Wow! Finally something without even a snide jab at politics. Somebody call my momma, I must be going crazy. As it is though, generally these video game entries are supposed to avoid those topics so this is in theory supposed to be the norm rather than the exception.

Anyway, you might notice that the material I photographed said “Pac-Panic”. As you can tell by the gold CD-I logo on the jewel case for the disc, that’s because this is the European release for this game. I thought it was the U.S. one for the year or two I’ve owned it- the European CD-I games and movies generally don’t have the slipcovers from what I’ve seen. Upon reading the Wikipedia entry though it seems this game wasn’t released on the CD-I in the U.S. at all. Furthermore, the CD-I release is enhanced over the versions seen on consoles in the U.S.

About The Game

The game itself is like Dr. Mario or Tetris or any other of those stacking games really, but your goal depends on which mode you pick. As you can see there are three. I think the bottom one is versus, but since I’m a lonely old man in a 30 year old’s body I don’t have a second player to test with. I also don’t have two working versions of the same CD-I controller to play with, though I do have four different controllers for it.

The first mode you come to basically has you eliminate boxes and ghosts until your pile gets so high that a new piece lands with part of itself sticking up out of the play area. There are three regular pieces- ghosts, boxes, and Pac Mans. Boxes act like blocks in Tetris- complete a row and they vanish. Ghosts block you from completing rows, and Pac Man eats the ghosts to clear a path for the boxes to land. Of course my wording implies an irregular item falls- a fairy. Apparently you have a fairy meter that I paid no attention to (I didn’t read the manual) that fills up to drop a fairy, which I thought was a stick or a poor attempt to draw a cherry (an element from the arcade games). The fairy wipes out all the ghosts when it lands.

The longer you last, the faster the pieces fall. Pac Man also sometimes goes the wrong way, away from where the other ghosts are. He’ll only move downward and left or right, so if you have 4 ghosts arranged in a square the most he’ll eat is three. However if you have a row of ghosts, with empty blocks to the side, and you drop Pac Man on top of the ghost that’s on the end next to the empty space, sometimes Pac Man will eat the one ghost then go into the empty space instead of following the row of ghosts. I don’t know why.

You can rotate the pieces of course, by pressing one of the buttons on the controller (one of the buttons surrounding the thumbstick on the pictured controller). You can also call up a menu for exiting the game by pressing both buttons simultaneously (there are four buttons in the picture, but two of them are redundant).

The other game mode I was able to try has a different goal- you have 5 chances to eat all of the ghosts in the field of play, so you have to place the pieces that fall to facilitate the expeditious consumption of said supernatural specters. New pieces falling can still contain boxes, ghosts, or Pac Mans (whether you’re ready for one or not).

That’s It?

That’s what I thought. It’s a Pac Man game. Where is the Pac Man action?

I suck at these games. However, this was kind of fun at my first try, though next time I’ll probably use the CD-I controller that actually looks like a video game controller. I found some of my reflexes slowed a little because I was doing everything with one thumb.