Pac-Attack, Riot Zone

The game: Pac-Attack
Its cost: 800 points

Lucas DeWoody – Pac-Attack is the yellow one’s one attempt at the puzzle genre. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon after the original Tetris boom of the early 90’s. Some were better than others, but this one lands somewhere in the middle. The first thing you need to realize about Pac-Attack is that this isn’t Tetris. Most reviews compare Pac-Attack to Tetris, but the comparison isn’t truly warranted. Though you do receive points for lining up solid rows of blocks, you can’t expect to last long doing just that here. The falling pieces consist of either blocks, ghosts, or a mixture of both. The ghosts serve to block you from simply clearing clean rows of blocks. Your goal is to keep stacking the ghosts in a solid row going up, down, left, right, or zig-zagging. It really doesn’t matter how you do it as long as they are touching. Every so often one of the falling pieces will contain Pac-Man. You want to position Pac-Man on top of the stack of ghosts. He will go in the direction he was facing, and then straight down the tower of blocks eating as many ghosts as possible along the way. The more he eats, the more points you receive, and the more blocks can fall into place clearing more room to play and even more points. Pac-Attack is a game of chain reactions, and you’ll spend the whole time trying to continually set one up for when that Pac-Man block finally arrives. If you clear enough ghosts to fill up the meter on the left side of the screen, a fairy will appear to clear all the ghosts on the field and save you from a potential mess. The puzzle mode has you clear a certain amount of ghosts with a limited amount of Pac-Man blocks, but to make things easier, you get to change the direction Pac-Man is facing. The versus mode is the star attraction where the more ghosts you clear, the more you drop on your opponent. I hope you like the Pac-Man arcade intermission theme, because it’s used as the main game theme. Fortunately, it’s one of the catchiest songs ever written for a game. It’s also nearly impossible to get out of your head, so take that as a compliment (or not). There’s also some original stuff for the other two modes as well. You’ll also get different background pictures as you advance to different levels. It’s a simple, yet appealing package all-around. Pac-Attack was made for pick up and play, so it will get old in long sessions (to some), but any puzzle game fan has to have this in their collection. It’s a fun little gem that often gets overlooked thanks to the “Tetris clone” stereotype, and that just doesn’t apply here.

Original spin on the old “falling blocks” puzzle theme; Quick pace means a challenging experience, Made for quick pick up and play sessions; 2-player simultaneous versus and puzzle modes are excellent

The concept is limited and was built for pick up and play, so extended sessions can get boring for some; bare-bones presentation does the job, but fails to stand out

TurboGrafx-16 CD

The game: Riot Zone
Its cost: 800 points

Lucas DeWoody – Riot Zone is another one of Hudson’s attempts to bring a genre to the TurboGrafx-16 that third parties neglected, and unfortunately the game is just of a bland, simple, and generic grade compared to some of the classic brawlers already available on the Wii. The closest comparison for gameplay is Final Fight, except with all the personality and fun sucked out of it. 2D brawlers are easy to screw up because they are repetitive by nature. You punch, kick, walk a little further, rinse and repeat, and kill a boss. All the classics add something different to the formula, or at least try to jack up the presentation to make the experience memorable. Riot Zone does none of this. Its like the developers just looked at a manual of basic beat ’em up design concepts and copied the formula straight out of the manual, adding none of their own taste to the mix. While the game isn’t exactly broken, you’ll find nothing you haven’t done a thousand times before in a much better fashion. The canned combos are stiff and basic, leaving you with shallow button mashing. A dog with a trigger finger could probably play it. Enemy AI is also dumb as a rock. The visuals are a total waste. The backgrounds are simplistic, the character designs are generic, and the settings are bland. You’ll find that many of the enemies are just color swaps of each other, and their animations are very limited and choppy. It’s barely above 8-bit. That’s just nothing that stands out. Musically, Riot Zone isn’t much better with the soundtrack much like that of a bad 80’s cop movie plus sound effects that will make you cringe. To add a proverbial spit to the face, Riot Zone lacks any kind of two player mode—a brawler staple. There’s just nothing worth spending $8 bucks on that you couldn’t already find on the Virtual Console for the same price with infinitely more content, personality, quality, and polish. Go buy Final Fight for the exact same price and see the game Riot Zone wishes it could be.

Decent controls; Basic design and low difficulty curve might be good for novices

Uninspired Final Fight clone that offers nothing but the basic brawler fundamentals; Bland characters and half-assed story; Awful visuals; No 2-player mode

some images courtesy of vgmuseum.com