Monster Munch (Commodore 64)
It’s a bit surprising a game like K.C. Munchkin! can get in legal hot water over similarities to the pellet-munching maze game Pac-Man when a game like Monster Munch seemingly got away with being an even more blatant clone of the popular Nacmo title. K.C. Munchkin! made a good deal of alterations to its play to differentiate itself, but Monster Munch’s main character looks just like Pac-Man in-game, they face off with colorful monsters that are pretty much the Pac-Man ghosts but a little taller, and the game’s single maze is essentially just a more compact version of the one found in its inspiration. Even stranger than it seemingly getting in no trouble at the time for this blatant imitation, it can even now be found on a streaming service like Antstream sitting right next to Pac-Man in seemingly peaceful coexistence. There are a few minor differences to be found though, and in fact, by being so close in design to its inspiration, it actually highlights some of the smaller aspects of Pac-Man that make it work as well as it does.
Monster Munch has you playing as Munchie who is represented by a yellow circle with a slice cut out of it to serve as the creature’s mouth. His goal in the single repeating level is to gobble up every pellet in the small maze he inhabits, the player trying to earn a high score before they lose all their lives. The main persistent danger to Munchie’s life comes in the form of The Monsties. Designed like colorful bedsheet ghosts, The Monsties consist of the red Crimsy, the green Esmerelda, the orange Bruiser, and the self-explanatory Purple Poison. These creatures will move around the maze and can kill Munchie with a single touch, but they often feel directionless besides Crimsy having some clearer intent on following you to kill you. This does mean it can be wise to wait in a corner and see if a ghost is going to go for you or will bumble off before picking how you move. These four monsters do have a decent enough chance of catching you that you can’t ignore them but at the same time you are given perhaps too much of an advantage in nullifying the danger they present.
Monster Munch takes place in a vertically symmetrical maze where most of it is filled with tiny dots to start. However, in the four corners there exist power pills, and by biting into one, the enemy monsters will turn blue for a surprisingly long amount of time. While blue, the Monsties are now instead vulnerable to your touch, Munchie chomping them up for extra points. There is a bit of a problem with the power pill system as seen here though, and it is how long the Monsties will remain blue. It isn’t too hard to go from pill to pill while grabbing plenty of pellets along the way, the blue monsters fleeing from you and becoming a bit of a non-factor for quite a while. If you do decide to gobble them up though, their eyeballs will return to the center of the maze so they can return to normal form and go back to chasing you, but it’s not hard to see the very simple strategy of grabbing a majority of the maze’s pellets by going from power pill to power pill without needlessly making your enemies a threat again. Even when they aren’t blue though, you also do have a simple trick in traveling through an open lane in the middle that will teleport you to the other side, the Monsties slowing down inside it so you can shake them even if you have a few more pellets to pick up and Crimsy is feeling rather persistent.
Perhaps as a counter to the perpetual easiness the poor power pill timing could add to the experience, Monster Munch added in an extra danger not found in Pac-Man. Near the center of the maze a question mark appears at times that you can approach and gobble up for a few points, but danger can appear here as well. At times, a spinning red fiend known as Fiery Fred will appear at the middle alongside a moving Pulsy Pill. The Pulsy Pill is essentially just a power pill that will travel the maze on its own, but while having a fifth one further increases the chance of you not having to worry about the Monsties much, Fiery Fred is actually incredibly dangerous and fully resistant to the effects of power pills. Fred is faster than Munchie and if he gets behind you, you are sometimes as good as dead. If he touches you he will at least disappear so when you pop back in with the next life he won’t bother you until the next level, but there’s not really a good counter to having him follow you besides taking a bunch of quick turns around the maze and hoping Fiery Fred arbitrarily decides to go a different direction. The attempt to inject some peril back into the experience is a reasonable idea but poorly executed, Fred’s success tied too much to random elements you can’t predict and a poor fix for making the Monsties less capable at being proper opposition.
