VOGONS


First post, by guigui10011

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Hi everyone,

I'm trying to identify a game I played as a kid on a PC (Windows 95 era), and I found that someone else on DOSGames.com asked the exact same question back in 2014 with no resolution:
https://www.dosgames.com/forum/about20496.html

Since that thread went unanswered, I'm hoping someone here might have better luck.

Here is the information about the game:

- Pac-Man clone, top-down 2D maze, single player
- You play as a THIEF / ROBBER collecting money and diamonds in a maze
- Enemies are POLICE with blue caps, displayed as faces/heads only
- There are 5 robbers total, each with a unique appearance — they serve as your lives. When caught, you switch to the next robber:
—> Robber 1: Black man with dreadlocks and red lips
—> Robber 2: Bald white man
—> Robber 3: Blue-skinned, thin face, short hair
—> Robber 4: Rabbit/buck teeth, yellow-orange coloring
—> Robber 5 (the boss): Called "Roger", green face, sunglasses
- When caught, a jail screen appears with the text "GOTCHA"
- Each robber has their own unique levels
- More police appear in higher levels
- Was part of a compilation floppy disk also containing Digger and a Frogger clone; the disk was labeled "Gotcha" or "Floppy Frenzy" (likely not the actual game title)

The platform is uncertain — it could be a DOS game, a Windows 3.1 executable, a QBasic/compiled BASIC program, or even an obscure Eastern European shareware title.

Thank you in advance

Reply 1 of 5, by konc

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If it's this one

The attachment gotcha1.png is no longer available
The attachment gotcha2.png is no longer available

then it is indeed called "Gotcha" and can be downloaded from the author's site
https://paulin.de/42/artikel/deliro_und_gotcha.html#zweitens

and it's also amazing how despite the extreme level of details provided it wasn't found earlier.

Reply 2 of 5, by guigui10011

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It was indeed this one. I'm impressed that someone got the answer that fast !
Many thanks !

Reply 3 of 5, by leileilol

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not the first crime-based pacmanlike. When I read this thread, I instantly thought of Bernie Stolar's arcade game Thief

apsosig.png
long live PCem
FUCK "AI". It is a tool of fascism. We do not need it. We do not use it.

Reply 4 of 5, by zyzzle

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And Lock'N'Chase is the classic game I thought of.

Reply 5 of 5, by darry

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Glad the game was found.

I will point out that feeding that very detailed description to an AI chatbot (Gemini) yielded the correct answer on the first try.

The AI craze causes plenty of issues (cost of RAM, resource crunch, etc) and AI can be confidently wrong, misleading and dangerous, etc. However, this type of use case is very low risk and low effort, IMHO. While in my experience getting a wrong answer is very common, especially when looking for older and more obscure stuff, it is enough to try it, assess the answer and move on.

EDIT And I queried again in another session and got a wrong answer. YMMV, to the surprise of no one.