You know, when I played Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou I was expecting it to remain at least fairly near the top of the list of games I'd played in this project as far as madness was concerned. It was a complete surprise to me that it was instantly shown its place by a game that wolfekko gave me, with the apparently innocent title Pac-Man 2.

To be fair, is it going to be any madder than any other recent events this weekend? Don't be stupid, of course it isn't. But it's going to make a decent attempt anyway.




There are two interrelated facets to this game that make it quite so remarkable... the first is that I have no idea why this is called Pac-Man 2. It has the greatest, most irreconcilable genre shift that I've ever seen between a game and its (alleged) sequel - it is not, as you might expect, a maze game with some enhancements over the original. Instead, it's a sort of adventure where you watch Pac-Man yomping through a cartoon world, occasionally pointing out something that you want him to pay attention to and hoping that he'll interact with it in the way that you expect. This leads us to the second unusual thing - the player doesn't really do a whole lot of playing, being reduced to vaguely influencing the course of events by shooting things with a catapult and getting frustrated when Pac-Man runs off in the wrong direction.

For the rather indirect method by which you control it, it's a bit like Scribblenauts - except your character is a manic-depressive Tamagotchi with the mind of a particularly stupid toddler and won't listen if you cheese him off too much. Despite all this, in this video I explore all of the game world that it will allow before remembering what I'm supposed to be doing, and even when I know the solution it takes me an age to manage it.

How did anyone get anywhere in this game before the Internet? Or, having listened to the sound, play it for long enough to do so before having their parents come through and ram the player's head through the television screen?