Bandai-Namco's port of Pac-Man to J2ME flip phones is shockingly competent. i'm not a Pac-Man expert but I'm pretty sure this is the closest they could have gotten to an arcade-perfect conversion; if you wanted to play Pac-Man while waiting for a bus, you wouldn't have any complaints about this version, it is completely satisfactory. but it does have one hilarious quality

the game is incredibly close to being unremarkable. by the time this came out - probably in the late 2000s - i think the days of atrocious pac-man ports were decades behind us. i'm pretty sure by 2007 you could get “Arcade Pac-Man” for basically any platform. however, there is one standout quality of this version that made me just about spit out my drink.

if you're trying to replicate the Pac-Man arcade experience, you can't just leave the iconic sound effects on the cutting room floor. they're absolutely essential, and yet, J2ME has an inexplicable allergy to PCM SFX, which is what you'd need to accurately reproduce the aural qualities of this particular game. faced with this unwinnable situation, namdai-bamco took an incredibly brave path: they attempted to recreate Pac-Man's iconic sound effects… using General MIDI.

i could describe this, but you would do better to just consume the two and a half minutes of gameplay i recorded for your benefit.

this is a fascinating outcome. the pill-eating sound is outright bad; i think it's a guitar patch? but the death sound is shockingly convincing, i think it's basically a 1.25 second long black midi that abuses “Square Lead” or w/e into a remarkably decent facsimile of pac-man's demise. the intermission song is also pretty decent.

it rules that bamco-namdai did this instead of just punting and replacing the sounds with something that fit the realities of MIDI better. hats off to good ol b-n

so, it was pointed out in the comments that maybe this sounds better on a real phone with a crunchy midi synth instead of my windows GS wavetable. now i had considered this, but I remembered flip phones all having MIDI that sounded pretty much the same. imagine my surprise when i tried it on my ericsson and the SFX sounded MUCH closer to the originals! i will record another video at some point to prove this, but the pill eating noise and death SFX are SPOT ON. the musical stabs aren't perfect, they still have a very “cheap MIDI”-esque twang, but honestly it's amazing that they nailed the effects. fuck me i suppose