There are not too many games that actually require a PC-8001mkIISR. But here's an exception; Pac-Land won't run on a standard (and much more common and far cheaper) PC-8001mkII. And it's amazing they got it to work at all, but get yourself something to do while you wait. Because you will wait, and wait, and wait. It starts out pretty standard, you do a CLOAD command and it reads the cassette, returining a prompt after about 10 seconds of load time. This is a machine-language loading routine that loads the main program. It starts by displaying this screen...

And that's no lie. About 16 minutes before the main title screen loads. But if you think that means the game is ready to play, you are mistaken.

"Press return key to load start" isn't just some questionable English for "start the game", it really means it's going to load the first level. Four more minutes and finally you are ready to go!

But move fast! They start a ghost in near proximity and it takes about 1.5 seconds for it to reach you, and the death jingle and "get ready" screen take about 10 seconds to get through. But my game didn't come with instructions. What are the movement keys? I mashed sections of the keyboard and got a small amount of movement, so I tried individual keys in the general area, but nothing would produce consistent movement. I searched Google and YouTube for instructions, but nothing doing. Death after death after death.

Finally, I figured it out on my own. They're about the least intuitive keys imaginable, you move with the F keys! F4 and F5 for left and right, and F1 to jump. Not bad, I feel much safer repeatedly striking those keys than I do the space bar, but it took forever to figure out!

Anyway, once you know how to move, the first level is fairly easy, like the arcade and X68000 versions. Once you pass level 1, you're ready for level 2, but the computer is not. More loading! If you know what you're doing, the average level is about 90-120 seconds to play, and then four minutes of loading the next level!

As you can see, they did an entirely decent job with the level creation in terms of graphics, considering the limitations. And it leverages the FM sound capabilities of the SR machines so it sounds pretty good! The control response isn't bad, but it takes some getting used to, and I struggled a bit with the rolling logs section on level 3. This is where I gave up for the day.

Fortunately, probably because they didn't want their customers to riot, they don't make you start over from reloading level 1 when you lose all your lives. You can restart the same level. But look at the set... there are two tapes, each with two sides of data! I copied them all to .wav files, and there's about two and a half hours of loading time if you manage to play through the whole thing!

Although it is even rarer, there is also a floppy disk version of this game. I think the cassette version of Pac-Land was created specifically to push sales of PC-8001mkIISR floppy drive units so people wouldn't have to wait so long for the game to load!