros and programmable calculators, this whizz kid created a solution to the problem ... the Munchers!

Operating under manual control, the Munchers were sent out to clear the bug-ridden logic mazes of Bits - small binary digits that would cause the terrifying Bad Program error if ever introduced in the wrong addresses.

To the assistance of our fearless pink heroes came the Nibbles - powerful bits that when eaten sent the Goojgies into fits of terror and while active, allowed the Munchers to devour these unsavoury creatures and temporarily stopped their evil doings.

Soon rogue graphics characters in the form of strawberries, birds, cherries, keys, bells and plums helped nourish the Munchers. But after a tough fight the graphics left and now my MOS is completely free of any problems.

If you couldn't already tell, this is a Pac-Man clone. The Muncher is Pac-Man, the Goojgies are the ghosts, and the Nibblers are the power pills.

A and Z let you go up and down, respectively. Left and Right on the arrow keys let you go left and right respectively. Remember to turn Caps Lock off; otherwise, you won't be able to move up or down.

You are the purple smiley face with the big mouth. The red and green aliens are the Goojgies. The big flashing dots are the Nibblers/power pills. You'll need the Nibblers to turn the Goojgies white so you can eat them. Once you eat all the dots in one maze, you'll go on to the next one.

This is a pretty good clone, but it does have its share of problems. For instance, you have to hold a direction down in order to keep moving in it, and you have to fine tune your position with A and Z or Left and Right just to take a particular junction. I had this problem before in Snail Trail, but this is even worse here, construction crane-esque controls aside, as the Goojgies can be pretty crafty and can get you when you least expect them to. Also, when you eat a Nibbler, the Goojgies turn white and flash, but you get no warning whatsoever that they will switch back to their normal red and green colors, so you could run right into them after the Nibblers wear off.

There is also no way to get an extra life. What you have is what you get for the whole game. Once you get a game over, the game starts over at the first maze. If you want to quit the game, you'll have to press the Break button.

This isn't a horrible game or Pac-Man clone; you can do worse, but you can do better. Even so, this isn't a bad arcade-style game to have in the BBC Micro library.