Pacman ’87

Pacman ’87 is another Pacman-clone, Written by Steve Jacobs and Jim Boyd in 1987, which you have to go eating the Power Pills, which turns the ghosts Blue for a short time, avoiding the Ghosts until you eat a Power Pellets to eat the ghosts up, before they revert back to the white colour and then randomly go about chasing you when they feel like it, in this version they appear mostly to randomly move around the maze rather than making an attempt at catching you

This version differs quite a bit from Pacman as you know it, in this version, there are traps, and hazards, such as flame floors, spikes which pop out and kill you if you go past them, and quite unusual is the ability to quickly move between levels, even if not fully cleared of Pills, via the paths at the side of the screen, which are marked up with an arrow, if there is no arrow, you cannot go in that direction

These paths will simply place you on another map, full of pellets and pills to clear off again, while avoiding the ghosts, what really puzzles me, is the fact you can path-hop as much as you want, without even clearing the current displayed map of Pills or Pellets, which I find rather strange

You would have thought it would only let you pass onto another level once you have cleared the currently displayed level, but sadly this is not the case, as you can simply level-hop as much as you want, there certainly appears to be no limit to this, and it can be done at any time

There is no Title Screen built into the game, it is a simple IFF Image, and sadly absolutely no sound at all, But the gameplay is good, its varied, and the traps do add some degree of skill into the game, as you need to avoid the traps and the Ghosts, and if you are not careful, a Ghost can lead you into a trap, if there is no other path you can take

Initially the Game loads up, you are presented with the gameplay area, along with 3 buttons at the bottom, namely “Play!”, “Pause”, and “Quit” which would just put you back in Workbench/AmigaDOS depending how you launched the game

While it has some unique characteristics, I think this game could have been a lot better made personally, for instance, I would have made the whole level cleared before activating the side pathways, rather than blanket enabling them, so you can just skip levels on the fly, the Ghosts for me, need better AI ability, rather than just wandering around like they do, and in some cases, the collision detection is slightly off, I have been killed by a Ghost behind a separating wall for example, But these small issues are not that major, and do not affect the games performance or playability

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