Day 6: Pesco

Pesco started life as an unlicensed port of Pac-Man. You might remember the original Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man. It looked like this:


The new version looked like this:


A handfull were produced and given away, but rather than face the prospect of being sued into oblivion by the owners of the World's Most Recognized Video Game Character, maker Ebivision retooled the game and sold it as Pesco, which looks like this:


As you might expect, Pesco follows the Pac-Man model very closely. The player controls a thing in a maze, eating things while being chased by other things. In this case, a fish eating dots being chased by 3 crabs, which is almost exactly how I would describe a Pac-Man clone from the early 80's called Piranha. Anyone who's seen the movie Multiplicity knows what happens when you make a copy of a copy.

Along with originality, Pesco also lacks sound effects. Eating a crab or one of the sea-themed bonus items results in a very disappointing complete silence. The one noise the game does make, the sound of Pesco eating a dot, sounds more like it should be coming from one of those Coleco table top games than a TV set.

I think I can safely say there are more than enough Pac-Man-like games out there, and this one adds absolutely nothing to the formula.