Ghost Hunt

The Good
Pac-Man was a popular game where the object is to gobble up dots in a maze while avoiding four troublesome ghosts, and official ports were released for every early eight-bit machine you can think of. Poor ZX81 users missed out on a port, and it was up to small game companies to produce clones of the arcade game. One of these was Ghost Hunt, and it was created by C.P. Cullen, who was the same person that did an excellent version of Frogger.

The scoring table is displayed on the title screen. The scoring scheme is the same, with each ghost awarded 200, 400, 800, and 1600, respectively. When you get past the scoring table, the game begins. Right from the get-go, you will see why the game requires 16K. The maze is well detailed, comprising of Basic characters; dots are represented as periods, for example, while the ghosts are represented as inverted quotation marks, making them look menacing. The ghosts that travel through the maze are as smart as they are in Pac-Man. As always, coming into contact with one of them will result in a loss of one of your three lives, and once those run out, the score will flash and the game is over. There is also a lot of programming code, and anyone efficient in Basic can change the appearance of the ghost and improve their own character sprite.

The Bad
There are no warp tunnels to be seen in the game, yet you can go through the wall on the bottom line.

The Bottom Line
Apart from black-and-white graphics, no sound, and no warp tunnels to speak of, Ghost Hunt is a faithful recreation of Pac-Man. The game requires 16K and was written completely in Basic, meaning anyone efficient in the language can modify it to their own satisfaction, as long as they don't profit from the changes.