61 Frames Per Second : pac-man

WTFriday: Pac-Man Vs. France

Bob Mackey — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:45:00 GMT

Note to readers: WTFriday is a weekly feature where I find something stupid about video games and get you to laugh until it goes away. Please try to forget this is what I normally do every day of the week.

While Pac-Man is usually viewed in a positive light, fans of this old-school gaming celebrity conveniently forget one important fact: he is a remorseless eating machine. Strawberries, pretzels, and even keys disappear into the gaping maw of this urine-colored glutton as he searches for a way to blot out the pain inflicted by his apocalyptic divorce from Ms. Pac-Man (formerly Mrs.). And sometimes, it gets ugly. A recent videos of Pac-Man's latest episode have surfaced (via Kotaku) which features what we can assume to be a PCP-fueled rampage through the streets and golf courses of France. For the following video, parental guidance is strongly advised.

Pac-Man is currently being held without bail in a French prison cell. He has been allowed to make a single phone call, and eat a single baguette. No word yet on if any cheese was consumed.

Related Links:

WTFriday: CNET's Don Reisinger Is Afraid of the Human Body
WTFriday: A Serial Killer's Ideas for Wii Games
WTFriday: The Super Mario Bros. Anime

Namco, Why You Gotta Make Me Hit You: Sonic Co-Creator’s Unnecessary Pac-Man “Comeback”

John Constantine — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Namco has hired Hirokazu Yasuhara to create a new Pac-Man to celebrate the little yellow glutton’s 30th anniversary in 2010. Namco chief of operations Makoto Iwai told Gamasutra that they’re making the game as a comeback vehicle for Pac-Man, to try and make him a relevant icon in today’s game market. When it comes to making great character-based games, you can’t do much better than Yasuhara. Yuji Naka’s gotten most of the glory, but Yasuhara was the real brains behind Sonic the Hedgehog’s glory days. He acted as director for the original Sonic trilogy on Genesis, was lead designer for Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, and headed up Sonic’s unfinished Saturn debut, Sonic Extreme. After leaving Sega, he joined Naughty Dog and acted as a designer for Jak 2 and 3 as well as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. That right there is a flawless pedigree, a veritable trail of excellence blazed across a decade and a half.

Why in the hell has this man been hired to make Pac-Man relevant again when Pac-Man’s creator already did just that two years ago? Someone please tell me how it makes sense to hire one of the best platformer designers of all time to make a freaking Pac-Man game? History has shown that a Pac-Man platformer is a terrible, terrible idea. Did Namco somehow forget Pac-Land? How about Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures or the Pac-Man World games? Is this selective memory or just idiocy? To quote one Tycho Brahe, which is it Namco? Assholes or retards? You don’t commemorate a game’s anniversary by making a game that is fundamentally different than the source material. I’m happy to hear Yasuhara’s getting more work, but this is a silly waste of a valuable resource.

Truth is I’m only angry about this is because of what a fantastic game Toru Iwatani’s Pac-Man Championship Edition is. It is the definitive version, and it perfectly modernized the 1980 classic in both presentation and play. You want to celebrate the 30th anniversary? Make an updated version of CE. You want to do something worthwhile with a talent like Yasuhara, Namco, you let him make you a brand new game.

God damn Pac-Land. Just listen to that music. That’s what hell sounds like.

Related links:

WAKA, WAKA: Pac-Man Championship Made Old School-er
Yeah, But Is It Art?: Pac-Man Championship Edition
Burn Your Skin for Pac-Man
Ms. Pac-Man: Feminist Champion

WAKA, WAKA: Pac-Man Championship Made Old School-er

John Constantine — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:30:00 GMT

I was a little sad last month when putting together my closing-yet-incomplete thoughts on the games of 2008. During those twelve glorious months, the majority of the games I played to completion were from 2007. (The way 2009’s going at this point, it looks like this year’s going to be just the same.) So when I was thinking of the games that sparked my brain the most last year, some were sadly excluded from mention. My game of the year for 2007 and probably the game I played the most in 2008? Pac-Man Championship Edition.

