Jr. Pac-Man

Le jeu

Jr. Pac-Man is an arcade video game developed by General Computer Corporation and released by Bally Midway on August 13, 1983. It has the same gameplay as prior entries in the series, but the maze in Jr. Pac-Man scrolls horizontally and has no escape tunnels. The bonus item which moves around the maze changes dots into a form which slows Jr. Pac-Man as they are being eaten. The core gameplay of Jr. Pac-Man is similar to its predecessors. The player controls the eponymous Jr. Pac-Man (who wears an animated propeller beanie), Jr. Pac-Man (Atari 7800) and scores points by eating all of the dots in the maze, while four ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Tim, who replaces Clyde) chase him around the maze and attempt to catch him. Eating a power pellet turns the ghosts blue, briefly allowing the player to eat them for extra points. Once the maze is cleared, a new maze is presented and the gameplay continues. The mazes are now twice the width of the monitor and scroll horizontally. A total of seven mazes appear throughout the game, and five of them have six power pellets instead of four, but none of them have tunnels that wrap around from one side of the screen to the other. Bonus items (such as tricycles, kites, and balloons) appear in each round, starting above the ghosts' lair and moving around the maze as in Ms. Pac-Man . As an item encounters dots, it changes them into larger ones that award more points but slow Jr. Pac-Man down while he is eating them. After a certain length of time, the item will move toward one of the remaining power pellets (if any) and explode on contact if not eaten, destroying both itself and the pellet. Contact between Jr. Pac-Man and a non-vulnerable ghost costs the player one life and makes any large dots either disappear or revert to normal ones, depending on how many dots overall are left in the maze. The between-level intermissions show the developing relationship between Jr. Pac-Man and a small red ghost named Yum-Yum who is apparently the daughter of Blinky. The Atari 2600 version of the game was programmed in 1984 by Ava Robin-Cohen of GCC. Atari had just re-released the system a smaller budget-priced revision called the Atari 2600 Jr. in 1986. Jr. Pac-Man was released for the Atari 2600 in October 1986. Ports for the Atari 5200 and the Atari 8-bit family were finished in 1984, but were scrapped along with Super Pac-Man when the home divisions of Atari, Inc. were sold to Jack Tramiel. An unofficial port for the Atari 7800 was published in 2009 by AtariAge.