Re: Clean Sweep 4/10 -- Vectrex Game Review/High Score Page

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Date Posted: 19:51:52 01/09/05 Sun
Author: Darryl B.
Subject: Re: Clean Sweep 4/10
In reply to: -- 's message, "Clean Sweep" on 08:44:17 12/10/99 Fri

Ech...how do you screw up a Pac-Man-type game? Let me count the ways...

Actually, lets get the good news out of the way first: first, it's Pac-Man, so that's good, right? It's also presented in a very original way, story-wise, where you're a vacuum cleaner (?) and you have to suck up all the money that's lying around after bank robbers blew up the bank. After ingesting too much money, you grow so big that you can't suck any more up, so you have to deposit the money into the vault in the center of the screen, so that puts a little twist to the Pac-Man genre. (Beavis and Butthead: muheheheh, he said "can't suck any more", hehehheeh) And the robbers arrive via the four escape tunnels (yeah, you've got four here), which is a neat effect.

So, what's the bad news then? Well, it moves a bit slow, and clearing screens can take a while. I can live with that; as most of us know, the Veccy can only handle so much if there's too many vectors to draw. Unfortunately, after several screens, the robbers (that look exactly like the blaster in Tempest, for some reason) start moving around in patterns, mostly hanging around the corners, so you can't lose a life unless you're really not paying attention, and it STAYS like that forever, I assume, since I went through several screens like that, plus the infinity sign appears in place of a level number!

Man, what the hell? I doubt the programmers changed the game in a really cool way or anything if you hung out with the game long enough, going through several screens of the exact same nonsense; it's like the game isn't finished. My guess is the game was rushed out, due to Milton Bradley screwing over GCE when they bought out the Vectrex from them, then as they were going to merge with Hasbro, Hasbro wasn't interested in video games, so Milton Bradley didn't air the Vectrex tv commercial any more after that, kept on slashing the price of the unit, and then the Video Game Crash hit, of course.

In a few ways (in my opinion), even the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is better than this, due to the game speeding up and getting more difficult (this one doesn't) and by having several variations (this one has an invisible maze, and that's about it).

And that's pretty sad.

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