Perhaps someone who reads this blog can help me...
I remember playing, when I was a kid, a game which was like PCbert. It had several differences, though. For starters, the "player character" was a bird, and instead of the disks you can take to go back up at the top of the pyramid, there were wings. The ball which contained the snake was not different in color from the normal balls: it was simply larger, and it did not turn into a snake almost immediately (instead it shook a couple times before doing that, IIRC). The ball that stops time if you catch it was blue IIRC, not green, and the effect lasted for longer. If you died, you started back at the top of the pyramid, not where you died. The things that came up from the bottom of the pyramid were cats, not whatever the hell those pink things are. The frog thing that turns the squares back to their previous color looked different too.
The whole thing had different sounds too.
Can anybody help me find it? PCbert is a nice substitute, but if I can find the original one...

ah, I remember Q*Bert from years ago. The one you refer to sounds interesting - can you remember which computer you played it on?