Pac-Man

Pac-Man is just quite simply put: a classic. I love it and so do millions across the world. It’s been out for over a good 30 years now and it still never goes out of date or gets to boring. It’s very simplistic but addictive game design, just like many of the classics such as Space Invaders or Pong to name a couple of others. Recently I’ve been playing the new championship edition, it’s still same old Pac-Man and ghosts trying to chase you but has little differences that make it just as, if not better than the original 1980 game.

Pac-Man 1980

First of all the game has 6 different game modes, championship mode, two different challenge modes and two different extra modes as well. In Championship edition you are given five minutes to gain the highest possible score you can, just the same as extra mode 1 to. The different in this game however is that the screen is split into two sections (for every game mode that is) and that you must work yourself (or Pac-Man) through the maze eating the dots, once dots are cleared on one half of the screen a fruit will appear on the opposing side in which you need to reach and eat to make more dots appear on the side you just cleared (if that makes sense). Each time you clear one side and you eat the fruit not only will more dots appear but the maze changes as well adding more challenge to the game. It’s very cleaver and challenges the user by making it more complex than the standard maze used back in 1980, so even the experts at the original game will be put to the test especially with a time limit now set. Championship edition of Pac-Man is essentially the ultimate game for Pac-Man players around the globe to compete to see who the best is because in the original 1980 version there is a way to basically cheat which proves nothing. The cheat is in which taking a certain route every time around the maze to complete it without fail (sounds like someone with way too much time on their hands must of found this by analyzing the coding of the ghosts and the routes they take if you ask me).  When they made Miss Pac-Man however they changed the layout of the mazes sort of causing people to work out a totally different strategy, Miss Pac-Man is just the same as Pac-Man except they made more maze layouts.

MS. Pac-Man 1981

I think the highest ever score on the original game I got was over 50,000 which is a good score since most people I know struggle getting 10,000. When I play Pac-Man however, my main focus is eating the ghosts. The power pellets as they are called are placed in 4 corners of the maze which is good game design since you can get caught or trapped easier in the corners. I basically try to wait and round up the ghosts in a corner, (which is a tip I saw on a video once) in which when they come close to you, you can eat the pellet quickly and they are no trouble trying to catch. The power pellets slow them down to but as the game progresses the speed of the ghosts gets higher and higher and if you make it high enough (most preferably through cheating) it gets to the point where the power pellets don’t even do anything because the speed of the game is going so fast.

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2007

If you were to make it to the 256^th level of the original game there is a coding error making this level essentially the last in the game as it is pretty much unplayable?

Coming back to the ghosts however, the creator of Pac-Man Toru Iwatani said in an interview that he coded each ghost in its own specific unique way, basically the red ghost (“Blinky”) trys to chase Pac-Man normally where as the pink and blue ghosts (“Pinky and Inky”) try to position themselves in front of Pac-Man’s mouth, and then there’s the orange ghost, (random one) being Clyde, you can tell it’s random because it’s name doesn’t fit with the rest, is basically programmed to go in random directions, though looking closer at the game’s code reveals it does chase Pac-Man most of the time but interestingly moves towards and hangs around at the bottom left of the maze when Pac-Man is facing a certain direction. What’s good about the ghosts is how they are programmed differently to give the game a more interesting style of game play rather than the game being programmed to chase Pac-Man all the same way else it would be boring. It’s basically the coding what games this game what it is, it sort of asks the question what is more important graphics or coding, in my opinion they are both as important as each other, coding is needed to make a game work in a certain way however coding is useless if there’s nothing to work with, which is where the Art to gaming comes in.

Back in those days however, in the late 1970’s when Pac-Man will have been in development there was none of the equipment that we have today, it was all basically coding to make the game do something and the Art was extremely simple. They would have had to work 8 bit graphics and not having to produce much in game Art as you do in today’s world. Back in them days the programming would have been heavily relied on I’d imagine making a game work, and not that many people working on a game, especially Artists.

I remember not so long ago in my blog talking about how I think we should revive old titles on new consoles, there’s so much potential I think and the next generation is ages away so why not to fill up the time? I personally could go on forever about how you could improve some of the old games, and I think that Pac-Man championship edition is a prime example of this. They’ve taken (at the time) what was almost a 30 year old game and turned it into something new, still being the same old Pac-Man but sort in a new age if that makes sense. What I mean is better looking graphics, new ways to play the same game and different style of controlling the game as they now have added these little extras in. This type of game would sell well with people that have been playing Pac-Man for years and still love it, it’s kind of like the Mario series, it’s still going today and they have the same style of game play as they did back in 1985 but adding different things into it in the new modern age we live in now. The new graphics, the new controllers, new interfaces, it’s pretty much the same thing from 1985 but now in today’s world we have the opportunity to take that and make what it was back then better with the technology that we have now as its advanced. I like to sort of call it the games that never were, or could have been back in the past, taking an original game but sort of updating it, putting the retro classics that everyone seemed to love so much back in the 1980’s when gaming was at it’s peak into the new age of today.

I think now a day’s more people put more emphasis on graphics in games and the way it looks seems to be the most important thing. It is important to have an Art direction, but at the end of the day all areas of game development are important because they all make up the game.