Tonight’s Gap-themed Snow Day game — with it’s Pac-Man, umm, homage — got me thinking about other Pac-Man clones. Surely, countless clones have come and gone through the years. This one, that I discovered through a bulletin board back around 1992 or so, is CD-Man by Creative Dimensions and is my favorite clone:
It had detailed, high-resolution, and colorful graphics, smooth animation, spider enemies, and new features such as a gated community for which your character needs a key to enter in order to complete the maze. The second maze of the game is water-themed with sharks as enemies.
Around the same time I discovered this game I also downloaded a 3D first-person perspective Pac-Man style game, which was not the first of its kind (I seem to recall an arcade game with the same theme as early as 1989). It was novel in the way that 3D graphics were always novel back then. But when I think back on it now, I don’t know if it was really an idea that worked.
How about you? What is your favorite member of the official Pac-Man family (whose franchise thrives to this day), or perhaps favorite Pac-Man clone?
Robert Swain says:
Shamelessly I used to play, and still do sometimes, Counter-Strike. On the server on which I used to play, there was a Pac-Man map. It’s quite intense to play an FPS game in a Pac-Man maze. Here’s a screenshot.
The wrap around bits at the sides are quite fun if you walk backwards through them you keep switching sides very rapidly. :) The aim is for the terrorists to plant a bomb in the middle room which has that strange force field door thing.
Usually at the beginning of the round everyone spams grenades at the other team so the first challenge is to survive the grenades, the second is to bite your lip, swallow your pride and run around like a crazy person shooting anything that moves and hoping it’s not a team mate… usual tactics. :)
CD-Man Player says:
Man do I miss this game! Any way of anyone emailing it to me? the-muffinator -at- hotmail.com
Multimedia Mike says:
Google is your friend. :-) Here’s one mirror:
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/25
luffythesoundninja says:
I have this game on an old floppy! my mom and me used too play it all the time. sadly, none of my computers will run it anymoreT.T
Multimedia Mike says:
I urge you to investigate the modern computing miracle that is DOSBox. It will run the game perfectly. That’s also how I captured the above screenshot.
Tomer Gabel says:
My favorite would have to be the relatively obscure (at least on the PC) Mad Mix (http://www.mobygames.com/game/mad-mix/screenshots). It was the absolute bomb.