Ms Pac-Man

Pac-Man was originally conceived as a way of appealing to the portion of society that seemed unsalvageably indifferent to videogames: women. Everybody eats, reasoned Namco, so a game in which the goal is to gobble up everything on the screen should have every man, woman, and child wrenching joysticks with rapt awe. Appropriating the Japanese myth of Paku for its avatar, Namco produced arguably the most iconic videogame character of all.

Ms Pac-Man followed in 1981. Piggybacking on such a popular licence, it might have seemed a marketing ploy to recruit those women who failed to pick up a joystick first time around.

Perhaps it was. Nevertheless, in gameplay terms Namco pulled off the trick of improving upon the old formula without violating its compulsive purity. All of the feverish near misses and games of chicken for the last pill were still present in Ms Pac-Man, but they were accompanied by a few gameplay adornments that made it the fairer game, if not the more popular.

The central feature that distinguishes Ms Pac-Man from her celebrated male counterpart is characteristically feminine. Rather than pit her against a group of generic ghosts, Namco populated her maze with four distinct characters: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Sue. Blinky, the leader, is the most vicious. Sue is the least aggressive, Inky is frequently ineffectual as a Pac hunter, and Pinky is wily and violent. It's very like Sex and the City.

It's a truism that simple games are often the best, but it's rarely truer than for Ms Pac-Man. While the sprawling landscapes of Zelda's Hyrule and GTA's San Andreas lose their thrill after time, chances are you'll still be tinkering with games like Tetris and Ms Pac-Man years after you began.

This enduring appeal is largely down to the fairly meagre depth of involvement. Whereas a game like Zelda sucks you in by the face and inhabits every glistening nodule of your body before you stumble away raw and exhausted, Pac-Man invites you in and boils the kettle, tells you where the biscuits are, and lets you come and go.

However, while simplicity is this game's most appealing trait, it's also true that Ms Pac-Man isn't as straightforward as it seems. Wending your way through a maze without getting boxed-in and mauled by ghosts requires the skills of anticipation and fast thinking, gradually acquired at the level of your hand muscles.

By introducing four distinct ghosts, Ms Pac-Man enriches this game mechanic. Avoiding them isn't just about predicting trajectories. It's about predicting where Blinky is going to go when she reaches that crossroads, and it's about knowing that Sue will probably blunder off in the other direction in her good-natured way.

Ms Pac-Man isn't dramatically different from Pac-Man. Ms Pac-Man on the mobile isn't dramatically different from Ms Pac-Man in the arcade. No significant improvements have been made in the 28 years since it first appeared, but then, nor could there be. Since dear old Ms Pac-Man has become a cliché, it's only fitting that we should sum her up with two more: no spring chicken, but you could do much worse.