Hey man. there's a lot of Pac Man type maze games on the Atari 7800. this one you can take or leave. Pac-Man Collection is the one. More about that one later.

Lots of people may not be familiar with Crazy Otto. GCC (General Computer Corp) was founded by a group of guys who set out to make expansion boards for existing arcade games. Rather than copy the existing code, the expansion boards required the original ROMs and PCBs so as not to violate copyright. Crazy Otto started out as an expansion pack for Pacman which added new mazes and cut-scenes. To comply with copyright, the original Pacman character was replaced by Crazy Otto. Midway discovered the Crazy Otto expansion pack, and dissatisfied with waiting for Namco to create a proper sequel (who eventually released the lackluster Super Pacman), decided to license GCC's idea and convert it into a full arcade game. It was decided that the protagonist should be a woman, and the Pacman sequel that everyone loved, Ms Pacman, was born. GCC never formally released the Crazy Otto expansion board because Ms Pacman was produced by Midway instead. As a result, only 3 prototypes were ever made, and only one of those is known to still exist today.

Enter Robert "Bob" DeCrescenzo to port piece of forgotten video game trivia to the 7800. I guess "port" is not the correct term. Crazy Otto was a hack of Pacman, and Ms Pacman was a hack of Crazy Otto, so our homebrewer Bob has hacked 7800 Ms Pacman back into Crazy Otto for everyone to enjoy. It turns out that despite the description, Crazy Otto is a little bit more than just a graphics hack.

*For starters, the default number of lives is changed from 5 to 3, causing games to end a little more quickly.

*The title screen is modeled after Pacman instead of the newer Ms Pacman screen. The monsters have all been renamed as well.

*Also, a couple of minor corrections to the Ms Pacman pallete have been made, making the game more arcade accurate. Most notably, Blinky is the proper red color instead of dark pink, and the pink color of the first maze has been changed to orange as well.

*Bob has fized the maze height so that the Crazy Otto mazes are full size instead of one line short like the 7800 Ms Pacman port.

*During the Meet and Chase cut-scenes, Otto is seen flirting with his red female counterpart, Anna. One slight bug I noticed based on screenshots online (I did not get this far in the game myself so it may have been corrected) is that the Otto Jr dropped by the stork during the third cut-scene is missing it's legs (unchanged from the original sprite in Ms Pacman), although they were clearly present in the sprite art based on MAME screenshots.

Graphical changes aside, Crazy Otto stands out as a slightly more arcade accurate port than the original 7800 Ms Pacman game. Interesting to note if you've ever noticed the marquee on the side of a vintage Pacman machine, the Pacman artwork actually has two long skinny legs with outward facing feet, much like the sprite art for GCC's Crazy Otto hack! But Crazy Otto is still just 7800 Ms Pacman with a slightly different skin and subtle tweaks. The physics and behavior are all exactly the same as Ms Pacman, and as such Crazy Otto still remains more of a curiosity or historical footnote than a brand new game.

Sans graphical edits, all of the tweaks and gameplay enhancements present in this hack can also be found by playing Ms Pacman mode in the exquisite Pacman Collection, plus an endless variety of gameplay options. But if you already own and are happy with 7800 Ms Pacman, Crazy Otto really doesn't bring anything new to the table besides the funky new graphics. For that, I'm going to dock a joystick or two as I don't really consider it an essential part of the 7800 library. But if you are a hardcore Pac-fan who has to own every variation, collect historical video game oddities, or simply enjoy goofy graphics hacks, there is still plenty of fun to be had with Crazy Otto.