No, seriously. That game is pure. Its rules are perfect. Its challenge increases seamlessly along with your skill. Its presentation is a quiet symphony of graphical polish and dynamic sound that encourages as much focus in a player as it does tension. It’s iconic but it’s also a legitimate sequel, improving on one of videogames’ most fundamental forms of play without relying heavily on nostalgia as a hook. It’s better than Pac-Man and it’s better than Ms. Pac-Man.

Crap, I’m tearing up just thinking about it!

Siliconera posted up this NES-styled mock up of Pac-Man Championship Edition and it really emphasizes how vital the widescreen format is in making PMCE a sequel that enhances Pac-Man fundamentals.

Without widescreen, PMCE is broken. The scrolling effect compensating for the smaller screen blocks you from tracking the ghosts at any given time, preventing you from plotting your course as you tear around the map gunning for a high score and bigger ghost-point chains. Shame it isn’t a real game. I’d love to try it side by side with the original.

Related links:

Game Compilations: The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly
Yeah, But Is It Art?: Pac-Man Championship Edition
Burn Your Skin for Pac-Man
Ms. Pac-Man: Feminist Champion

Game Compilations: The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly

John Constantine — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Time was, I thought game compilations, museum, and anniversary collections, and anything else you’d want to call them were the cat’s meow. Greatest thing since sliced bread. The *ahem* tits. Then The Mega Man Anniversary Collection for Gamecube came out back in 2004. Fifty simoleons for all eight console Mega Man games plus an opportunity to finally play Mega Man: The Power Battle and Power Fighters? Sounds like a dream come true. Then I found out that instead of the A button making the little blue fella shoot and the B button making him jump, the buttons were reversed for the compilation. There is no way to change this control scheme. It turns playing Mega Man 1 through 6 into a personalized hell, the place where cheat code users go when they die. Compilations are dangerous business because, more often than not, the publisher puts no effort whatsoever into them and people buy them anyway. That’s how you end up with Mega Man’s jumping and shooting getting reversed, how Sega releases not one, but two Sonic the Hedgehog collections with fantastic unlockables that are almost impossible to unlock, and how Namco can release the same damn Galaga/Dig Dug/Pac-man collection nine-hundred times.

Of course, they really can be a treat. Despite all the load times and inaccessible unlockables, the Sonic Mega Collection is still a great way to play Sonic at his best. Occasionally, budget numbers like the Capcom Classics Mini Mix, a no-frills GBA collection with Bionic Commando NES, Strider NES, and Mighty Final Fight, can come along and introduce you to games you’ve never ever heard of. (Seriously, Mighty Final Fight? When did that happen? It’s got mini Haggar!) They are a more palatable alternative to Virtual Console-style downloads too, as far as price is concerned. Sega’s just-announced Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection for PS3 and Xbox 360 comes with forty games, and for thirty bucks you get what Nintendo would charge $120 for on Wii. Plus, they wouldn’t even all fit on the Wii’s memory! But again, the production values are highly questionable. As Jeremy Parish pointed out with the screen Sega released of Shinobi III, the emulation work on this new collection isn’t exactly screaming HD-console-quality visuals. Look at this:

That's a game that Backbone Entertainment has already put on Xbox Live Arcade! It didn't look half that muddy. See?

So, what’s the problem? Why can’t Sega, and every other publisher with a mind to, release well-considered, value-laden collections like the Capcom Classics Collection (which has radical Street Fighter tutorials?)

(Link: Joystiq)

Editor's Note: Pictured at the top is Sega's own Fantasy Zone Complete collection. It is awesome.

Related links:

What I'm Playing This Weekend: Mega Man Anniversary Collection
Sega "Gets" the Wii
Infinite Mega Man 9: Composer Ippo Yamada Talks Living Up to a Serious Musical Pedigree
Where I Draw the Line With Retro
Growl, Snarl, Bark: Screw Attack's Top 10 Genesis Games

Portrait of the Prince Pre-Persia

John Constantine — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There’s something about seeing the physical inspiration for a fictional character that is both deeply exciting and unsettling. The pizza missing a lone slice, covered in tomato sauce and bubbling cheese, is downright creepy when you think about it as a basis for Toru Iwatani’s Pac-Man. Seriously think about it. That’s what Pac-man would look like if he was skinned! What does that say about Iwatani, or even me for thinking about it? Take good ol’ Mario Segali as another example. You can practically see the ghost of a red hat perched atop his mustachioed dome. Now picture him breaking bricks with his scalp and jumping on turtles. Sickly fascinating, no?

