Maze-Man

Published on Magic Disk 64 01/90

Maze-Man is a game about a yellow ball that eats a lot of dots while differently colored enemies are chasing it. If the yellow ball gobbles up all the dots, the next level starts. If one of the baddies touches the yellow ball, it loses one of its three lives and has to start the level anew. I can't shake the notion that this concept sounds vaguely familiar...

Yeah, it's Pac-Man. Even the font used for the title is as subtle as a sledgehammer.


Something I found interesting is that you can observe the playfield getting drawn to the screen during the game's startup process. Maze-Man wasn't written in BASIC, as far as I know, but that is a distinctly slow drawing routine:

This game is so fresh, you can literally see it getting built.

As soon as the proper colors appear, a nice little tune starts playing. It's the only sound you'll get out of this game, but the music isn't overly intrusive and holds up pretty well, even after several loops.

Pressing the joystick button starts the game. Pac Maze-Man appears in the center while his adversary spawns in the top left corner. You may have noticed by now that, for a game named Maze-Man, there isn't much of a maze going on at the moment. Here's where the game diverts from the classic it is modeled after and inserts its own twist:

As soon as you eat a dot, one of that tile's four sides becomes a solid wall. Which side gets blocked is determined by the direction in which you are moving when you swallow a dot. In the above screenshot I moved to the right, and thus the right side got walled off.

I continued by alternating between going down and right until I reached the bottom.

A short while later, the blob-like enemy has taken an apparent interest in my maze-building hijinks. Thankfully, the blob can't go through walls, and I can block off its approach simply by moving left.

The way the game determines which wall gets solid is a bit buggy. Or maybe it's a feature. You decide: If you move diagonally when touching a dot, two walls appear instead of just one. This is justifiable from a technical standpoint, as a diagonal joystick movement effectively means the player is moving in two Cartesian directions at once (e.g. left and down). On the other hand, it was rather mean for the programmer to leave this behavior in, assuming it was intended and not just an oversight.

Here you can see how I accidentally put myself into a dead end because I got impatient and moved diagonally to reach that dot.

If you manage to block yourself in or completely wall off part of the playfield, you can detonate one of three bombs. This destroys all walls which are adjacent to your current position. I didn't need to use a bomb in my situation, but I was in a vindictive mood and wanted to show those walls who's in charge.

Besides, I don't need to resort to bombs anyway, as I don't make these kinds of mistakes.

Well, poop.

And that's level 1 done. The bonus amount, which starts counting down at the beginning of the stage, gets added to the score. Luckily, you can still finish the level even after the bonus has reached zero.

The blob was hardly a threat in this stage. Once a couple of walls are in place, the one-eyed freak struggles to get anywhere. It isn't very interested in chasing the player, even without any barriers. Its movement seems to be controlled largely by pseudo-random numbers, and only occasionally does it attempt to reach the player's position directly. I started a game where I remained at the starting position, and the blob spent a lot of time aimlessly drifting around the playfield until it finally decided to reach me. Sometimes it just moves back and forth between two tiles, the kind of abnormal, repetitive behavior caged-up animals can exhibit. Man, now I almost feel sorry for the thing. I mean, look at its sad face:

・(

It doesn't seem angry to me, just cheerless and glum. Naturally, there is no backstory for this sort of game, but I still wonder what the blob is doing here or how it came to be.

Maybe the red dots are the blob's eggs, and the player is intruding on its nesting ground and feasting on its unhatched young. Who's the monster now, eh? Human beings, think what you have done.*

Level 2 starts out the same, but there are now two blobs roaming the evolving maze.

The number of enemies is the only distinction between the levels. The blobs do not get faster in later stages, and the initial playfield layout always remains the same.

Just having to deal with more enemies at once soon becomes difficult enough, especially because the blob folk tends to roam the areas where the player hasn't been yet, as displayed in above screenshot.

By level 5 the game has become rather tricky. It's interesting how creating walls can work for and against the player from moment to moment. You can pull up barriers to prevent blobs from reaching you, but the more dots you eat, the narrower your potential escape routes become. The blobs move at the same speed as the player sprite, so there is no way outrunning them. Thankfully, they never try to keep on the player's tail for more than a few tiles.

The sixth and last level has six enemies which are a major pain to evade. I've managed to section them off somehow, and the remaining dots are currently in a blob-free zone. Since none of my adversaries are any good at path finding, I might just complete this one. If any blob touches the player, the level gets restarted, and losing a life doesn't even replenish the bombs.

Believe it or not, the player sprite actually consists of two (single color) sprites. One represents the yellow body, and the other depicts the eye, which is just one black pixel. That's right, one whole sprite is "wasted" just to display a single black dot. That's also the reason why the game never goes beyond six enemies. Without some raster interrupt trickery, the C64 can only display eight sprites at a time, and in Maze-Man the player already takes up two.

Success! I am apparently a MazeMaster (my capitalization), though considering how many times I accidentally raised two walls at once or put myself into a dead end, I hardly ever felt in control of my creation of twisty little passages, all alike.*


CONCLUSION

For a Pac-Man clone, this is not all that bad. The maze creation adds an interesting twist to the overly familiar gameplay. The biggest problem for me is Maze-Man's pace. The player sprite doesn't move especially fast, and the speed never changes from level to level. While the slow movement helps to slide past enemies that just moved out of the way, the first few stages are a bit of a slog.

As you can no doubt tell by the screenshots, the graphics aren't anything to get excited over. The player sprite's mouth is animated to ceaselessly open and close, but it only has frames for facing left and right. If you move up or down, the yellow protagonist doesn't bother to turn its head.

Maze-Man takes up only 18 blocks (about 4.5 KB) on the disk, which doesn't come as a surprise in light of how simple it is. In comparison, Decton on the same disk is 82 blocks (~21 KB) and TX - The Game 162 blocks (~ 41 KB). Needless to say, size isn't an indicator for quality, and I'd honestly rather play a round of Maze-Man than any of the other two games.


* Bonus points for whoever recognizes that reference.