At the Rocketstar Cafe in Kalamazoo, I used to play the Ms. PacMan machine a lot, and that was OK...I mean, you can't go wrong with the basic formula of running through a dark place eating pills and listening to electronic music, right? For some reason long-gone Ms. PacMan machines have just recently started popping up everywhere again, so it's definitely a childhood passion vigorously renewed in the last year.

PacMan is just so nicely representative of all of the games that all us "Reagan babies" (a beautifully evocative phrase for those of us hatched/raised in the bizarre decade of the 1980s that Dave Chapelle used in his classic skit on drug awareness speakers) enjoyed so much. The secret, of course, of Reagan baby games was precisely their simplistic silliness. Chasing ghosts, shooting spaceships...shit, in Frogger all you had to do was *cross the road.* Did that make them boring? Hell, no. That was the secret of their addictive power. Plus, I've always had a spiritual affinity with PacMan in all its forms (hitherto unconscious, having only just noticed this on Wikipedia) rooted in the fact that it was first released in the year that I was born, 1980.

Still, that trip down memory lane aside, this is a whole new world. When my far more technically adept younger brother was visiting over break, he installed two new forms of PacMan on my computer--"Pac the Man," which is more or less the classic arcade version (although with less perceptive ghosts and a slightly slower speed) and my personal favorite, "PacMan Deluxe."

PacMan Deluxe differs from the classic form not only in being faster, but in having completely re-thought visuals (you're still a little round thing eating pellets in tunnels through a dark environment and being chased by ghosts, but the shapes and colors are all subtly different, not to mention weird little touches like giving PacMan eyes) and, better yet, in the music and high score list. The music is this creepy ghostly-soft "uh-uh-uh-uh" undertone, except when you eat a power pellet and it switches to a continuous clip of James Brown belting out "I feel good/I knew that I would/", etc. If you are lucky enough to get on the high score list, the automatically generated default names the computer spits out before you erase them and put in your own name or clever euphemism are all character names from Pulp Fiction--Vincent Vega, Mia Wallace, Tony Rocky Horror, etc.

If they had invented this thing before I graduated from high school, I still wouldn't have.

"But, Ben," I hear you asking, "what's a person with appropriately gourmet sensibilities to *snack on* while playing this delightful game?"

I'm glad you asked. Pancakes.

The aponymously-branded pancake mix you can buy at Meijers is supposed to be good for 5-7 pancakes per 1 cup of mix and 3/4 of a cup of water--but, if it's just you, who has time? Much better to use 1/3 of a cup of mix, 1/4 of cup of water and fry it for as long as it takes to make one big pancake. If you happen to have any around, it's best to do the frying in olive oil and, while we're going nuts, smear the final product with nutella ("the original hazelnutty chocolate spread" as the label says.) Still, even with jam, it's pretty good.

I'll bet you didn't think I knew how to cook anything, right?

As a final note on this subject, I should say that a recent google search turned up the unsuprising fact that PacMan Deluxe is far from the most creative that developers of PacMan clone have gotten. I refer you to the following quote, advertising a 3-D version called PacShooter:

"Remember when you used to play the old classic Pacman game how you wished you could shoot at the enemies?"

If that doesn't sum up something buried deep in the collective Reagan baby psyche, I don't know what would.