[Ad – Gifted Products] I feel like everyone has heard of and has played Pac Man. It’s one of those retro games that have been around for what feels like a lifetime! Pac Man is a simple game – there are a bunch of dots on the screen, inside a sort of maze. There are ghosts stuck in the middle, that make their way out and move around, sometimes chasing you, so that they can eat you! As Pac Man, you need to eat up all of the dots around the screen, including blinking dots that allow you to eat the ghosts for a few moments after you’ve eaten one, before they go back to normal ghosts or, in the case of being eaten, respawn. Sometimes fruit appears that you can eat for extra points. The Pac Man Plug and Play allows you to play this simple game on your TV, just by plugging in a HDMI-drive stick and a cable.
The little game itself has a HDMI-drive stick that goes right into the back of your TV. A cable goes from that stick into some sort of USB power supply. We used a battery pack as this cable isn’t super big and our TV is. The controller itself for the Pac Man Plug and Play is a little rectangle with a joystick on the top, which looks like Pac Man. This does need three AAA batteries, then it’s all set! When you want to play, you can just hit start to start a round.
The Pac Man Plug and Play does have two player, with one person playing until they die and then the next playing on the same map, looking to achieve a high score. Once the maze is emptied of all of the dots, it then gives you a moments rest before respawning. It all feels very much like the classic arcade game that it’s based off of. The whole thing was also very easy to set up and play. The only real issue there is, is with the joystick. The joystick itself sometimes doesn’t move the way you want it, and as a result, it becomes tricky to avoid the ghosts and keep yourself alive. The device also only has the classic game of Pac Man, none of the other Pac Man games, so it’s a toy that’s fun to tinker around with for a bit or great for retro fans, but doesn’t have a bigger appeal in our opinion.