DTVuser2009

cronus

I never noticed that before. There is a difference. I was never good at Pac-Man, though, as I don't think I ever got passed the second screen.

DTVuser2009

i am the same. i die on level 1 or 2 lol!

I'm pretty good at Ms. Pac-Man though. she moves faster than Pac Man and can evade the Ghosts much better lol.

BTW there's also another oddity. on Pac-Man, the last Ghost is 'Clyde' but the same ghost on Ms. Pac-Man has changed not only names but genders and has become 'Sue'

cronus

Did the ghosts actually differ in speed? I remember people used to try to say that the red ghost was the fastest. I thought they were all the same.

andrew25

That is interesting I had never seen this differences although I had played it a hundred of times. It reminds me that nothing in the world is perfect which are man made and it applies to large number of products.

DTVuser2009

Actually there was an A.I. on the ghosts. Blinky (red ghost) always had not only the fastest speed but was also always after Pac-Man; his name is really 'Shadow' and that is because he always 'shadows' pac-man.

the others like 'Bashful' (inky) are just cruisers on the maze and don't initially chase Pac-Man until visible. they eventually find him and sometimes dead-end him on a corner. that's how i always lose. they get me boxed in with no way out.

Either way i always laughed at the death sound. esp today it is so 1980s.

There's also a neat fact in the game crashing if it was ever won. the game was never designed to be beat, so level 256 after completion would wipe out the game or make it graphically impossible to go further. the game had to draw fruits (at the bottom) in 256 bytes, so after level 256 there was no way the game could draw any more fruits, so it tried combining the previous 256 fruits in attempt to draw a new one, but it was impossible and would crash the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K7orNZNGU8

tongyun

I never noticed the differences before either. Of course, I had a good reason. By the time I got to the arcades, I was usually drunk and didn't care and just played the game. LOL

stevezachtech

Wow! I can't believe I know too little about the game that have eaten most of my time when I was younger. Thanks for the info! And by the way, at least I can get to 5 keys on the game! haha! Has anyone actually finished the game? What's next the KEY stages?

DTVuser2009

The game doesn't really finish. it doesn't have any closing 'you won' sequence like games today do nor any secret videos or easter eggs like when you beat a new game. it was a game designed to be fun and get a higher score than your friends. back when 'beating' the game was unheard of.

That being, after Level 255 the game crashes. the CPU cannot handle drawing the last fruit at Level 256 since the game only consists of 256 bytes. so after Level 255 the CPU attempts to draw 256 fruits only to wipe it out or really screw up the video where one cannot go further but the game keeps going anyways. today it's all about what would happen if one could actually 'beat' Level 256. so far it's considered 'impossible'

Today people have memorized the patterns of the Ghost A.I. (primitive but it's there, but the Ghosts only have so many combos of moves, kinda like Chess) so it's possible to get to Level 255, something the designers of the game never expected.

Another bit of Trivia: Pac-Man from 1981-onward is not the original Pac-Man. the TI-99 computer from Texas Instruments in the late 1970s had one of the originals, Puckman with similar game play. Atari had a game available called Pac Man but the game was very different looking and the sound effects primitive. you'll sometimes hear the Atari version whenever someone's playing a Wii or Sega on Sitcoms, even though those systems never had those games, it's just a generic game sound used in a lot of TV when an Arcade or home console is there.

homebrewer

Cabinet arts' are usually not that accurate in the early gaming days. Lolz