Push Button B

You’ll have to excuse the indulgence, but with last week celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man (and a playable version taking over Google for a couple of days) I figured it was about time that I tried out a Pac-Man-styled energy drink, called, rather unsurprisingly, Pac-Man Bonus Fruit Energy Drink.

What wonders does this can hold?

How can you go wrong with that? Pac-Man, monsters turning blue, and lots of fruits floating in the background?  I sure would like to have that kind of energy!

I’ve played a lot of Pac-Man, and I’ve got a lot of experience eating the bonus fruits from the game… except for the green things (which I’ve been lead to believe are durians), the bells, the keys, and the Galaga ships, so odds are good that this stuff tastes like something I’m familiar with.

Look & Smell:

Immediately after opening the can I was hit by a smell I couldn’t immediately place. It smelled kind of like marshmallows mixed with Kool-Aid powder, and was mostly clear with an orange tinge.

First drink:

Taking a drink from this thing was like biting into a handful of orange peels, almost like someone took a bucket of orange Sweet Tarts, ground them into powder, and mixed them with some carbonated water.

Additional drinks:

This stuff is really hard to drink. Chugging it is definitely a mistake. My throat nearly closed itself off almost immediately after it hit my tongue. And the aftertaste! It’s hanging around in the back of my throat like someone shoved an orange up my nose and it’s draining down the back of my throat. Sipping is even worse, it lets the ridiculously concentrated orange-like flavor wash away every trace of everything I’ve had in my mouth today. Kind of like eating out of a volcano… actually, that might be slightly more pleasant.

At this point, I was finding it hard to press on. But after letting it sit for a few minutes, hoping for an errant bolt of lightning to hit it, I decided to press on. With over half of the original 8.4 ounces remaining, I decided to guzzle the remnants.

Huge mistake.

This might be the first time that I’ve drunk something that tasted so heinous that I had tears welling up in my eyes. I couldn’t see out of my right eye for what seemed like several minutes afterward, and my face was locked in an expression that you might assume if you ate a piece of cake, but the person who made it ran out of sugar and decided to substitute cat urine.

Energy levels:

But all of this is totally worth it if I get some kind of energy boost, right? Well, I didn’t. An hour after drinking this melange of flavors that’s just one step up from drinking a solution of that juice that spills out the back of a garbage truck mixed with kerosene, I felt no noticeable increase in alertness. In fact, I felt as I’d drunk a soft drink or a cup of coffee. Which shouldn’t be much of a surprise, caffeine is one of the major ingredients.

But is that a good trade off for drinking something that makes my tongue taste like I swam through the storm drain underneath the local zoo with my mouth wide-open?

No, not really.