Why was 2600 VCS Pac-Man so hated?

ifkz

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Please explain it to a gamer that was not active at the time. I ran into the game at a friends place five or so years after it was released. For me the *bonk* *bonk* *bonk* is almost iconic and the game is okay, much better than ET. I don't see how it is much worse than 2600 VCS Ms. Pac-Man.
 
Please explain it to a gamer that was not active at the time. I ran into the game at a friends place five or so years after it was released. For me the *bonk* *bonk* *bonk* is almost iconic and the game is okay, much better than ET. I don't see how it is much worse than 2600 VCS Ms. Pac-Man.

Your Pacman didn't turn to lead with his mouth for one thing. Go around the corner and he stayed facing left, go up, still left, turn right, still left, go down, the same. The 'dots' were bars and Pacman himself looked like 2 Mayan pyramids stacked on top of each other. The flicker sprites, the cheap sounds, etc. All of this, and my brother and I played it on a 13" B&W TV making it even suckier looking.
 
I don't see how it is much worse than 2600 VCS Ms. Pac-Man.

It's not, they both sucked terribly by arcade standards...

But to your original point, it was a combination of things. The anticipation of it's release and the utter disappointment at how it was rendered. The wait. IIRC, we paid (just a few bucks) to be members of the Atari Club, which afforded us the opportunity to pay in advance and wait for it's release. The cost. It was about $50 (~$120 today) at a time when carts were ~$30 (~$73 today).

Also, Activision was really doing some neat and unique things with the VCS and PacMan just wasn't in the same league. All that said, I logged many many hours paying it and Ms. PacMan. Never did care for ET, not sure I even owned that one although I can't imagine there was a major market title we didn't have...
 
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Pac-Man was also the biggest game in the world when that awful cart came out. The maze was different, the colors were different, the animations were gone, the game speed was incorrect, the orientation was wrong, the scoring was wrong, and one of the objects (fruit vs. vitamin) was wrong.

Personally, I was of the age where it was the first awful game that I recognized as awful. The concept of a crappy video game hadn't really hit me till I played that.

I think E.T. gets a bit of a bad rap - a guy had six weeks and made a somewhat-interesting puzzle game out of source material that didn't lend itself to a platform built for action games. But Pac-Man for the 2600 is an abomination. (There were also Pac-family games developed later that looked great on the 2600, but I've yet to see a good E.T. game anywhere, heh.)
 
I think E.T. gets a bit of a bad rap - a guy had six weeks and made a somewhat-interesting puzzle game out of source material that didn't lend itself to a platform built for action games. But Pac-Man for the 2600 is an abomination. (There were also Pac-family games developed later that looked great on the 2600, but I've yet to see a good E.T. game anywhere, heh.)
Pac-Man was programmed in 6 weeks too... I'd imagine it would be hard to program a port of a "modern" game in such a short time frame utilizing a system whose architecture was (at the time) 6 years old. I guess the suits at Atari didn't care and just wanted to shovel out whatever they could to get product out the door.
That being said, I don't mind PacMan for 2600, I mean it's certainly not great, and would have probably been better had they taken more time to program it, and used a larger ROM. But I guess there is a level of nostalgia for the game. Certainly not my favorite game for the console.
I also liked E.T. My only complaint was there wasn't a whole lot of game there... once you found all the pieces of the phone, "phoned home", and went up in the spaceship, there wasn't a whole lot of reason to keep playing.
 
The 'dots' were bars

The manual called them "video wafers":

Video Wafers: These are the dotted lines on the screen. You maneuver
PAC-MAN around the playfield over the video wafers. He automatically
eats the video wafers, and they disappear from the maze. You score
one point for each video wafer he eats. (To score a point, PAC-MAN
must pass directly over the video wafer.)

off topic:

Look at this cool cover for the 8 it Atari version. I really love this art.
 

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Jr. Pac Man on the 2600 was awesome and first played it growing up in the 90's. Regular Pac for the 2600 was nowhere near as fun to play.
 
Man, Pac Man on the 2600 sucked big time.

Apart from the terrible graphics, flickering ghosts and boring maze (that was the same small maze part repeated four times), the gameplay was a very poor imitation of the arcade. The ghosts had completely different AI and had no personalities, you couldn't clip corners like in the arcade, and the dots didn't slow you down.

Worst of all - it was far too easy. I could play the 2600 version for hours until I got bored and switched off the console.

- James
 
Pac-Man for the 2600 sucked ass. Always has,always will. If your first experience playing pac-man was on the 2600 then you didn't the get full "WTF is this BS?!" effect. And like several people have said before,everyone was anticipating it and when it came out people hated it. I remember how utterly disappointed I was when I first played it,and I was like 5 or 6. I was very disappointed in DK and Burgertime as well. The only 2600 ports of arcade classics I could tolerare (that I played) were Frogger,Bezerk,Q-Bert,Solar Fox,and Bump 'N Jump. For me the 2600 was my first console,but it definitely isn't my favorite. Matter of fact,it's probably one of my least favorite.
 
