+ Three cheers to PC-Man

Computer games these days are meant to knock you over, and your computer too. My cousin was telling me the other day about a new game – Doom 3, I think it was – that installs over a few GB on the hard disk and needs a 3 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM for decent play. Forget the piffling 128s on your that you might have on your antiquated P4 2.4s. So, what do you do? Go ahead and shell out a handsome few thousands for an upgrade or replacement so that you can have your ears explode and your mind reel from the energy of Doom 3 and its ilk that ship in 3-CD packs. Maintaining status quo is an uneasy choice because the ante is being constantly upped.

I don’t suffer from the angst, of course. I draw most of my sustenance from dear old dos games.

It was love at first sight with two of the all-time classics – PC-Man and Arkanoid. And it has ensured that I will never buy the latest PC to play a 3D game with 5.1 Dolby surround which requires that I become a monster with about 12 hands in order to go through the hundreds of keyboard commands fast enough to avoid an early gory end.

At my sometime amateur level, PC-Man is like chess, with its inexhaustible variety. Wonder how they managed to pack that kind of randomness and the seeming intelligence of the four monsters in less than 50kb.... I remember playing both these games on a 286 about a dozen years ago. And if I like that time the best, it is also because the speed of the machines allowed me to score pretty high. In fact, on faster machines I have not reached even two thirds the points or levels I did on those cute slowcoaches. It is only recently that I have started to get better results optimised by the tweaking of the wormily named SloMo.

PC-Man palled a little after I hit a peak of about 70,000 and when I realised that after level 8 or 10, you come all the way back to level 1, only this time it plays at relatively blinding speed. Of course, the level discovery was something I reached with some cheating. You don’t have highly developed cheat codes for diddly little games like this. So I had a geek friend look into the program code and tamper with the digits for the number of lives, which gave me unlimited lives. But it wasn’t a fraction of the fun as when you knew you had only three lives plus the ones you gained on the way. It’s the challenge of playing by the rules and winning that provides the thrill, not being able to be god.

Arkanoid, on the other hand, remains quite a challenge. The 286 helped me reach close to 190,000 points on the 18th level - after that, I haven't even reached six figures. And am I curious to know about the beyond!

Sure, I have a library of hundreds of games, but I still don’t play more than a dozen frequently. And half of them are dos games, including a couple of shoot-‘em-ups and a grand prix racing game.

Oh, I almost forgot. Another reason I keep going back to PC-Man is the music. Music’s never been cuter in the post-midi era.