The Video Game Revue

Pac-Man Vs.

I've been doing a bit of hosting lately--friends and gamers who are one and the same, mostly. We have our usual party games: Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mario Kart: Double Dash, and occasionally Zelda: Four Swords. (I'd like to see more Chu-Chu Rocket happening, but it doesn't frequently happen, perhaps because it's such a frantic game.) One of the most popular 4-player games by far is a little-known gem that goes by the name of Pac-Man Vs.

The concept behind Pac-Man Vs. is simple. Have you ever played Pac-Man and imagined how awesome it would be if your friends could play as the ghosts? That's basically what Pac-Man Vs. is. Now the first hang-up you'll encounter when you consider how multi-player Pac-Man would work is that if everybody sees the entire level, it's far too easy for a few ghosts to cooperate and pin Pac-Man in a corner. What you really need to make this game work is for the ghosts to have limited information about their surroundings. Of course, Pac-Man himself needs to be able to see the entire maze, which makes it difficult for him to share the screen with the ghost players.

In the PC gaming world, you'd just require that the player hosting the game plays as Pac-Man, and the other players client programs only recieve information about their immediate surroundings. This makes the problem all too simple, but it only works for PC games--what about the hot-seat console scenerio? Pac-Man Vs. uses the GameCube connectivity with GameBoy Advance to create a setup where the player playing as Pac-Man uses the GBA and each other player gets a normal controller. The ghost players get limited windows into the world on the TV screen while the Pac-Man player plays a deceptively normal-looking game of Pac-Man on the GBA. Ingenious.

Of course, what makes this game special are the little tweaks that really make it work--the design details that elevate it from a fun demo to a full-fledged game. In the ghost view screens, Pac-Man leaves a short-lived trail behind him. The ghosts can't see very far, but it's easy for them to pick up Pac-Man's trail; the net effect is that ghosts will often chase Pac-Man in much the same way that the ghosts in a classic game of Pac-Man would. Unlike a regular game of Pac-Man, the ghosts can pick up the fruit. In addition to getting points, the ghost that eats the fruit has their field of view temporarily widened, which makes the fruit far more valuable to ghosts than to Pac-Man himself.

To make the game truly interesting, the players ought to be in direct competition. You may have noticed in the last paragraph that I said the ghosts can get points--actually, what happens is that each of the four players takes turns being Pac-Man, and points are traded around. The first player to be Pac-Man is decided at random; after that, whichever ghost player catches Pac-Man gets to be Pac-Man for the next round. Pac-Man acquires points as per usual: he picks up pellets and fruit, catches ghosts after getting a power pellet, and gets a nice bonus if he managed to clear the map. Ghosts also get points for picking up the fruit, but their main source of points is that they pick up 1600 points that are subtracted from the Pac-Man player's score when they manage to catch him. The first player to accumulate a specified point total (I commonly play on 15,000) wins the game.

The ghost behaviour in Pac-Man Vs. is far more interesting than in any other Pac-Man game imaginable, both because the ghosts are human players and because it's not always in their best interests for the ghosts to cooperate. If one of the ghost players has a massive point lead, for instance, it's in Pac-Man's best interests to assure that if he gets caught he is caught by one of the other ghosts, because the player with the huge lead will further that lead even more if they get to play as Pac-Man. Ghosts will often employ cheap tactics such as camping a power pellet (which works well if there is only one left, although it makes it easy for Pac-Man to clear the rest of the board for easy points), camping the fruit, or camping the last few remaining pellets on the board. To help curb this last tendency, when there are only 10 pellets left, the game hides the location of the remaining ones from the ghosts--and if Pac-Man is clever, he will clear the map in such a way as to make it confusing where the final remaining pellets are. Strategic behaviour such as this simply is not as much of a factor in a standard game of Pac-Man with A.I. controlled ghosts.

And what really makes Pac-Man satisfying is that when you're hot-doggin' it as Pac-Man, you know that the ghosts eating your dust are actually your friends. Years ago there was this bar that my buddies and I used to go hang out at, and it had one of those cocktail-style arcade machines of Ms. Pac-Man. I used to get a few pints of ale in me to work up a nice buzz, and then totally rip-through Ms. Pac-Man; I wasn't much of a wizard at it, but I was good enough that my buddies (none of them really the arcade gamer variety) would watch and get a kick out of the close calls, near misses, and psyche-outs that I pulled off against the A.I. ghosts. Those were good times. But it's far better these days when I can hook up with my friends for Pac-Man Vs., because I'm still the same slippery-assed Pac-Man, and now the frustrated ghosts are my friends. I still manage to squeeze in the near misses and psyche-outs, but now instead of watching as passive observers, my friends are right in on the action.

Needless to say, the whole point of this little rant is that Pac-Man Vs. is pretty much the most fun four-player console game that I have, and yet a lot of people don't even know about it. The best part is that you don't even need to have four controllers or four GBA units (as is required by games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Zelda: Four Swords) to play--you only need three controllers and one GBA with a link cable. Part of the reason that Pac-Man Vs. is not more widely known is that it comes bundled with Pac-Man World 2 for GameCube, which is not a particularly worthwhile game; but it is worth picking up solely for Pac-Man Vs. If you have a group of friends who commonly get together for Mario Kart: Double Dash, Mario Party, or some other such GameCube game, and at least one of our friends has a GBA, you should give Pac-Man Vs. a try.

posted by Parappa @ 2:13 PM