It’s April 3rd and back on April 3rd, 1982, Atari created Pac-Man Day to celebrate Pac-Man’s coming to the Atari 2600 and we’re going to celebrate by playing this on the Pac-Man Connect and Play Plug and Play System. As you can see, this thing’s a monster. It’s very large. You have an A button, a B button, and a nice clicky joystick that’s probably high-quality micro switches inside. That’s usually what it means: an on/off switch. And where are the wires? Well, to connect the connect in play, you have to take off this back, which is a little bit stubborn, but not much, and
There are the wires inside the little notch that you could pull it through to play and put the backpack on standard RCA cables with the mono audio running on four double-A batteries, so let’s go ahead and take the pac-man connect and play plug and play system. Let’s hook it up to my TV and see how it holds up today. Let’s go to the games.
Pac-Man Connect and Play was published by
The Pacman 30th anniversary Connect and Play was published by Bandai and came out in 2015 to cash in on Pac-man’s 35th anniversary. It contains 12 games accessed by a simple menu screen where you can also see saved high scores for the games that stay saved even if you take out the batteries at any time. When playing a game, you can hold down both the A and B buttons together to return to the main menu. As you would expect, the first game is the classic can’t fund Pac-Man. The second game is packed with manpower.
It’s a fun game where you swallow keys to open doors. It can also eat a superpower up to turn it into the massive super pack man, who can go through doors without keys. It’s not as good as the original, but it’s still a fun game. The third game is Pack and Pal, a follow-up to Super Pac-Man. You now have a ghost pal that can help you clear all the items and eating certain items gives you the ability to press a button and fire a paralyzing ray at the ghosts again. It’s interesting but not as fun as the original.
The fourth game is Pac-Man Plus, which is basically a hack of the original Pac-Man. This game has a faster pace. The power pellets sometimes have different effects, and even the bonus items act like power pellets, but they also turn a ghost temporarily invisible. It’s fun, but I still prefer the original. The fifth game is Pac-Man 256, and it actually starts you on level 285 of the original Pac-Man. If you manage to pass the screen, which is no easy feat, you will go to the legendary and hit glitchy level 256.
it’s not really a full game
So it’s not really a full game but a fun skip ahead. As I’ve mentioned many many times before, it’s not my personal cup of tea, but I know a lot of you really enjoy this game and it’s a worthy addition here. The seventh game is New Rally-X. It’s a maze game with you as a car collecting flags while you avoid other cars, sometimes using smoke screens to stop them. I’m not the biggest fan of this one. The eighth game is Bostonian, a free-moving space shooter where you bust giant chips by either shooting a collection of its parts or hitting the sweet spot. In the arcade version, you can move in eight directions, but here you can only move in four. Interesting Lee, it seems that every plug-and-play I reviewed this game on, including the pac-man retro arcade plug-and-play I reviewed this game on, including the pac-man retro arcade plug-and-play,including the pac-man retro.
Pac-Man TV games
Both the Namco Pac-Man TV games, plug and play from episode 257 by Jack Spec, also used four-way joysticks, which I didn’t realize until viewer Matthew Henderson pointed this out to me. Thank you, Matthew. The ninth game on the plug-and-play is one of my favorite old-timey space shooters, but this is one of my least favorite versions of the game for two reasons. Once again, you can only move in four directions as opposed to the original eight due to the four-way joystick. The second reason is that when I play Xevious, sometimes I like to hold down both funds to continue firing both my air blasters and ground bombs, but doing this here will send you back to the main menu.
The 10th game is Dig Dug, where you defeat enemies either by blowing them up with an air hose or by dropping rocks on them. This is another one of my favorite old-timey arcade games, and it plays well here, although it does scroll the screen. The most loved game is Galaga, a classic and fun early shooter. What more can I say? The 12th game is Galaxian, a groundbreaking shooter when it came out but not one I’ve enjoyed much to date as its sequel, Galaga, surpasses it in many many ways.
Overall
Overall, the graphics and sounds feel close enough to their arcade counterparts for my tastes, although some purists might notice some differences. Bandai recommended the unit for ages 4 and up. Currently, you can still find these in some major stores and on major online sites for about 20 dollars, give or take. So what do they think of the Pac-Man connect and play plug? Well, on the plus side, the games look and sound good, and the four-week joystick works very well for most of the games.
I guess that they used Wii joysticks and pac-man style plugs in place, such as this one, because formerly joysticks tend to work better than eight-way joysticks for those types of games. I also like being able to try to get to level 256 in Pac-Man by starting at level 255. On the minus side, the Eevee court could have been longer. The shape of the unit can be uncomfortable to hold at times, although sometimes I didn’t notice it.
For me, the version of Xevious included was disappointing. It would have also been nice to have had Miss Pac-Man included, but apparently, there are some sort of legal issues that prevent us from seeing the arcade version of Miss Pac-Man. I’m plugging in today.
In the End
So in the end, this is a pretty good plug-and-play, but it does have some drawbacks for me. So first I’d like to compare it to my number one plug-and-play, the Pacman 30th Anniversary Retro Arcade by Jack Specific. Both have 12 games, with the only difference in those games being that this one has Pac-Man 256 and the retro arcade one has pole position. That uses an awesome setup where you twist the knob to steer, and let me tell you, that rocks. So where will the Pac-Man Kinect plug-and-play end up? I’d now rank the Pac-Man Kinect plug-and-play in the 11th position.
