Written by Marco Leal and first released in 2023, Pac-Man Arcade on the ZX Spectrum is about as close as you could possibly get to the original Pac-Man, without using voodoo.

The game has been perfectly translated to the Spectrum screen so that hardly any colour clash happens (there is a bit when Pac-Man eats ghosts and fruit), and everything moves beautifully smoothly. The author seems to have gotten almost everything right – the speed of movement, control responsiveness, animations, and ghost behaviour (although I’m not 100% sure about that last one).

I really enjoyed playing Pac-Man Arcade and wondered what the response might have been in Crash Magazine, had this been released in 1985. I’m pretty confident it would’ve been a Crash Smash. 🙂

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