The best part is when I die I feel like I made a dumb mistake, and that if I improved just a few things I could be way better.
Too many games these days give you the allure of depth and complexity by making things difficult in the wrong ways.
The one game that never fails to hook me in that way is Quake 3. Every mistake feels like your own, but with a very clear and obvious path for improvement. Every improvement step feels incremental and doable, none of that “noscope 180 from the bushes where i had zero chance to spot the enemy” situations.
Even on kills where it initially felt like some annoying cheap trick, i watch the killcam, and walk away very impressed and eager to try out their approach myself. And it always makes perfect sense. As opposed to a lot of more modern games, where killcam only frustrates me more.
Imo this is the same thing that made the original DOOM a massive sensation, but I feel like Quake 3 would be easier to relate to for a lot of people (on HN or elsewhere). At the time, I was too young and growing up in a wrong part of the world to catch that original DOOM hype. But with Quake 3 (and imo even quake 1 and 2), that phenomenon truly transcended countries and cultures.
I think I've heard Miyamoto talk about that. When the frustration is all with yourself (rather than with the game itself), and you just know that if you try one more time, that'll be the one where you won't make any dumb mistakes. I think it's the cornerstone of every action game that appeals to me.
I don't feel like it was my mistake when I got killed often, for one thing the ghost is faster than me, sometimes respawns right next to me, ...
I think it picks the farthest edge from where you ate it. Also, it only spawns at the edges, so don't eat the ghost near the edge if you're not sure where it will spawn.
Yes the ghost is faster than you, but it can't wrap around the stage like you can.
If you look closely, the chomping visual doesn't -actually- match up with the chomp sound, it's closer to if there was a track of chomping at a certain chomps per minute that gets toggled on/off if pacman is chomping. Same with everything else-is, so you mute/unmute sounds when the event happens, rather than trigger a sound play.
Or so it sounds and seems to my ears and eyes.
Nowadays we have such capable hardware that we can model near photorealistic stuff in real time. Not quite but not far off.
Those manic sounds and graphical effects are what you get when the hardware is very limited and some very talented people decide they want more, a lot more.
See if you can run up a simulator and get something like a Jeff Minter game running on whatever your IT gear is. You may like Attack of the Mutant Camels - the sounds are quite surreal, given the target hardware.
Consider taking a look at RetroPie or something similar.