For the most part though, it’s not too difficult to get on a tear and clear a few mazes with little worry so long as Fred doesn’t appear too soon in them. In that way it can occupy your attention a bit, the task not too difficult even though it’s not putting up too much of a fight either, but there are some odd choices that differ from the Pac-Man inspiration perhaps more as an oversight than a new design direction. When you die in Monster Munch, Munchie will immediately reappear at the spot he always starts in a maze. However, the Monsties don’t stop moving nor are they reset after your death, meaning it is quite possible for a monster to already be parked on your respawn space and thus you lose another life instantly. You can earn extra lives but the general game pace is rather slow as well, the pokey maze navigation making your work nominally slow even though that’s only to your disadvantage when Fiery Fred is in play. This specific balance does mean that often you’ll slowly be navigating the singular maze, chomping away at pellets unimpeded by the usually blue Monsties where the main threat is the random movement of the one thing you can’t do much about, success feeling more like a roll of the dice rather than figuring out smart ways to move about the maze. Since there aren’t changes to things like how long the Monsties turning blue lasts either, the rounds blend together into something more samey than the inspiration. Monster Munch is both easier than Pac-Man but not as dependent on your own skill, a mix that doesn’t do it too many favors if you have any other version of this maze game formula available.
THE VERDICT: Monster Munch cribs many of its ideas from Pac-Man in an unabashedly blatant manner, and this could have almost made it acceptable if plain. A few simple changes make it more tedious than its inspiration though and more of a gamble on how far you’ll even make it. The power pills turning the Monsties blue lasts far too long and makes it easy to chain them together without fear and almost clear the level in that time, but the appearance of Fiery Fred throws in an opponent who can kill you if the whim strikes it with you having no real recourse if it maintains its laser-focus on you. It’s not too awful to try and see if you can press in further on another run without Fred ruining things, but this slow maze game runs dry fairly quickly once you realize the weaknesses in its systems.
And so, I give Monster Munch for Commodore 64…
A BAD rating. I’ve often been softer than some critics on games that make little effort to hide their inspiration, these “clones” usually about as good as the originals because they are imitating something that works. Monster Munch almost looks like it’s just going to be Pac-Man but the maze isn’t quite as tall, but the high score chase here is let down by the two major missteps of the power pills being too strong and Fiery Fred being too capable if he decides he wants to be. If the pills weakened in each maze or the Monsties got a bit more capable then they could have maybe carried the experience alone, but it feels like a problem was created by not reining in the time they’ll be blue and the solution was to instead introduce the new problem of a foe you can’t reasonably handle. There is some mild enjoyment to extract from easily clearing some mazes when you don’t have your true adversary to worry about, but the moment Fred enters play you’re left hoping that luck is on your side. There’s not too many ways to plan around his arrival besides grabbing some central pellets first so you’re not incredibly close when he pops up, but at the same time it’s hard to know when he might be coming since it’s not consistent. A stick of dynamite named Dyno Mite will appear in place of the question mark at times and seemingly unleash Fiery Fred and the Pulsy Pill when it detonates, but other times they appeared near the start of a level so it’s hard to say how tied together the two are. Regardless, the rather drowsy normal play isn’t improved by adding a random factor in a game where the goal is about getting as far as you can and scoring points along the way, your success out of your hands a bit too much thanks to this approach to injecting some danger back into the proceedings once you understand how easy it is to invalidate the Monsties.
Monster Munch might be excused away by some as a way to bring the Pac-Man play to Commodore 64 back when getting a home version of the arcade game wasn’t as easy as it is these days. However, 1983 was the same year Pac-Man would receive a port for the Commodore 64 and it’s maze design is actually pretty close but a tiny bit different to Monster Munch’s attempt to condense the arcade maze’s size. The game’s publisher Atlantis Software wasn’t a peddler of bootleg games or anything either. Pac-Man clones certainly weren’t rare at the time but Monster Munch both comes much closer than one might expect of an official product while also making small edits to the formula that only weaken the experience, so perhaps Namco didn’t have as much to worry about them compared to K.C. Munchkin!, a game that was helping to headline a home console’s library. It’s not too awful to play a few rounds of Monster Munch mainly because it’s issues are inconsistent, but it’s also not compelling to shoot for a high score either, Monster Munch unfortunately not the kind of clone that either successfully copies the original to the point it’s just as good nor is it one with some special twist that makes it worth checking out.