Lady Bug: An Ode to the Maze Chase
I’ve previously established on this blog that I really like maze chase games. I think the various traditional Pac-man games range from pretty good to very good, and I really like Nintendo’s Devil World (and Clu Clu Land, if you count that), so it should be no surprise that I think Universal’s Lady Bug is a fantastic game.
It’s a pretty simple take on the genre, but it does everything right. It’s frantic, it’s dynamic, and it is pure game. This is one of those arcade games where you just get in the zone while playing it.
The way it works is as follows: You’re the titular Ladybug, and you’ve gotta eat all the dots. The enemy bugs come out of the bug house from the center of the screen one at a time. You will notice the outline of the maze is counting down like a timer; each time it completes a full revolution an enemy is released. So you start with no enemies and then you get one, then two, etc. You cannot attack the enemies at all, though there are a few randomly placed skulls on the board that are deadly to both you and your foes, so you can use them as blockers or bait enemies into them. Once a skull is activated it’s gone though, so you can’t use them to deal with multiple enemies. The other main mechanic at play is the swinging gates. You can enter through these gates and push them on their hinges, manipulating the layout of the maze and potentially losing the baddies that are tailing you. Enemies cannot open any gates, but the mazes are configured so the baddies will always have at least one path to you. It’s very simple and intuitive. I’m not currently sure if the enemies operate on Pac-man ghost style logic that you can use to read their moves in advance, but they definitely don’t have a physical tell the way the ghosts do with their eyeballs.
I didn’t really want to write about Lady Bug in particular today, but rather I wanted to write about what it represents. The maze chase genre is a very interesting one. It had a few years where it completely popped off and was everywhere, and then it completely dropped off the map. And I mean completely dropped off the map. In modern times, people don’t even call these maze chase games. Games like Lady Bug are called Pac-man clones. An entire genre, one that was the most popular in the world nonetheless, has been completely dismissed and largely boiled down to only its one greatest hit. Anything else is considered a pale imitation.
Consider the other formative arcade genres. Shoot em ups are certainly not the force they used to be, but they still exist and people like them. Platformers have evolved a lot since the days of Space Panic and Donkey Kong, but they are obviously still around. Maze chase games? Sure, they technically still exist, but can you name a maze chase game from the past 25 years that isn’t a Pac-man revival? I guess Bomberman sort of qualifies?
And it’s a shame because the genre is really fun! I would even go so far as to describe Lady Bug as exhilarating. There are no pauses, no breaks, and the 5 or 10 minutes that you survive are the perfect kind of tense that you can seldom replicate outside of a nice score attack game. Pac-man of course has the energizers that give you a brief few seconds to relax just a hair, though you still need to maintain focus on getting the most points out of each energizer. But at least for those few seconds you can’t lose a life. Lady Bug offers no such safety, and the ticking of the timer serves as a constant reminder that things are only going to get tougher the longer you take. The entire game feels rushed, in a good way.
So why was the maze chase genre left behind? How did it go from the top of the pedestal to being barely remembered and largely dismissed as consisting entirely of mediocre Pac-man clones? I think it boils down mostly to not evolving to keep up with trends. Platformers took off to become much more complex and mixed well with RPG elements, and of course transformed into console style games with an ending. Racing games underwent the same sort of evolution, from Pole Position to Taito Grand Prix to Gran Turismo.
Probably the best comparison for the maze chase game is the shoot 'em up, which also was always kind of more of an arcade (or at least arcadey) thing. We didn’t get a whole bunch of shoot em up RPGs (though they do exist), and the genre didn’t really evolve that much over the years relative to how much platformers have changed in that same timeframe. And like the maze game, shoot ‘em ups have fallen way off from being one of the premier game genres, though they obviously didn’t fall quite as far.
But you could make a maze game with a lengthy story, and characters, and player stats and items and money and an actual ending rather than a score attack; it just sort of never happened. (Again, Bomberman I guess?) I think what happened to the maze chase is that all these developments really started taking off after the genre’s heyday. When the great shift from arcade style to console style game happened, it was platformers and shooters and nascent RPGs that ruled the roost. People just weren’t making maze chase games anymore, so hardly anybody made any with these new elements. And this became a sort of self-feedback loop where the genre was underdeveloped and behind the times, and then didn’t get revived because it was seen as so outdated. I don’t think there is as much room in a maze chase game to develop the complex systems seen in a game like Zelda, but again I do think the shoot em up is a good comp where there could have been some evolution or possibly some hybrid maze/action games in the same way that The Guardian Legend is a hybrid shoot em up/action game. And there probably are a handful that I’m either not aware of or not remembering, to be fair.
In the end, as we know, the genre was left behind and to this day it is seen by most as painfully old fashioned, even though people do acknowledge that Pac-man is fun. The genre peaked so early in video game history and produced so few iconic characters that it just isn’t remembered or discussed for the most part, and it really is largely not even recognized as its own genre but rather just as Pac-man and imitators. And it’s a shame, because games like Lady Bug deserve better.