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Author: Picker's Games Genre: Arcade Game Reviewer: Pete |
Size: 3 KB Download: pickman.zip |
| First Impression | Once upon a time there was a Pickman from the planet Pick. Pickman's girlfriend stopped liking him for some unknown reason, and to win back her love, he had to complete 15 increasingly difficult mazes inhabited by a giant, man-eating ampersand!!! Oh, the humanity!!! |
| What It's Like | This is a text Pac-Man clone. There are a couple other text Pac-Man clones in existance that I've seen, but this one has the most variety, and the 'bad guy' does have some routines to actually try to hunt you out and get you (they really work!!), compared to the random movements of the ghosts in other Pac-Man games I've played. You are in a maze, and you must collect all of the dots (like in Pac-man), but this time, the enemy is stalking you. This game also has a password feature and a story that come with it, plus 15 mazes, and an enemy system that can be a bitch to get around sometimes, but isn't really AI.. At any rate, despite it being a text Pac-Man game, it was interesting enough for me to play for more than ten minutes, and I rarely do that with text versions of sucessful arcade games. :) |
| Other things you should know | The way the AI works in this game is the enemy tries to match up the column and row that you're in. He moves at different speed depending on the circumstance. But it often gets caught on the opposite sides of walls and tries to walk through to get you. That's the only problem I've seen with this simple, yet effective engine. The mazes are designed so that it will take some strategy to escape the monster. There are a lot of places where he can corner you, which will lead to your demise. |
| Graphics |
Hrm.. Text graphics. I don't even know if this deserves to be called graphics, but they symbolize the graphics nicely. #'s are walls, .'s are the dots you must collect, you're a smily face and the enemy is an & sign. I don't want to ruin the game's score for this category just because it's text based, so I'm going to be a bit generous.
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| Sound |
There is no sound.
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| Flexibility/Features |
This game comes complete with 15 maps, a password system, a menu, and a story! It also has the nice little enemy routines and the maps are strategically drawn. It's not the best I've seen in terms of features and flexibility, but the game is pretty fun. :)
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| Gameplay/Control |
The keys used for this are weird.. A is up, Z is down, , is left and . is right. I can tell that Picker's Games doesn't know how to use the arrow keys with inkey$. There's nothing wrong with the control, it's just you have to use weird keys. Ahhhh well. It works. I have (few) complaints.
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| Overall Impression | It's extremely simple, has no real graphics and no real sound, and weird control. It's got a couple nice features, and that's about it. But this game is one of the most entertaining Pac-Man clones I've ever played, only because of the way the maps were made to make the enemy harder to avoid. A valiant effort by Picker's Games!
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| Total | 62% |