Packings is one of the first games I found in the wild for my Pasopia7. You play a snake, slithering around a maze while trying to clear all the dots. Avoid the alligators. Or crocodiles. Whichever. There are bonus items and power-pellets, but unlike Pac-Man, the power-pellets appear randomly, as opposed to being in fixed locations for your arbitrary consumption. The allidiles are a lot less adventerous than the ghosts, preferring to say close to home base and nab you if you get too close. Maybe they based it on real crocigator habits.

At first I was excited to get it, because games are fairly rare on this system. And here was a Pac-Man clone that offers enough to be a different experience. And it's not bad, but some aspects of it seem a little glossed over in an "as long as it works" sort of way. It doesn't take advantage the hardware color dithering on the Pasopia7, and it doesn't push any envelopes of the six-voice sound system. The animation is very choppy. For some reason, the maze changes color when you start your next snake-life.

But one cool thing it does offer unique to the system is four-player joystick action. I am not exactly sure how you do that, though. The Pasopia7 has no built-in joystick ports, they were sold as cartridge expansions (that itself isn't so weird for the time). All of the cartridges I've seen so far have two joystick ports. The Pasopia7 indeed has two cartridge slots, but they're different sizes, so unless there was some sort of cartridge to cartridge adapter, I think there must have been something else required to attach four joysticks. Oh! And I just noticed, the game says snakes are worth 100 points. But the only snakes I've seen so far are your players. Are they rewarding cannibalism?

And how's that for a load command? BLOAD #-1,"PACKINGS" followed by A=&HC000:CALL A. You gotta be like a total hacker gal or guy to play this game.