Atari 2600 Hack’em Review by Nukey Shay

“Hack’Em!” is a hack of an un-released Pac-Man game (the Ebivision version) which later became the popular homebrew game Pesco. It was developed by the late great Atariage user and programmer, Nukey Shay, known for other hacks such as “Bottomless Pitfall”, “Space Invaders Deluxe”, “Adventure 8K”, “Pac-Man 8K”, to name a few. At first I thought he named it Hack’Em simply because he already used the name Pac-Man 8K and Hack’Em sounded kind of catchy. Now I realize the name fits really well. It is clear from the finished work, what Nukey Shay had intended to accomplish was to make a more Arcade-perfect version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 while at the same time, extending its replay value throwing in two separate Hack’Em games and two Hangly Man games all in one. I have two cartridge versions, one an 8K variety and the other is a 16K variety, dated 10/04/2006. For the purposes of this review, I am discussing the 16K version, since it seems to have more features, fixes and even includes a title screen. Hack’Em is a single player game.

In addition to an improved version of Pac-Man, both cartridges contain three additional hacks, “Hack’Em 2”, “Hangly Man!” and “Hangly Man 2”, making this a super value cartridge and a super value review.

Hack’Em title screen

Hack’Em 16K, packs in a real nice title screen with several animations. The stationary ghosts are animated to the left of their names. The ghost names are neatly right justified. The “C” in Hack’Em is animated to look like the Pac-Man chomping and Hack’Em himself makes an appearance flowing in from the right side of the screen followed by the four ghosts. When he gets all the way to the left and eats the power pill, all the ghosts turn blue and reverse direction with Hack’Em in hot pursuit. As he eats each one of them, their point values are displayed. The power pill and wafer point values are also displayed. After consuming all four ghosts, he reaches the end of the screen and an in game demo begins. Each time you press “Game Reset” on your console, it cycles through the various game modes, starting the in game demo over.

Hack’Em 2 / Hangly Man Title Screen

For the “Hack’Em 2” / “Hangly Man!” game type, once Hack’Em dies, the title screen starts over showing the new ghost names, “Macky”, “Micky”, “Mucky”, “Mocky”, quite humorous and a departure from the Arcade version of Hangly Man. I prefer these names to the Japanese names which are:

Red Ghost – “Oikake”
Pink Ghost – “Machibuse”
Blue Ghost – “Kimagure”
Orange Ghost – “Otoboke”

By Continuing to press “Game Reset”, you will notice there are a total of four main mazes or what I am calling “Game Modes”, two blue and two green.

Hack’Em

Hack’Em maze

The Hack’Em maze layout mimic the traditional arcade Pac-Man maze pretty closely and plays like it. You have a total of four power pills, one in each corner. There are four ghosts and you have a fruit that appears in the center of the maze on each successive level. Upon eating the “fruit” all of the ghosts are “energized”, turn blue and can now be eaten. For the purposes of simplicity in this review, I refer to whatever object appears in the center of the map as “fruit”. After completing a level, or losing a life, you must press the fire button to resume play. In a new level you start with the same maze, except this time there is a different fruit, the amount of time the power pills last (blue time) has been slightly reduced and the ghosts are slightly faster.

The images for the point values of consumed ghosts are:

Hack’Em 2

Hack’Em 2 or Hack’Em squared?

Now, by pressing “Game Reset” and switching to the first all green wall map, you will find Hack’Em 2. The only obvious difference being the walls are now green instead of dark blue. You will quickly realize the real difference after eating a few power pills, some of the ghosts do not turn blue. Every time you eat the fruit in the center of the map, the ghosts are energized as if you ate a power pill, with the small exception, they turn invisible while still roaming the map. This effect means you have to mentally track the invisible ghosts and try to figure out where they are in order to eat them. They remain invisible until they begin flashing. You also have the added bonus of the score being doubled for each consumed ghost, an extremely nice incentive to do well with the fruit. In this game mode it is hard to tell but the ghost patterns are slightly more aggressive. When you costume a power pill, the ghosts stay blue for a shorter period of time. The ghosts have additional detail added to their heads, a little Apple stem or flags.

Nukey Shay describes the fruits on this maze (Hack’Em 2 & Hangly Man 2) as:

After completing the first intermission and upon eating the first power pill, you will notice the entire maze disappears, all you see are the fruit, the ghosts and Hack’Em himself. At this point you are still constrained to the walls, so you must navigate from memory until you eat all the ghosts or until the power pill wears off.

Hack’Em 2 after consuming first power pill, where are my walls, wafers?

