#dot eater

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 57 - The Maze

This article is part of our Japanese Obscurities feature. We put out a whole book about them, which is available as both a full color hardcover and a Kindle ebook from Amazon! If you’d like to see more of these features, please check out the book and if you enjoyed it, leave a five star review so we can do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

As the name implies, the 57th volume of the Simple 1500 Series is an original game that takes place entirely within randomized mazes. Consisting entirely of 1v1 battles, each player is tasked with grabbing three keys and making it to the exit before their opponent can. The keys are color-coded and players need to grab the ones that correspond to their color in order to unlock their respective exit. However, one of the keys a player needs is always held by the opposite player at the start, forcing them to interact in every match. To aid in their mission, each player has melee attacks, a bazooka for slow ranged attacks, and an item menu that lets them place traps and use/drop items they’ve found. It’s possible to knock out the other player, especially if you can lure them into an explosive trap, but doing so is only a minor setback, so traps that waste their time like sticky slime puddles generally have more impact.

Crystal Castles

Bentley Bear is in a jam. While out roaming the forest, he decided to take a nap in his favorite tree stump. The problem is that when he woke up, he found himself in a glittering array of castles. These were the Crystal Castles, home of the evil witch Berthilda. The only way to get out is to collect the gems scattered throughout the ten Crystal Castles. It won’t be easy for Bentley, though, as Berthilda has sent her minions to stop him and turn him into dinner!

Raimais

Taito’s 1986 title Arkanoid was an update of Atari’s brick-breaker Breakout, adding elements like power-ups and enemies. The designer, Akira Fujita, looked to continue the theme but turn toward the dot-eater genre – popularized by Namco’s Pac-Man, but technically started by Sega/Gremlin’s Head-On – and evolved it with the 1988 arcade title Raimais (pronounced “ray maze”).

Painter Momopie

It’s rather unfortunate when a game becomes rather forgotten due to reasons out of its control. In the case of one such game, Painter Momopie, it was because the game was exclusive to Japan, and also perhaps because people dismissed it thinking it’s a simple Pac-Man clone, and also possibly for its cute looks. It really is a shame, because looking past those reasons, it presents such a great concept for a game, with some going as far as to say it’s a hidden gem on the Game Boy. 

Pac-Mania

One might say that the late 90s and early 2000s were the time when remakes of classic arcade games seemed to be coming out non-stop. In truth, such remakes have been part of the industry from the start, even during the heyday of arcades. Namco was no stranger to remaking their most well known titles themselves, with games like Galaga ‘88. Pac-Mania would be their next attempt at bringing their classic maze game to a new arcade era, with all the features expected of it. In a year where more complex games like Double Dragon were seeing release, it’s a bit of an anomaly in its simplicity, but it still holds up. 

Pac-Man Arrangement

Namco, for any faults they might have, rarely gives up on their classic franchises, no longer how long it’s been since their heyday. By this point during the late 90s, they had already firmly established themselves with games like Tekken 2 and Ridge Racer. Despite the money they had been making hand over fist with games like this, they saw fit to make a new revision of three of their classic arcade titles. Pac-Man, of course, was one of them, and this update does decently well at keeping what kept the original a classic while keeping it from getting too stale. 

Super Pac-Man

It took two years after the monumental release of the original Pac-Man for Namco to take the reins once more with the franchise. Perhaps they were too busy with their own many arcade titles of the time, or perhaps they were content taking licensing fees from Midway. Whatever the case, Super definitely feels like a true sequel to the original game, even more so than any of Midway’s attempts. There’s a lot of new ideas, so many that veterans of the original game might have to take some extra time coming to grips with them all. Even if it might not be quite as classic as that 1980 behemoth, it’s a fun game on its own and a worthy successor to the original game. 

Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness

With the success of Pac-Man World helping to keep Namco’s mascot relevant in a world of 3D platformers, it must have only seemed logical to update his wife, as well. Instead of a platformer, however, Maze Madness takes the core of ‘eat dots, avoid ghosts’ and adds a massive amount of new features on top of it. The result, while not anything spectacular, still makes for one of the best games to come out of the ‘arcade game remake’ boom of the late 90s and early 2000s.