Pacar

I've been doing some work on an incredibly ambitious secret project, and in my travels I've, yet again, found an amazingly weird underrated video game for a console nobody cares about. On the menu today is...

PACAR. It's one of Sega's old creations from 1983, and comes with a side order of fries or onion rings. It's an SG-1000 game that successfully fuses Rally X and Pac Man into something potentially better than both of them. The SG-1000 was Sega's first video game console, and one of Sega's first commercial failures, mostly because it was released on the same day as Nintendo's Famicom in Japan (though its computer equivalent, the SC-3000 did a bit better). The hardware behind it is similar to the first MSX computer (aka rubbish) and its games library was mostly made up of Sega arcade ports due to a lack of third party support. But you can't get Pacar on Nintendo.

Sega didn't bother trying to make sense of this game. They even say quite clearly on the reverse side of the European box that the object of the game is to "delete dots". Back in 1983 things didn't have to make sense.

I'm sure you'll all agree that if you could run over the ghosts in Pac Man, the game would be much better. In Pacar, you can... sort of. The rules are largely the same as Pac-Man, though there are less enemy cars than ghosts presumably due to technical restrictions. There is, however, an extra layer of difficulty added to this game. First of all, your car (which is green by the way), goes slower in reverse. Second, the equivalent of power pellets only appear after you've deleted a certain amount of dots, and they don't last as long (and I assume you use them to "delete" cars too... I'm not sure how the Pacar universe works). There's also some rather annoying problems like the spawning of enemy cars in seemingly random locations, but to give Pacar some credit, with two "maps" there are more locations than the original Pac Man game. Also, as you can see, Sega also tried to make bridges, so this game isn't quite as flat. That doesn't count for much though.

It may sound and look simple, but on the SG-1000, everything is. Still, if you're planning on building up an SG-1000 library for some reason, make sure this is on your list.