The disappearing wall effect seems to happen after every other consumed power pill. It also seems to happen at “random” for the rest of the game. For that matter, which ghosts turn blue upon eating an energized wafer also appears to be random in my best estimation. Nukey Shay has said these effects are not actually random but do follow preset patterns.

Hangly Man !

In “Hangly Man!”, we are presented with an ‘alternate’ blue map. This map is interesting since it has multiple horizontal warp tunnels, three to be exact, along with several other minor tweaks. This game mode plays exactly the same as Hack’Em in that it has traditional Pac-Man / Hack-Em rules where the power pill always turn all the ghosts blue and the fruit just gets eaten and has no special powers. The exception being, in this game there are two maps that alternate after completion.

Hangly Man – Map 1 – Notice the small text at the top center, I know it’s difficult to read but it says Hanglyman!

Hangly Man – Map 2, notice the two vertical warp tunnels?

On “Hangly Man!” – Map 2, you’ll notice two extra vertical warp tunnels. You will also notice the absence of most interior walls on the map, a plethora of black space filled with wafers. This presents its own special challenges, ones that will have to be played to be fully appreciated.

Hangly Man 2

Hangly Man 2 has the exact same maps as “Hangly Man!”, except the maps are green and the rules in place seem to be the same or near the same as Hack’Em 2 (see above). To repeat a little, when you consume the power pills, not all of the ghosts will turn blue. When you consume the fruit, all four ghosts are energized but disappear from view until they flash. Consuming them will reward you with a double point value bonus. In this game mode the fruit that appear are the same as the fruit in the Hack’Em 2 game mode, “Coke can, martini, pea pod, apple, grapes, Galaxian, loaf of bread, and stack of pancakes”.

Hangly Man 2 – Map 1

Hangly Man 2 – Map 2, same map as Hangly Man-Map 2, but green, plays using Pac-Man rules…

Intermission screen shots

Part of first intermission sequence displays after first Strawberry level

“Pac-Man enters from the right, followed closely by Shadow (Blinky). They exit to the left. Blinky reappears from the left as a scared (blue) ghost, followed immediately by a much larger “super” version of Pac-Man. This super version would officially appear in Super Pac-Man.” — Excerpt from Strategy Wiki

Part of second intermission sequence, Blinky gets snagged on a nail.
This sequence plays after the first Apple level completion. Pressing pause
during this intermission will cause it to loop.

“Pac-Man enters from the right, followed closely by Shadow (Blinky). This time, there is a nail sticking out in the path that Pac-Man and Shadow are crossing. Shadow’s “clothing” gets caught on the nail as he passes by it, and the bottom right corner tears off, stuck to the nail. Shadow, whose foot is now visible, looks at the nail and then rolls his eyes.” — Excerpt from Strategy Wiki

Part of the third intermission sequence, Blinky lost his shell, is now a slug?
This sequence takes place after the first and fifth key level completions.

“Pac-Man enters from the right, followed closely by Shadow (Blinky), whose torn “clothing” is clearly sewn back together. After both Pac-Man and Shadow exit to the left, Shadow immediately reappears from the left, appearing disrobed and dragging his clothing on the floor behind him. This disrobed sprite was not reused in any later Pac-Man games, but was seen in a few of the unlicensed bootlegs.”– Excerpt from Strategy Wiki

More on the gameplay of all four games

You are rewarded with a free Hack-Man after attaining a score of 10,000 points. This is the only free man rewarded, unless it is possible to roll the score at which point I would assume you could earn another free man. Once you lose all Hack Men, the game is over, your final score is displayed at the top of the map and upon pressing the fire button, you start all over from the same level you left off on.

Speaking to the graphics in these games, overall they are pretty good. I love the detail of the word “Go” appearing at the beginning of each game in the fruit location, but it seems to me it should have had an exclamation point added to it. I would have liked the power pills to be larger and round, but at least they are flashing on/off in the corners. The fruit is nicely detailed making it easy to discern. You will notice the fruit also starts to fade out just before going away. The ghosts have nice detail and are actually animated as they move. You cannot however tell which way their eyes are moving. When you eat a power pill, the ghosts turn blue and have a frown face, nice detail. On the “Hangly Man!” game types the ghosts all have flags or stems above their heads. When you eat the ghosts, their point value is displayed, also a nice detail, and they turn into little eye balls that are animated in sort of a wiggly fashion which is better than nothing, but you cannot tell which way they are looking as with the Arcade version. The mazes look great and they flash after level completion. The number of Hack Men, your score and the current level are all displayed on the top row as opposed to the bottom row. One knit-pick is regarding the fruit. When you begin a new level or start over the fruit is displayed in the center briefly then disappears, teasing you. I believe this was intentionally done to notify you which difficulty level you are now beginning. The ghost cage is great and the ghosts bounce up and down until released.

