If you've been looking at the Melbourne radar on Thursday afternoon, you could be excused for thinking you're stuck in an iconic 1980s video game.

What looks like a giant green Pac-Man was descending on Melbourne, bringing a steady band of rain towards the city with the occasional heavy downpour in some areas.

The giant Pac-Man on today's radar images is being caused by the way radar data is displayed in concentric circles on our phone and computer screens. It's not the rain chasing ghosts.

It's been a consistently wet start to October in Melbourne with rain recorded on all but three days and a total of 24.2 millimetres up to 9 am Thursday.

Just a millimetre or two was initially forecast to fall on Thursday, but there's more than a ghost of a chance that the Pac-Man shaped rain band could bring a bit more than this in some areas.

Image: Pac-Man? Radar image showing rain moving over central Victoria on Thursday afternoon.

There were solid falls in all parts of Victoria in the first week of October with the highest totals in the north-east and south-west.

Large areas of the Mallee region also received welcome spring rainfalls of between 25 and 50 mm.

Image: Rainfall totals observed in Victoria during the past week. Source: Bureau of Meteorology

Meanwhile the storms that were on the cards for Sydney on Thursday have largely bypassed the city.

A few storm cells developed near the coast and off-shore, but most of the Sydney Basin has remained dry.

Prior to today, Sydney had recorded just 3.2 mm of rain in October to date after only about half of the long-term average reached the gauge in September. Despite this dry start to spring, the total rainfall for the first nine months of the year was still around 30 percent above average - due mainly to consistent heavy falls in late summer, autumn and mid-winter.