Pac Man was obviously immensely popular in the arcades and people expected a lot out of the Atari VCS version. When it came out it was a major disappointment and I think people finally realized how obsolete the Atari VCS really was.

I can't stand it when people refer to the Atari VCS as the 2600. Yes the part number was CX2600, but Atari never referred to the machine as the 2600 until after the 5200 came out around 1982. I think they used 5200 as a model number because it made it seem like the new 5200 system was "twice as good".
 
Pac Man was obviously immensely popular in the arcades and people expected a lot out of the Atari VCS version. When it came out it was a major disappointment and I think people finally realized how obsolete the Atari VCS really was.

I can't stand it when people refer to the Atari VCS as the 2600. Yes the part number was CX2600, but Atari never referred to the machine as the 2600 until after the 5200 came out around 1982. I think they used 5200 as a model number because it made it seem like the new 5200 system was "twice as good".

I only knew it as the 2600. I never called it a VCS. Later we picked up the woodgrain Sears (Telegames?) version. What I can't stand is people referencing the black version I grew up with as the 'Vader' version. Who came up with that nonsense?
 
I only knew it as the 2600. I never called it a VCS. Later we picked up the woodgrain Sears (Telegames?) version. What I can't stand is people referencing the black version I grew up with as the 'Vader' version. Who came up with that nonsense?

I never heard it referred to as Vader. The only thing we ever called it was "The Atari" and so did everyone else I knew at the time. By the time it was being called the 2600 we had pretty much stopped playing it and were more focused on arcade games and computers.

We have a picture of my brother opening the Atari box for Christmas 1977...he was the one who got the system as a gift. The look on his face is classic. I think we had combat and the air sea battle game that first year. Both were solid titles, and it was remarkable to be playing them at home.

In my opinion the best arcade ports were Space Invaders and Missile Command. And the best game overall was Adventure.
 
I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong but from what I remember, Vader is just something that VCS collectors came up with to distinguish the solid black VCS from the woodgrain, other nicknames are "Heavy Sixer" "Woody" and "Rainbow" (2600jr)
Those names were not used "back in the day", at least not that I'm aware of.
 
I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong but from what I remember, Vader is just something that VCS collectors came up with to distinguish the solid black VCS from the woodgrain, other nicknames are "Heavy Sixer" "Woody" and "Rainbow" (2600jr)
Those names were not used "back in the day", at least not that I'm aware of.

Yes, I'd agree. All I ever heard was "The Atari" - and there was no distinguishing between the Sears Tele-Games version and the regular Atari VCS.

I can't imagine owning one of these now. The old arcade games are lot more interesting.
 
Yeah I guess we always just said "Hey, wanna play Atari?" Maybe 2600 was something I picked up in the 90's. But I know I never called it a VCS. Ever.
 
It's interesting to read some perspective on the game from those of you that lived through the release of the game and were really excited for it. Did anyone see any kind of preview of the game, pictures, or anything? I can only imagine how pissed I would have been being blindsided like that.
 
It's interesting to read some perspective on the game from those of you that lived through the release of the game and were really excited for it. Did anyone see any kind of preview of the game, pictures, or anything? I can only imagine how pissed I would have been being blindsided like that.

I don't recall it ever seeing it in a magazine before it was released, but I'm sure it was. At this point in time I was a lot more interested in arcade games. It seemed like a great arcade game was coming out every week during that time. There was a lot of anticipation for Atari Pac Man, and I recall the utter disgust when we popped this game (borrowed from someone) in the Atari and tried to play it. I think it was one of the last new games we ever played on it, if not the last one. With all the cool arcade games out at the time, the Atari looked like shit...

I believe Pac Man is far and away the best selling Atari cartridge of all time, with 7 million copies sold. Pitfall sold slightly more than half that number. However, Pac Man was bundled with the system for a while so I am not sure how many were sold that way, but I'd guess a lot of these were sold individually.
 
Yeah I guess we always just said "Hey, wanna play Atari?" Maybe 2600 was something I picked up in the 90's. But I know I never called it a VCS. Ever.

That came later too with Nintendo, Sega and even Playstation. There is only a break now where most people call the Wii "Wii" and not "Nintendo" that I have noticed. But all the systems before that people just called them "Nintendo" and similar for the other brands I've mentioned.
 
pac man definately sucked but i played it like hell but my all time favorite was kaboom. when ever i hook up my atari every once in a while its what i play.
 
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