The sounds in all four games are pretty good. There is a nice introduction sound. The background siren is present. The sound for eating wafers is a nice one. ****However, using real hardware, you only barely make out the sound of Hack-Man eating the wafers (much too low a volume)****. I find this to be a bit of a disappointment. There is a pretty good sound for eating the power pill and it temporarily replaces the siren until the power pill wears off. When you eat a ghost, there is a nice sound effect that plays until all the eye balls return to the ghost cage. When you die, there is a sound effect. At first I did not like the dying sound effect, but I have come around to liking it now. There is a satisfying sound played when you eat the fruit. The intermission sequences have music that mimic Arcade Pac-Man.

Game Sounds:
Background Siren

Consume Fruit

Dying

Eat two ghosts

Eating wafers

First Inermission

Power Pill on key level

Power Pill

Start of Game

Second Inermission Sequence

The left difficulty switch controls the ghost intelligence. In setting “A” all four ghosts are as aggressive as the red ghost. In setting “B”, all the ghosts except for the red one move randomly around the maze. The right difficulty switch controls the speed of your Hack’Em man. In position “B”, Hack Man is faster, the wafers do not slow him down. In this mode Hack-Man is always faster than the ghosts. Since faster equals easier, this is the mode I prefer to play in. You can alternate between the Game Modes and the number of ghosts on each map, simply by repeatedly pressing “Game Reset” on your console. Pressing the “Game Select” button will switch between all the fruits on a given map, slightly increasing difficulty along the way. The TV Type switch actually pauses the play so that you may take a bathroom break. This is a nice feature to have since, in my opinion, that switch is highly under-used.

Important notes:
If you toggle any switch besides the TV Type Switch, the current game will be reset. This will prevent you from switching the speed and/or difficulty on the fly and would combat at least that form of cheating.

Either joystick can be used to move Hack Em!

Pro tip:
Nukey Shay shared with us a sort of an Easter egg, more of an undocumented feature: quoting Nukey Shay

if you hold up on both controllers when starting a game, you will begin at level 254 (just a little split-screen development thing I left in…level 255 features a simulated rollover bug).

 

You see, Arcade Pac-Man would not render properly on level 256 making it un-playable. It looks like Nukey Shay has emulated this defect and given us a way to check it out without having to play all 255 levels!

Arcade Pac-Man – The 256th “Split-Screen” level cannot be completed due to
a software bug. —Source Link

Simulated 256 level bug: You can consume all visible wafers, but you cannot complete the level

Observed Glitches (on real hardware)
I have ran across the instance where when the ghosts are energized and if two of them are overlapping when you attempt to eat them, only one of them is consumed.

I have also run across the instance where on the top left corner on the Hack’Em game mode, when consuming the power pill with a ghost chasing closely, I was able to go past one of the wafers without consuming it.

During long games, I have observed the whole map “flash” briefly during game play. This glitch also happens when the attract or title screen completes.

One time after losing my last man on the Hangly Man game mode, the game totally reset back to the opening as if I had reset the power.

I have passed through a ghost while making a 90 degree turn without incident.

Pause Mode inversion: If you start the game with the TV Type Switch set to “B/W” the game will start normally. The pause feature will then be activated upon switching back to “Color”. This is the opposite of normal.

To me, even though the name of this game is Hack’Em, this is not just a hack, I consider it a whole new homebrew version of Pac-Man. I would have killed to have had this game back in the 80’s. This fits somewhat neatly between Atari 2600 Pac-man and Atari 2600 Ms. Pac-Man, in that it is an improvement on Atari 2600 Pac-Man and it has more than one game map. It actually contains four distinct games. Speaking to the two Pac-Man ‘like’ games (Hack’Em and Hangly Man), the ones with the blue maps, I prefer the first one, Hack’Em, since it mimics the Arcade version. The second blue map has the extra warp tunnels and thus a little bit more complexity, which can be a good thing.

The Hack’Em 2 / Hangly Man 2 game types, represent a new twist on classic Pac-Man, throwing in a few surprises along the way. I prefer Hack’Em 2 since there seems to be a little more variety and the map is more familiar. I have to say, they take some getting used to. These game types further extend the playability, adding many more hours of Pac-Man style fun.

I guess you can call me a purist, but I really do prefer the original Arcade Pac-Man over Arcade Hangly Man. I give a lot of credit to Nukey Shay for putting all of this together. I love it when programmers take the time to add sufficient polish to their product. That’s what he has been done here. This is an excellent hack of Pac-Man and a nice interpretation of Hangly Man, combining four separate games in one.

Highly recommended.

*****
References