[The Many Faces of....Pac Man]

A few more classic versions you could add to the rankings:

 

1983 - Apple II

1983 - PC/IBM

1984 - Fujitsu FM-7 (Japanese home computer)

1984 - MSX

 

There's also the unreleased 1981 "Muncher" for the Bally Astrocade.  It's Pac-Man, just with a changed name due to Bally only having the arcade rights to the game.  If you want to stretch to 1991, there's the Game Boy version as well.

 

Put me down as another vote for the 5200 being my favorite.  I'm biased because it's what I grew up with, of course.  The one big issue I always had with my copy was a bug in the higher key levels where the energizer doesn't behave as it should.  You eat one, the ghosts turn blue, and they never turn back as long as you leave them alone!  As a kid I didn't realize that this was a bug, although I certainly thought it was strange.  It wasn't until much later that I learned that Atari fixed it in later production runs of the game.

 

FWIW, IMO a scrolling Pac-Man is sacrilege and/or a work of the devil. 

[Star Raiders (Atari 5200)]

One person's attempt to improve the explosion particles rendering code:

 

http://playermissile.com/tech/starraiders/

[Star Raiders (Atari 5200)]

Star Raiders on the 5200 is probably a top-3 game for me in terms of how much I played it.  The only game deficiency I remember is the lag when an enemy explosion was on-screen, especially one close to your ship.  But that was a minor annoyance -- the quality and complexity of the game more than made up for any little detriments.

 

I wish I'd kept track of some of my rankings from back in the day!

[Pac-Man (Atari 2600)]

I find that I often feel like I need some "special tablets" after playing 2600 Pac-Man.

 

One thing that I felt was inexcusable in the 2600 port were the sound effects.  Or, in the case of Pac-Man doing nothing, the lack of one (i.e. no background siren).  Cramming better sound into 2K of ROM may have been a herculean task -- I don't know the programming ins and outs, but I imagine that programming any complex sound just takes that much more valuable code space -- but it was a needed one.

 

The game would almost certainly have been much better received with sound effects that at least seemed to *try* to approximate the arcade sounds.  I think people would have been willing to give the graphics more of a pass if they weren't stuck listening to the harsh buzz-pops of eating dots, the boooooops of eating "vitamins", etc.