Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde

Are you tired of walking all the way down to that cool cafe on Church and Market every time you need a PacMan fix? I know I am. Thank goodness for the PacMan application, which allows you to play PacMan from the comfort of your own desk chair whenever you need to.

The thing I find fascinating about this version is that you can make moves in advance. You know how the major challenge of PacMan was that you had to jerk the joystick or controller at the exact right moment to make PacMan turn? This PacMan is controlled by your keyboard, and you can order him to turn well before he gets to a turning place. For example, I might hit the right arrow while he’s still going up, and he’ll automatically make his next right, no matter how far away it is.

The app runs kind of slow on my computer, although since almost everything runs slow on this poor old bag of bytes I really can’t tell if it’s the application or my hardware. I’m guessing it’s me, since most of the complaints on the boards are about how fast it runs.

In any case, the slowness of the game combined with the opportunity to make moves in advance makes this PacMan more of a strategy game than the frantic chase I’m used to. I have a chance to figure out the best routes and to guess where the ghosts will be three moves from now. I almost prefer it this way, although old school PacMan fans might not be so delighted.

If you find the speed is tricky, you might try an alternate PacMan application. This one doesn’t work for me because the screen is too big for my monitor. You can change your screen resolution to see the whole game without scroll bars, but to be honest even that is more work than I’m willing to do for a five minute game break.

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