PacBoy & Mouse

When you see a title like PacBoy & Mouse, released in 1992, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming it was a shameless rip-off of Namco's famous dot-muncher. However, in typical budget-developer fashion, the name is something of a red herring. Rather than manoeuvring around a maze eating pellets and dodging ghosts, the game is actually a direct, thinly veiled clone of Sega's arcade classic Pengo.

The setup is paper-thin and slightly baffling, even by the standards of early nineties handhelds. According to the sparse documentation, a young boy's female companion has been accosted by a swarm of aggressive mice. As the titular PacBoy, it is your job to clear a series of single-screen arenas of these rodents. There is no scrolling and no narrative to speak of; you simply drop into a grid, eliminate every last mouse, and immediately warp to the next, progressively harder stage. If you dally for too long trying to line up your attacks, the game punishes you by spawning even more mice to flood the arena.

The core action revolves around block-pushing rather than standard maze navigation. The playfield is littered with solid square blocks that you can violently kick. If a block has empty space behind it, it will slide rapidly across the screen until it hits an obstacle, instantly crushing any unfortunate mouse caught in its path. This demands a fair bit of spatial awareness, as you must constantly line up the perfect shot while dodging the erratic movements of your enemies. Alternatively, if a mouse is scurrying along the outer boundary of the arena, you can kick the exterior wall. This sends a shockwave that temporarily stuns the creature, allowing you to walk over and dispatch it - a defensive mechanic lifted wholesale from its arcade inspiration.

Naturally, as is the case with almost any title on the platform that requires quick reflexes, your primary opponent is the console itself. The Supervision's four-shade greyscale LCD was notoriously cheap and suffered from brutal motion blur. When you kick a block and send it hurtling across the screen, it frequently dissolves into a smeared, ghostly streak. Tracking the fast-moving mice against the static grid quickly becomes a genuine strain on the eyes. It turns what should be a snappy, responsive puzzle-action game into a rather taxing ordeal of squinting and guesswork, as you desperately try to figure out if you successfully crushed a rodent or if it merely vanished into the screen blur.

The sound design does little to soothe the headache. The Supervision’s internal speaker was capable of producing some incredibly shrill, metallic noises, and PacBoy & Mouse utilises them to full effect. You are accompanied by a short, looping chiptune that aggressively drills its way into your ears, punctuated by loud, static-heavy crunches whenever a block shatters. It is a decidedly rudimentary package, lacking any real polish or long-term appeal. Yet, for collectors of obscure technology, it remains a brilliant example of the chaotic nature of the Watara Supervision - an era where developers simply borrowed whatever arcade mechanics they fancied, slapped a completely misleading name on the box, and shipped it to the shops.