This week's game is Crush Roller, a maze game that's about trying to paint everything while avoiding the clutches of some pesky fish that want you dead for some reason.
As you'd expect, much of what it does remains close to the Pac-Man formula, but the new wrinkles that it introduces give it a unique flavor that's worth trying even if it's not quite on the level of Namco's legendary game. Crush Roller combines the frantic action of Pac-Man with the stressful thoroughness that Q*Bert would ask of players a year before that game came out. Not only do you need to make sure you cover every single little space with paint (and you will inevitably miss one!), you also need to take the elevation of specific sections of the maze into account and make sure to use the titular rollers to crush the fish and give yourself some breathing room. There are also these critters who'll show up just to get footprints all over your beautifully painted floors until you put a stop to them. It's a challenging and fast-paced game that can provide plenty of close shaves and endorphin rushes, but it does fall into a somewhat tedious rhythm as you're forced to rely on the crushers more and more as the fish grow too fast for comfort.
There are multiple versions of the game, including two bootleg versions (Brush Roller and Bookyman) that replace the graphics and make some smart tweaks, a slight revision/sequel called Korosuke Roller that swaps the paintbrush for a squid and gives it the ability to teleport to previously covered territory (kinda like Splatoon!), and a Neo Geo Pocket Color version that adds some nice extras alongside its tremendous audiovisual upgrades. The NGPC version features collectibles in the form of cute animals called Ojama that you can earn by catching them whenever they show up to cause trouble in each stage. I love all of the additions of this version, but I find that it feels worse to play due to your slower movement speed and the addition of two more types of fish that move way too fast to feel particularly fair. Each version has their merits, so they're all worth a shot.