I’m told this footage of Jordan Mechner’s kid brother has been floating around the net for quite some time, but today’s the first time I’ve ever laid eyes on it. Some twenty years ago, Mechner dressed the lad up in whites and then set him off running, climbing, and falling as a model for his seminal masterwork, Prince of Persia. Thing is, the boy looks exactly like the Prince in motion.

Unsettling: I watch this terrified of long falls and hidden spikes. Exciting: Mechner didn’t have motion capture technology, just a primitive scanner and animation skills that resulted in a sprite every bit as fluid and human as the real deal.

The Prince certainly doesn’t look like Mechner’s brother any longer, having transformed into a goateed swashbuckler five years back, then into a scowling cosplayer/GWAR-fan, then into a sort of starry eyed dude covered in scarves who looks like he escaped from a Yoshitaka Amano print.

Know what’s creepier than seeing the real life basis for a game character? Seeing the character re-translated into reality. Behold your bother’s legacy, Mechner!

Editor's Note: That is not Mario Segali at all, merely a cruel hoax.

(Link: 1UP)

Related links:

Trailer Review: Prince of Persia
Character Case Study: When Good Characters Get Bad Attitudes
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
Yeah, But Is It Art?: Pac-Man Championship Edition
Burn Your Skin for Pac-Man
Ms. Pac-Man: Feminist Champion

Burn Your Skin for Pac-Man

Nadia Oxford — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:34:00 GMT

I'm always interested in video game-based body modification. Though I sport no video game tattoos of my own or indeed, any tattoos at all (am I a chicken? You'll never know), I like to know what kinds of choices people made before they went ahead and got Mario stamped upside-down on their foreheads.

I'd especially like to know what the motivation is for the latest fad going around: burning images, particularly of game characters, into the skin with industrial strength lasers. For one thing, I'm not sure about the intended use of these lasers under circumstances when the Stupid virus isn't rampant, but I'm pretty sure body art isn't it. Health regulations? Risk of post-procedure infection? Ahhh, big deal!

It's also quite possible that you can't remove a laser-etched Space Invader from the back of your hand in a safe and effective manner. On the other hand (ha!), there's something special about having Pac-Man stare at your partner with his mouth agape as you make love.

Personal Firsts: My Gaming Scrapbook, From A to Wii

John Constantine — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Written by Amber Ahlborn

At some point in the 1980s, the year nebulous in my memory, my mom bowled with her team every Thursday night. I loved Thursday nights because dad let me stay up late to watch M.A.S.H. and Benny Hill. Sometimes he and I would hop in the car and go visit mom at the alley, and that was the best. Dad would sit and watch mom bowl. Me? I would squeeze every last quarter I could get out of him. With a fist full of change and dollars soon to be converted into change, I’d walk down to the alley’s hamburger bar, snag a stool, and drag it through the glass doors into the arcade. Without deviation, I’d position my stool in front of the “Ostrich Game” and stay planted there until I ran out of money. I’m speaking of Joust of course, but at that age I could neither reach the controls without a stool to sit on nor read very well.

The Atari 2600 became my first home console. I had around a dozen games for it. I owned the usual suspects like Pac-Man, Pitfall, and Frogger, but I especially enjoyed playing Kaboom with my half brother. He was over ten years older than me and I put everything into trying to beat his high scores. Super Mario Bros. 2 ushered me into the NES era and I became a dedicated platformer fan with a little beat’em up on the side thanks to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Super NES became the first home console I bought with my own money (well, technically about 40% of it was my lunch money). With the SNES came a host of more firsts that introduced me to some of my greatest gaming loves. I discovered Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Mega Man X. Star Fox lead me into the third dimension and Chrono Trigger showed me that RPGs were not boring. While the N64 and Playstation fed me more of what I liked, the Gamecube and PS2 broadened my genre horizons even further.

