pac-man posts

We have seen many Pac-Man adaptations over the years but none like this. The World's Biggest Pac-Man is a browser-based version of Namco Bandai's classic arcade game but one which has over 1,300 user-based maps that are all linked together to form one gigantic Pac-Man map.

The game was made by Australian-based developer Soap Creative with permission from Namco Bandai as a way to promote Microsoft's launch of the Internet Explorer 9 web browser (although any HTML5-based browser should be able to play it). More maps are being made by Facebook users who link their creations to the huge collection of Pac-Man maps.

[Via Gamasutra]

We have a feeling there's a big negative effect on office work productivity around the world today. Google's front page has a fully playable version of Namco's original Pac-Mac game to celebrate the arcade game's 30th anniversary this weekend. The game will be live until sometime early on Sunday morning Eastern time.

Users of Google know that the company likes to do special logos on its front page for holidays and other occasions but this is the first time the company has put up a playable game in the logo spot. A post on Google's blog page has some notes on how the Pac-Man logo game was made by its programmer Marcin Wichary. He states he was careful to recreate as much of the original game's programming as he could, and that includes bugs that showed up in the original release.

Common wisdom has it that if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. What, then, should we think of the recent trend in gaming to bring back, and in some cases revamp past video games? I'm thinking here mostly of Bionic Commando's recent upgrade to be both a completely new reimagining of the franchise (yes, now it's a franchise at last) and an update of the classic arcade hit which itself includes a version of the original. Developer Grin is covering all bases, giving die-hard fans what they want while at the same time bringing in new fans who may never have played the first release.

Is it a good idea to keep mining the past for the hits of the future? How much life do these games still have in them? Is it possible to revamp an old game sufficiently to make it feel new while retaining its old-school flavor? Let's take a look.

Ahh, the tyranny of the blank page. For a writer, there is nothing more daunting than staring at an empty space with a deadline looming. Yet that's what wordsmiths do every day -- dig deep to find the content, the signal amidst the noise. However, it's one thing to sit and write a novel, where it's just the writer and the story, with the audience taking a static, non-participatory role. When one writes for a video game, the audience becomes an active part of the experience, and the writer must take that into account.

Yet often, the player merely sits through the story portion of a game, frequently told through cutscenes. Even those games which tout branching storylines with multiple endings do little more than offer closed choices, offering only the illusion of audience control. Are there any real choices to be had to affect a game's plot? Do narratives merely interrupt gameplay? What exactly is the role of story in video games?

Long before there were home consoles or Flash-based and downloadable games accessible via the Internet, the only place to get your gaming fix was the venerable video arcade. For those of our readers who may be too young to remember the arcade boom of the 1980s, these were spacious, sometimes dimly-lit buildings filled with games housed in large cabinets; some later games were contained in sit-down, glass-topped tables. These spaces were home to the grand, seminal casual games that have become enshrined within gamers' memories as the first great games of our time. Titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Joust, Dig Dug, etc., and the gameplay they embodied, have been the basis for all games that have followed since.

However, as home console systems became available, and their game libraries grew both in size and complexity, the once-ubiquitous video arcades dwindled in number from thousands country-wide to perhaps tens per state, and even that figure might be optimistic. With the focus of electronic entertainment switching to the home, gamers also left the arcades en masse, in favor of playing at home alone, or at best, with one or two friends who didn't have a system of their own. These players might not have known it then, but soon they would subconsciously realize that they were missing something integral to the gaming experience that wouldn't return for years.