Pac-wars is an old classic that seems to have been lost in time. One of the original network games, it was simple fast and very high on playability. I first played it something like 12 years ago, when I used to work for a PC computer reseller in London. It was banned from the company because we used up all the bandwidth! i was nearly banned from the company too, for bringing in external software and loading it on company machines.
It's great to find Pacwars again as an Internet games. I've downloaded and given a copy to all my children, now our house is an arcade zone.
As a Pac-warrior you have to dash between rooms, hiding behind objects and searching for your Pacman colleagues to shoot-em-up! You can be any one of a number of cool sprites, with a gun and an attitude. The playability is fast on modern PCs because the graphics are so simple, and this makes the whole game very quick-fire and exciting. You can either wander around searching for your enemy, or hide-up behind some covering feature, and disappear. As soon as you see another Pac come into the room, dash out to ambush and blaam! Dead Pacs return
back to beginning and start again, so the action continues for hours. Reactions are essential. For me this game is more about the playing than the winning, point don't matter and there is no high-score to try for. The idea is to have fun online and Pac-wars certainly does achieve that.
I can honestly say that Pacwars2 is a big improvement over the original version, which itself was a legend of it's time. The original was designed to run on a Novell IPX network, but with the rewrite it's now on TCP/IP, so you can play over the Internet from anywhere in the world. Keyboard control is more than sufficient, so don't worry about trying to configure your joysticks and games controllers for DOS games. It all works out-of-the-box. An installation on two PCs will have you playing in minutes.
If you want to take a step back in time then I recommend that you download and enjoy. Just don't take it in to your company and install it on the office PCs!
Now I feel like I'm back at my old company, just without the work!
