Daniel Thomas MacInnes
GAF's Resident Saturn Omnibus
Wow, it's questions like these that really demonstrate how old you really are. This is like asking for the differences between Elvis Presley and The Beatles.
...And if anybody out there replies with "Who's Elvis?" they're going to get hit.
Seriously, Ms. Pac-Man was created in the USA by General Computing Corp, a group of hacker-programmers who got busted trying to pawn off their own Pac-Man clone. Instead, Midway, who owned the distribution rights, allowed the team to amend their videogame as an official sequel to the most successful videogame of all time. The rest is history.
Ms. Pac-Man features four mazes instead of the single Pac maze, fruit that bounces around instead of lying stationary underneath the ghost lair, and three new animated cut-scenes. It became a monstrous blockbuster success, arguably the biggest selling arcade videogame of all time. Even 20 years later, you couldn't find a laundromat anywhere that didn't have a Ms. Pac-Man machine.
The arcade version is also famous for, ironically enough, a number of hacked versions, the most popular being a "speed" hack that let's Ms. Pac blaze by at turbo speed. Frankly, I can't imagine playing without it, and this feature did appear in the NES, Genesis and Lynx translations. If memory serves, the speed option is also present on the outstanding Pac-Man Collection on Atari 7800--get the "POKEY" version if you can, or better yet, wait for the new "XM" version of Pac-Man Collection which is absolutely arcade perfect.
Ms. Pac-Man is the greatest videogame ever made. Full stop. I'll also often add in Tetris and M.U.L.E. to that title, but we all know who really holds the crown. It's simple, anyone can play, it's endlessly challenging, its additions to the original Pac-Man have become series standards, and it's great fun on nearly every home platform. Heck, the Atari 2600 version is glorious and quite possibly the best thing that Warner-era Atari Inc ever did for us.
