YMMV / Baby Pac-Man

• Demonic Spiders: The ghosts in this installment are fiendishly difficult, not only being faster than in Namco and GCC's installments but also having more aggressive AI. They can even switch directions at any time. The red ghost is also always in a permanent "Cruise Elroy" state.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Baby Pac-Man requires a good amount of skill with both pinball and video games. However, hardcore pinball players and hardcore video gamers are rival fandoms (even during Baby Pac-Man's time), so there are relatively few people who are proficient at both types of games to perform well in Baby Pac-Man. As a result, most people who try this game get frustrated at either the pinball or the mazes. Even for players that are fans of both video games and pinball, the video game half is designed to be more unforgiving than the arcade titles that inspired it with difficult maze designs that leave no room for error and ghosts that don't give the player any sort of breathing room and play by none of the original arcade ghost rules. As for the pinball, on top of being a smaller-scale table and the flippers being quite far apart from each other, the goal of earning Power Pellets is made difficult by the player having to hit one of the yellow drop targets seven times per Power Pellet slot (although the upper quadrant pellets can alternatively be activated by hitting the inner drop targets hard enough to move the ball behind them to the other side) and the drop targets being placed just above the flippers. If the player isn't good with the timing of their shots on the drop targets (especially the center blue drop target), it can easily send the ball flying straight for the drain.
• Nintendo Hard: This is known by fans as the hardest Pac-Man game ever, and with good reason. The ghosts just hunt Baby Pac-Man down instead of following a fixed pattern (with the red ghost moving faster and the magenta one moving slower, and the two other ghosts moving at Baby's speed). The table itself is smaller than an average pinball table, making it very easy to drain the ball. Added to the fact that the only way to earn power pellets is to play the pinball portion (and the drop targets for the lower two quadrant pellets must be hit seven times just to spawn one of them and can easily drop the ball into the drain due to their position; the upper quadrants have it a bit easier since you can spawn either or by hitting their drop target hard enough to get the ball occupying them to go to the other side, but since the pinball exits are at the bottom of the maze it's an uphill climb to get up there without getting hit), along with the ghosts' AI behaviors being undocumented due to the obscurity of the title. Your only saving grace is the pellets in the maze will not slow Baby, unlike the official games.
• Polished Port: PacManPlus' Atari 7800 homebrew port includes options to play with less brutal ghost A.I. and play either the video or pinball portions by themselves.
• That One Level: The first maze is considered to be the most difficult of the three by players, especially the top halves of the maze. The second maze meanwhile is only slightly easier but continues with the problems of the first maze by providing very few routing options for escaping the ghosts.
• Uncertain Audience: As stated several times, video game fans and pinball fans find the opposing segment of the game frustrating. While the idea sounds like a good Medium Blending concept on paper, in execution the end result is something that most people consider to be a mediocre arcade game and a mediocre pinball game haphazardly mashed together with no clear design direction or focus. The Atari 7800 port addresses this by allowing one to choose a "Play Type", changing the game to contain only the video or pinball halves or leaving both fully intact ala the original machine.

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