Pac-Man 'Coleco Mini Arcade' Review & Gameplay - Rerez

When I was younger my mom first introduced me to games by playing Pac-Man with me. She taught me exactly what I had to do and the memories of this game have stuck with me ever since. I’m pretty sure everyone out there knows what Pac-Man is — you play as Pac-Man, you eat dots and avoid ghosts unless you can pick up a power pellet because then you kill the ghosts. Really the game is pretty simple and this version from the Coleco mini arcade series is pretty much the same idea. Only there are a couple of changes that arguably make it a tad more difficult.

The maze in this Pac-Man is very similar to the maze you will find in most other versions of the game. The difference is how they’ve set up the maze with these very thin walls. For some reason the pathways feel longer and narrower vertically yet wider horizontally. That creates a distortion and confuses you while you trying to play the game. I know it seems like a minor complaint but for somebody like myself who has played Pac-Man since I was a kid it changes the feel of the maze and artificially inflates the difficulty.

I’m a huge fan of the way this arcade box is designed. It has a really clean look and pretty much everything works as it should. However there is one problem with this set up. I don’t know if it’s because of the age of the unit that I’m using or not. But the joysticks do not work well. Since this is a portable version of Pac-Man I was expecting the controls to be restricted to up, down, left and right but it feels more free and loose. What results is a spongy feeling joystick that doesn’t feel good to use. This is opposite to the Galaxian mini arcade that felt a lot more responsive. These controls feel a little bit weak. This version of Pac-Man also has a head to head mode that’s pretty much a 2 player mode. One player controls the left joystick and the other player controls the right joystick and you play on the same field collecting pellets. It’s really cool but I prefer the single player mode a lot more. Another negative with this mini arcade is that the sound effects are terrible. They will make your ears bleed.

The mini arcades take four C-cell batteries but Coleco came up with an idea called Perma Power. Perma Power batteries are basically hollow plastic tubes with two metal ends and you install these the same way you would install regular C-cell batteries. One of the tubes hooks up to an AC power adapter and that AC adapter will power any Coleco mini arcade. It basically replaces the need to keep buying fresh batteries for the mini arcades. And this is instead of having an AC input on the back of the console itself. I guess maybe they saved money doing it this way?

The people who made this game had a lot of limitations simply because of the size of the machine. But one of the things that limited the game the most is the Vacuum Fluorescent Display. Basically every square inch of the screen needed to be able to support, at one time or another, a Pac-Man, a ghost and a pellet. Their solution was to make the ghosts the largest image, have Pac-Man appear as the head of the ghost and have the pellet double as one of the ghost’s eyes. As far as I know this is the only version of Pac-Man where Pac-Man can be seen inside the ghosts. It’s kind of weird but it works in a very strange way. On top of that if you look closely at the pellets you can tell they really are just a ghost eye complete with pupil. Another thing that’s unique to this version is that because of the limitations of this display setup every single ghost has eyes on the bottom of their body. This is the only version like this because in every other version the ghosts’ eyes are near the top of their bodies. So that makes this version of Pac-Man a little bit of an oddity.

The mini arcade version of Pac-Man isn’t better than the arcade original. The gameplay simply isn’t as sharp. Because the controls are a little bit loose they don’t flow so well. I wouldn’t prefer this version over the full arcade version. But if you’re out there and you want to play a unique version of the game with two players on the same field this is the one to try. But for everybody else stick to the arcades.

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