Ico was the first game to give me a naturalistic puzzle environment to climb all over, and ever since I have loved these types of games. Pikmin primed me for future strategy titles and Katamari Damacy helped form my love of the really weird. With the advents of the DS and Wii the firsts keep rolling in.

What are your firsts? Did your tastes progress to ever widening genres or have you stuck with one obsession? Are you so new to gaming that everything is a first? It feels appropriate at this point in time to pause since the industry has recently experienced a few firsts itself. For the first time, graphical prowess is not the only draw for home consoles. The evolution of what games are and can mean to people marches on.

Looking off towards possible future firsts can be both encouraging and disheartening, depending on your perspective. As a primarily Wii gamer I’ve certainly hit both extremes. I’ve had the pleasure of playing my first “casual” games. I’ve also suffered my not-so-first frustrations with seeing deeper games watered down or shuffled to other systems. Even so, I keep a positive outlook and encourage all gamers, veteran and newcomer alike to keep the door open to firsts. You can never tell what your new love will be if you never bother to look. Give a try to that game you might be inclined to write off as “just not your thing”. It might be the very best thing you ever played.

For the first time ever, I played a video game with my mom. Every Sunday night we go bowling in my living room… and I always thought I hated sports games.

Webcomic Watch: Eegra

Peter Smith — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Videogame-themed webcomics are a mixed (and dizzyingly numerous) bunch; for every powerhouse like Penny Arcade, there're a few hundred semi-comedic fan-fictions stapled together from sprite sheets and MS Paint doodles. It's always a relief to find something with some genuine craft put into it. The relatively new Eegra's got craft in spades — artist Patrick Alexander deploys an impressive range of visual styles — but it's also got a glorious mix of old-timey wordplay and visual grotesquerie. Just behold the character model Alexander speculates will appear in Soul Calibur VII. It's one thing to make the obvious point that Soul Calibur is more about T&A than gameplay these days; it's another entirely to render that obvious point as some kind of monstrous T&A slug. Eegra is one to watch, and if it occasionally lapses into familiar "cloyingly beloved children's character is actually a murderous psychopath" gags, it usually does so with so much visual and verbal wit that it's hard to complain. Anyone who can render Pac-Man as a Victorian dandy who finds his meal of dots "ripe as a deb and juicy as the ensuing gossip" has made it into my Firefox bookmarks for life.

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Pac-Man Championship Edition

John Constantine — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

There’s no time like the present to revitalize fundamental game types. Like abstractionist painters finding new creative horizons in crafting a pristine still life, designers are going back to the well, throwing off the shackles of complex narrative and detail rich presentations to create more immediate, visceral experiences. Once June rolls around, we here in the United States will get our greedy little hands on Space Invaders Extreme and Arkanoid DS, stylized modernizations of Taito classics with gameplay rooted in thirty year-old tradition. The trend, however, kicked off one year ago when Toru Iwatani released Pac-Man Championship Edition. Iwatani’s swansong, Championship outwardly looks like little more than a gussied up version of the 1980 original. Get your hands on it, though, and Championship shows its true colors as a very different work. Championship and the original Pac-Man have the same fundamental goal: get the highest score. But Championship is a fluid, timed experience as opposed to a series of contained, linear challenges. Pac-man, the ghosts, the light house-techno music, the pulsing of the screen all increase in tempo as the clock winds down and the score rises, creating a hypnotic effect. When you make a mistake and it’s all momentarily halted, it’s jarring and drives you to keep the experience uninterrupted.

I claimed to Pete earlier this year that Pac-Man Championship was the best game I played in 2007. I still think that’s true. It is gaming at its purest: simple, elegant, and beautifully affecting.

Have you played it, FPSers? Do you agree? Am I mad?

Editor's note: Pete finally played it about a month back and told me, "It's just Pac-man." What an ass.

It Ain’t Violent, It’s Fashion

John Constantine — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Peter Gronquist, the LA artist who turns the tools of ultra violence into Madison Avenue delights, just opened a new show at Gallery 1988. While I can’t deny the allure of a Louis Vuitton chainsaw, the most fetching item on display is also the one that hates ghosts the most. Pac-man grenades. That is just plain HOT!

Our thanks to Kotaku for the spot.