194. Pac-Land (Namco, Famicom, 1985)

Pac-Land is the Famicom port of Namco's 1984 Pac-Man spin-off. Instead of solving a series of mazes, this is more of a straightforward platformer with a non-traditional control scheme. Tapping the A / B buttons moves you left and right, and you press up to jump. This is maybe the best "press up to jump" game on the Famicom that I've tried, and it's because you aren't also controlling your left / right movement with the d-pad. You actually have pretty decent control of Pac-Man, a good sense of momentum, and the stages have a good amount of variety in terms of the platforming.

While you start off in a flat town and forest, later levels have mountains to climb with trickier jumps on moving platforms. Ghost enemies fly above you (often in planes for some reason) dropping smaller ghosts like bombs. These ghosts are generally much easier to avoid than the ghosts in the original Pac-Man, but there is still the occasional power pellet that you can collect to turn them blue / vulnerable.

After the third level, Pac-Man reaches Fairy Land, at which point he turns around, but there is a huge chasm you can't jump over. Turns out you can jump infinite times, making a lot of the platforming trivial. After Pac-Man returns home after the first 3 levels, he goes on a second trip, but the fourth level is much longer and more difficult, and has a lot of weird invisible paths that cause some major slowdown.

Probably my favorite thing about Pac-Land are the almost polygonal looking graphics. While the arcade original had big black lines that made everything look like a coloring book, the Famicom version has no black lines around the sprites. They are simple to the point of almost looking childish, but end up looking cool in a minimal kind of way, like Katamari Damacy.

3/5, a decent platformer with an interesting graphical style and level design that's all over the place.