PacLand
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Atari 1991
Atari Lynx
Funky platforming game starring everyone's favorite power pellet munching half-circle person. Except now Pac-Man has arms and legs, and instead of a maze with dots it's an automatically side scrolling jumpy type thing.
The setting seems to be taken from the Pac-Man Saturday morning cartoon from the early 80s, you run through cute little Bavarian-looking towns and forests and stuff. Graphics are simple but pretty clean, lots of good parallax in the foreground and background going on. As you jump over obstacles and pits and such the ghosts come after you, most of the time while piloting some sort of vehicle (cars, trucks, pogo sticks, etc.) You collect cherries, time extension icons, and the occasional power pellet so you can eat ghosts.
This is one of those games where the main character never stands still (in fact if I remember correctly the arcade version didn't even use a joystick but instead had buttons that changed your direction left and right.) Thus the bulk of the game is all timing as you jump over and duck under stuff while continuously moving forward. It's not as bad as in games like say China Warrior or Hudson's Adventure Island, here at least you get to slow down and even turn around. But you cannot stop which makes certain areas pretty tricky to get through. For instance if you're trying to time something (like say running under a bouncing ghost on a pogo stick) you end up slowly walking back and forth while waiting for an opportunity when it would be a lot more efficient to just have your character stop walking. But that's the game I suppose.
The game doesn't put up much of a challenge until about the third level or so when you have to start jumping on moving platforms and such over bottomless pits which can be pretty tough as you're forced to keep moving. But even then it's nothing a bit of dedication can't overcome.
A decent translation of the arcade game, once you figure out tricky control scheme it's pretty enjoyable.
Graphics: Blocky like everything on the Lynx, but very clear.
Sound: Crap music like most Lynx games. The rest of the sound effects are limited to the usual 16-bit whistles and boings.
Gameplay: The hardest aspect of the game is deciphering the unique control scheme, but once it's learned the game becomes pretty fun.