2600 Pac Man CE random musing (aka idea peddling ;-)

[kisrael]

So one trend that's had longer legs than I expected is trying to make a Pac-Man that was better than the first 2600 port... admittedly a fairly low bar!

 

But are people familiar with this new Pac-Man Champion Edition? An Xbox 360 downloadable game, with a 3 minute demo and a $8 download available.

Here are two descriptions praising it:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/06/11

http://blog.dessgeega.com/?p=85

 

Iwatani was on the team for it even! It's pretty nifty. I've just enjoyed it but I know people who really got grabbed by its refinement of the classic formula

 

Just based on screenshots, and its horizontal, wide-screen-friendly layout, it reminded me a bit of 2600 Pac Man.

 

So I was wondering how much of it could be done in a 2600 port.

 

There are of course some cosmetic upgrades... good use of trailing shadows, amd subtle shimmer and light effects...

 

But here are the big differences:

 

The basic game has a 5 minute cap

 

The usual "eat every dot, board resets" pattern is gone. The board is fundamentally divided into two halves; clearing all of the dots on one half makes a fruit emerge. Eat the fruit, and more dots appear on the other half (generally not completely filling the board, at least 'til the game really gets going.) But not only that... actually the other half of the board gets redrawn as well, with a new layout! (The funny thing is, it actually took me a while to realize the actual layout of the other half of the board changes, because the draw in effect is subtle, and/or because my attention is always on the other side of the screen...)

 

Another interesting features is you can chain power pills and the score multiplier, which is the way to wrack up mighty scores. There's this strategy to maximize that chaining, stuff like emptying both sides of almost everything but energizers, then chaining those energizers, then eating the new energizers that appear and so on, up to 4-6...

 

So I dunno. This might be beyond the range of an unaided 2600, more plausible for a supercharger. I guess you could still keep the board in ROM... figuring out how to replenish dots might be a challenge. And you couldn't rely on a reflected playfield.

 

Well, my time of 2600 ASM mojo is long gone. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Pac-Man CE is widely and rightly regarded as a remake (and a download!) done right.

[raindog]

I realize the game was meant for a tournament, but I hope there's a way to remove the 5 minute cap and make it a survival thing. What made games like Pac-Man (and Space Invaders before it) pivotal was the draw of being able to play all afternoon on one quarter if you got good enough, I think, and putting a time limit on it pushes it back down into the realm of "minigame" in my book.

 

It sure does look nice, though, and sounds like it plays even better... maybe the most inspired Pac-Man sequel to date.

[Lord Helmet]

There is no way to remove the time cap. There are several modes of play, but all of them either have a 5 min or 10 min cap.

 

Pac-Man CE rocks btw. It has some furiously intense gameplay. Especially as you get closer to the last min or two of the game.

Edited June 21, 2007 by Lord Helmet

[Kurt_Woloch]

Hmmm.... I watched a video of it on YouTube (since I don't have an X-Box myself), and I think it could be nicely done if you adapt it the way Jr. Pac-Man was adapted... by having a similar screen layout to that.

What occurs to me first is the distance from one passageway to another which has been increased to 4 dots, compared with 3 dots on the original arcade Pac Man. Each half of the playfield consists of a 6x7 grid, in addition to that there's the monster pit in the middle which derives a bit from the grid.

As-is, I think it's pretty undoable on the 2600 since the playfield isn't reflected. However, the playfield is reflected on the horizontal line, so if you turn it around by 90°, you get something that would be doable on the 2600. Instead of the left and right half, you'd get an upper and lower half, and with some simplifications this would be doable. However, since the playfield now would be more high than wide, you'd have to scroll it, like Jr. Pac-Man does. Now each half would be 7 grid positions wide and 6 high, with the whole maze being 7 x 15. This is smaller than the maze of Jr. Pac Man on the 2600 is... that one is 10 wide and 18 high. You could adjust for this by changing around the mazes so that they are 10 wide and 11 high, or something like that. Yes, I think it should be doable this way.