Pac-Man has always been an arcade game.
After all, it started out as an arcade machine. It has been cloned
often, sometimes faithfully, sometimes, as in Clean Sweep, it has been put into a completely new surrounding,
but it has usually remained an arcade game: swift reaction, a good
hand-eye coordination, was the main quality required for success.
1987 Frédéric Thiesse created Maze-Man, a game clearly inspired by Pac-Man, yet quite different too, mainly because the maze was not visible right from the beginning, but became revealed during gameplay. The overall speed of this game was slower, giving it more the feel of a puzzle than an arcade game, but it remained somewhere in-between.
JdR-Pacman is far closer to the original than Maze-Man, yet it has
crossed the gap completely: It is a puzzle game, no arcade elements
left. There are two types of monsters in JdR-Pacman: spear-guys
chase you, but they do so in completely predictable movements. They
have no AI, they just try to get towards you if they can, moving a
maximum of one square sideways to achieve their goal. Ghost
just wander around aimlessly, all you have to do is keep out of their
way.
Thus your strategy will not be to constantly run away from the monsters, instead you will try to lure them into dead ends and otherwise use their lack of intelligence against them, all without any time pressure. A type of gameplay I vastly prefer over the arcade original.
Technically, JdR-Pacman is a bit odd. it comes as a single executable, which upon first execution will create a README.TXT and README.BAT in the same directory as well as rewrite itself. It was created in 1999, probably on a Pentium II or similar, which may be why it feels a bit slow on a 286, while still being playable. I guess a 386 would be just right.
The only sound are annoying beeps over the PC speaker, which luckily can be turned off with F2. F3 is supposed to toggle music, but if you try to activate it, you get a message that there is no music due to lack of musical talent. Not a problem, but in this case, why have the function to begin with?
