Lock n Chase (Game Boy)

The story of me and Lock n Chase is a short, pointless and boring one. This summer, while I was subjected to only a mobile broadband dongle with very limited bandwidth, I noticed somewhere that the entire ROMset for the Atari 2600 took up only 5MB. Seeing this as good value for bandwidth, I downloaded it, and put it onto my GP2X to play while watching repeats of Everybody Hates Chris and 60s Batman.
Overwhelmed by the huge list of games, I started playing the familiar games I played on a real 2600 in times long past (Carnival, Stampede, Othello), then games with interesting titles (Aquaventure, Cosmic Ark) and also, games that I remember seeing advertised in the old (as in pre-dating my birth) Marvel and DC comics I used to buy from the book stall on the market in my teenage years. Lock n Chase was one of those games.
But I'm not writing about the Atari 2600 version, or the arcade game of which it was a port. Today I'm writing about the much later Game Boy port.
It's pretty fun. It's a Pacman clone, as was the fashion at the time, themed around a bank robber being chased by cops. The characters all look like the chicken nugget people that McDonalds had among their many mascots a long time ago (I specifically remember during the 1992 Olympics, Happy Meals came with little plastic nugget-men, each one engaged in a different sport, not letting their lack of limbs stand in the way of their ambitions), and are all wearing hats. The cops are wearing the kind of hats you see cops wearing in old gangster movies, and the player is wearing the kind of hat you see gangsters wearing in old gangster movies.
You waddle around the mazes avoiding cops and collecting round things (which I think we can assume are coins). As usual, collect all the coins and you go the the next stage. There's also moneybags and diamonds, that will periodically appear for a short time every now and then. The moneybags freeze the cops in place for a few seconds, and the diamonds let you chase them for a short time, like the power pills in Pacman.
I should probably go into what makes Lock n Chase its own game, and not just a reskinned Pacman clone. The original gimmick in the arcade version was that there were doors place all over the stages that the player can shut behind them, cutting off any persuing cops (but also possibly creating a dead end for the careless player to be chased down). This feature survives into the Game Boy port, which also gradually adds more gimmicks as the game goes on. The first to appear is kind of the opposite of the original: doors that are closed by default and can be opened for a few seconds by the player walking into them.
I won't spoil any of the other features for you (plus i can't get very far into the game, and have only seen a couple more anyway, but shhh.).
The GB Lock n Chase is a pretty fun game, and even better than the original version. It is also, by extension, better than the PSP version, which is a download over 100MB large from the PSN store, despite just being a ROM of the arcade version packaged with an emulator. THat doesn't even automatically save high scores. Tsk.

Batman (PC Engine)

So, this game is obviously based on the 1989 live action Batman movie (ie, the good one that isn't from the 60s). Although judging by what I've played of it, it's based on an alternate interpretation where batman is a grim, avenging janitor of the night. For example, the first set of stages has you walking around the streets of Gotham City picking up litter (though a more sensible person might suggest that this litter is the ingredients of Joker Venom. Of course, they'd be fools, since why would they all just be strewn around the streets at random? ) while beating up.avoiding mimes, and the second set has you in the museum, being up goons in puffa jackets and cleaning graffiti off of paintings. I haven't got to the third set of stages yet (don't laugh! There's 12 stages in each set, and they're pretty hard!), but I assume it has Batman going round to Comissioner Gordon's house to do the dishes or something.
It might sound like I don't like this game, but I really do! In fact, of all the Batman games I've played, it's probably my favourite! It's not very Batman-like (though maybe you could stretch your imagination and say that picking up all the Joker Venom ingredients in the first area is a game-substitute for detective work), but it is very fun to play. It also does a couple of things that are unusual for the maze game genre. For example, you aren't limited in your ability to get rid of enemies. In most maze games, you can only take out enemies with a temporary power-up, while in Batman, you just throw a batarang to stun them, them walk into them to make them fly off in an amusing manner. And the power-ups you do get, that do things like increase your walking speed or the range of your batarangs are permanent, even when you lose a life or finish a stage!
The music is good, too. But not very atmospheric, except in the very short (and very nice looking) cutscenes you get between areas.

