Game Review: Munch Mania (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

It’s no secret that Mastertronic sought “inspiration” from the arcades for many of their early releases. Like so many other publishers at the time, copyrights were blatantly ignored and the market was flooded with clones of almost every major arcade game you could think of. So it comes as no surprise to find out that Munch Mania, written by Martin Ellis, is a clone of the Namco classic Pac Man…

Send In The Clones

To be honest, in the early days of the home computer scene in the UK, releasing arcade clones made sense. As the industry was in a state of rapid growth there was a constant need for new software, and with it a continued pressure on programmers. Arcade clones meant that developers didn’t have to worry about coming with new game ideas cutting development time immensely.

And from a marketing point of view, if a customer had a vague idea in advance what a game was going to be like before handing over their hard-earned cash it gave that publisher an instant edge over their rivals. As a gamer, if you knew a game was based on one of your arcade favourites, or the alternative was a game you knew nothing about at all, the arcade clone was going to win every time!

Enter Munch Mania

In the case of Munch Mania, Martin Ellis has attempted to recreate the timeless Namco classic. Even back in 1984 when this was released it was considered to be a game that everyone wanted to play so it had the potential to be a sure-fire hit. And when you look at the stills for Munch Mania, it gives you the impression that you going to get at the very least a passable clone.

In fact, with the exception of the screen layout using the full width of the C64’s display rather than the narrow screen layout seen in the arcade, it looked pretty good. But as they say, looks can be deceiving…

The Good…

As I said, when you first look at the screenshots, Munch Mania looks as if it could be a competent port of Pac Man. The maze layout looks the same, if a little stretched and the power pills and everything else is all where it is supposed to be. The ghosts are all the correct colours and everything looks as it should do.

One difference I noticed is that the logic and movement patterns for the ghosts seem to be different from the arcade original, although to be honest this wasn’t really a deal-breaker here and if anything it helped give Munch Mania a bit of a twist on Pac Man making you learn new tactics on how to play.

Finally, there’s even a choice of joystick or keyboard controls (something that seems to disappear from many games later in the C64s lifespan) so there didn’t seem to be anything to complain about. Until you started playing, that is.

And The Bad

First thing you notice is the music. At the start of every game is a very poor attempt at playing the opening Pac Man theme (using a single sound channel). I don’t know if this was deliberately written to be out of tune, or with the notes mixed up, but either way it sounds pretty awful. Thankfully, it’s over in a few seconds and you don’t have to hear it again until you start another game.

But sadly it’s the gameplay itself that lets Munch Mania down. The biggest issue that strikes you as soon as you start playing is the speed of it. Not that the game is sluggish – far from it. Instead, it is far too fast compared with the original it takes its cue from. This, combined with some fairly unresponsive controls, makes for a game that you spend more time struggling with rather than enjoying. It’s all too easy to run headlong into a ghost not because you took a wrong turn, but simply because you were moving too fast to avoid them.

The only time the game isn’t fast is when you move through the exits at either side of the maze and then it can take several seconds to re-emerge on the other side. This just leads to more frustrations as the ghosts continue to roam so more often than not you end up colliding with ghosts who just happen to walk straight in front of the exit you are coming out of.

Overall

As a long time fan of Pac Man (to the point that I even bought one of the Arcade1Up cabinets), I genuinely wanted to love Munch Mania. But what could have been a great clone of the arcade classic turned out to be nothing but a huge disappointment. I could forgive the “music” and the new movement patterns for the ghosts didn’t worry me too much (as a kid growing up I don’t think I ever noticed them anyway!), but the speed made it almost unplayable at times.

Time after time we’ve seen superb official and unofficial conversions of the game to most home systems, but just one simple change to the game mechanics took this from being fun to being too frustrating to be enjoyable.

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