This week’s friday fun link is to a flash implementation of the classic though mostly overlooked arcade game Ladybug. The game is a riff on the gameplay concepts introduced in Pacman – manuever your ladybug through a maze, munching on dots to score points and eating special dots to turn the tables on your bug adversaries and eat them. It adds turnstyles to the maze, making it possible to block the enemy bugs and adding an additional element of strategy, and there are two kinds of letters strewn throughout the maze which enable scoring multipliers and extra lives if you manage to capture them to spell the appropriate words.

I loved this game back in the early 80’s, much more so than Pacman, and played tons of it – there was a machine adjacent to the pizza parlor near my house and a lot of my paper route money ended up in that machine. My neighbor also had the Colecovision version of the game, which was a reasonably accurate port of the arcade game and just as much fun to play.

So – check it out for a bit of nostalgia or a taste of an unheralded game from back in arcade gaming’s heyday.