Mean Arenas (Amiga)

This is a maze game for the Amiga, presented like one of those deadly future gameshows thatr seemed to be so popular on that computer (there was this, the killing game show... I'm sure there were others too...)
The most obvious thing to talk about with this game is the presentation, which is quite nice, despite the game having an obviously very small budget and probably being made by only a couple of people. There's lots of voice samples, all the time while you're playing, such as your character going "ooh!" when taking damage, the crown cheering when you kill enemies, and the presenters commenting when you collect power-ups or die. I had this game as a kid, and the main thing I remembered about it before playing it again in recent times was the "Studio" bits before each stage, where the two presenters of the show would tell you the theme of the next stage (dungeon or spaceship or whatever), and something would happen like one of them farts, or a microphone breaks. Those bits were hilarious when my age was only a single digit, but now they just seem a bit weak and embarassing. But the game was probably made by a couple of fourteen year olds, so it's unfair to be too harsh on the rubbish humour. The best part of all the voices (and possibly the whole game) is the sample that plays when you finish a stage, that says "MARRRRRVELLOUS" in an amusing upper class cad sort of manner.
The game itself is pretty average. You go around the mazes, which are all quite a bit bigger than the stages in most games of this type, the smallest being a few screens high, and later one the stage start to have multiple floors and the like, too.
There are more differences between Mean Arenas and most other maze collecting games, too. The pace is a lot slower than say, Raimais or Pacar. As well as collecting a power up that lets you kill enemies by walking into them for a short time, as is common with these games, you can also collect fireballs that you can store to shoot at anytime, too. There are lots of keys to open doors, switches to change the stage's layout and other gimmicks and traps in each stage too, a change from the typical maze game which has the enemies posing the only threat.
Overall, the game is pretty good, though the slow pace and huge stages, while different, do make the game seem a bit of a boring slog at times. It's entertaining enough for a couple of games, though.

Pacar (SG1000)

At first glance, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that Pacar is just a crap, lazy rip-off of Pac-Man, but with cars (the name is probably as close to "Pac-Car" as Sega could get without being sued). In reality, it's a pretty great rip-off of Pac-Man!
The fact that the ghosts and... yellow thing have been replaced by cars isn't just an aesthetic change, it leads to the first, and probably most important difference between Pacar and Pac-Man: cars go much slower in reverse. This means that if you want to change direction quickly, you have to turn 90 degrees. You can drive backwards, but it's a lot slower than going forwards, which is pretty dangerous when there are enemies around.
There are other differences, too. For example, there are two mazes instead of one. The game alternates between the two, and each time you clear both mazes, the end of level bonus increases, as does the number of blue cars in the maze.
Blue cars are the most common enemy type in the game, and they just passively drive around the mazes, not making any special effort to try and kill you. Each maze also has one orange car, that appears after you've been in the stage for a certain amount of time. The orange car is much more agressive than the blue ones, actively chasing you around and trying to kill you.
Like Pac-Man, Pacar has special larger dots that temporarily give you the ability to kill the enemies. Like everything else that Pacar takes from it's predecessor however, there's a little more strategy to the power dots.
Firstly, they aren't waiting ready on the map for you to collect them from the start, one appears for every 30 normal dots that you collect. Secondly, the blue cars can collect them, although doing so gives them no special advantage, it does rob you of the chance to get some extra points, both by killing the enemies (the points awarded for which double in the exact same manner as, that's right, Pac-Man), as well as the quite hefty 300 points that each power dot is worth.
There is quite a bit more strategy to the game that i won't go into here, since this is meant to be a review, not a guide.
In summary, though it's not quite as good as later maze games such as Raimais or Pac-Man: Championship Edition, Pacar is still a very good game, definately better than it's inspiration, as well as being a lot more playable today than a lot of it's contempories.