Stumbling through Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures

[davidn]

You know, when I played Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou I was expecting it to remain at least fairly near the top of the list of games I'd played in this project as far as madness was concerned. It was a complete surprise to me that it was instantly shown its place by a game that wolfekko gave me, with the apparently innocent title Pac-Man 2.

To be fair, is it going to be any madder than any other recent events this weekend? Don't be stupid, of course it isn't. But it's going to make a decent attempt anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTTgZjL9Fd4

There are two interrelated facets to this game that make it quite so remarkable... the first is that I have no idea why this is called Pac-Man 2. It has the greatest, most irreconcilable genre shift that I've ever seen between a game and its (alleged) sequel - it is not, as you might expect, a maze game with some enhancements over the original. Instead, it's a sort of adventure where you watch Pac-Man yomping through a cartoon world, occasionally pointing out something that you want him to pay attention to and hoping that he'll interact with it in the way that you expect. This leads us to the second unusual thing - the player doesn't really do a whole lot of playing, being reduced to vaguely influencing the course of events by shooting things with a catapult and getting frustrated when Pac-Man runs off in the wrong direction.

For the rather indirect method by which you control it, it's a bit like Scribblenauts - except your character is a manic-depressive Tamagotchi with the mind of a particularly stupid toddler and won't listen if you cheese him off too much. Despite all this, in this video I explore all of the game world that it will allow before remembering what I'm supposed to be doing, and even when I know the solution it takes me an age to manage it.

How did anyone get anywhere in this game before the Internet? Or, having listened to the sound, play it for long enough to do so before having their parents come through and ram the player's head through the television screen?

Comments

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

while I admit the controls here are. . unintuitive, I never expected anyone to render Pac-Man unconscious during the tutorial for this game!!! D:

I think, before there was Internet, everyone was a lot more prepared to spend time fiddling with puzzles until they found an answer. Honestly, it's easy to see you need to make Pac-Man look at the bottle, and then, at the exact moment he does, magically summon a blackbird to assault Pac-Man, thus causing the bottle to randomly fall the ground where it can be collected. Really, it's just common sense.

Towards the end of the game--spoiler alert--there's a bit where you need to bypass a door lock by entering a code you get by. . . .well, I never actually figured out how to get the code. After searching for it, I decided to simply brute-force the door lock open. A grievous task when you find that the game forces you to run a dangerous dungeon course every time you fail to open the door. Got it; beat the game over a weekend. See, lots of time for these things in 1994. I literally don't even have time to play half the games I've recently acquired now. :(

[davidn]

I can only say that it's more of a struggle to talk about what you're doing as well as experiment, when you're aware of people watching ;)

I used to fiddle with games to progress all the time - before the Internet was invented, I had a lot more... stamina and persistence for them, and it really felt like an amazing achievement to make progress in Monkey Island or Simon the Sorceror. Now, when you know that the solution is just a mouse click away, it's much easier to become tempted and save yourself wandering around fruitlessly for hours...

The bottle reminded me of the goat from Broken Sword, where you infamously had to be in a knocked-down special state before you could do anything to get past it.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or did this game come out about a decade too early?

I mean, seriously, the control scheme seems definitely more suitable for the DS than the SNES.


That being said, WHY IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY DOES THIS EVEN EXIST!?

[davidn]

You know, you're right - it really does look like something that should be on the DS, with a cursor control (there is a mechanic where you need to hold down the button a bit before you fire, but this doesn't seem to have any effect at all except making sure that you can't fire too rapidly).

Still no word on why it's called "Pac-Man 2"! I could almost understand it if it were a game called "Pac-Man: Adventures in Being Knocked Out", or just anything that didn't suggest it was a direct sequel.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

It's kinda funny, yet also kinda sad, how many SNES games would have been perfect to bring up to the DS but never did. Kjorteo and I both agree that Mario Paint would have been a perfect game to port over, and I have to say, it would have done this train-wreck a world of good.

[premchaia_pre4]

I couldn't get through it due to the sound issue, but—did you ever try switching the “Stereo” option on the title screen? The sound distortion sounded kind of like a wrong-number-of-channels-being-rendered distortion.

[davidn]

That's a good thought, actually, and I just went back to try - unfortunately it didn't make it any less hideous! I knew that it must be something wrong with the emulator and that they hadn't produced something that sounded like this intentionally. Then again, the sounds on a clean version only sound marginally better...

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Soo. . . . how bad is it that I actually enjoy the music in this game? I would happily listen to the soundtrack :3


. . The sound effects, however. . . that slingshot does not sound like any slingshot from this world D:

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

When I first saw this, I thought they'd decided to base a game off the Pac-Man cartoon - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3n22GQMgcU - before I realised the game came out 13 years afterwards. On the other hand, at least they didn't feel the need to put in the spurious fifth ghost (Inky, Pinky, Blinky, Clyde and Token Female Ghost Because That's How Cartoons In The Eighties Worked just doesn't have the same ring to it, y'know?). And the mysterious 'dark lord Sauron' seems to have been replaced his mechanical voice box with Perfect Cell's I'MMA FIRIN' MAH LAZOR face.

D.F.

[davidn]

What confuses me most is how absolutely everything seemed to need a Saturday morning cartoon in the 80s, whether it had been given an actual storyline and characterization or not! Then again... games at that point just didn't have the capacity to do that.

I like the implication that when you eat the ghosts and they're just disembodied eyes, they're just running back to get a new sheet out of the cupboard.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"A rather camp gospel choir"?? XD

This is really a tremendously ambitious game in a lot of ways... and I mean, they've spent plenty of time making graphics, and animations, and programming him to respond to things..... but somehow, it never occurred to them that... "pac baby needs milk" isn't going to stand up to "sword things in the head" no matter how long they spend on the graphics?

Why is Pac-Man afraid of farmers? Is his kind kidnapped and used for livestock or something?

Oh shoot- that whole wordy tutorial and they didn't even tell you about the 'look' button?

He refuses to move on once he notices a shiny apple, when music plays in the park he spontaneously starts waltzing around with the air, and even after you finally get him to finish his assigned task, he refuses to go inside because he wants to play with the dog. It seemed too easy a comment to make, but honestly, this game is beating you over the head with the idea that it's a "child with ADD" simulator. I honestly wonder if it was invented to try and make someone's videogame-addled kid understand what it's like trying to get to the shops and back with them. I mean literally all you can do to make him go where you want is shout "LOOK!" and pray there's something more interesting in that direction... I would've said the gigantic celebratory cutscene for coming home with a bottle of milk seemed a bit much, but.... it really isn't, is it :P

I'm not sure I understand this villain's logic... "Pac-Man did something to you, and I'm angry about it, so now I'm going to do the same thing"?

I am kind of intrigued by the sound of Pac-Man's voice, though! It sounds like it's generated live, almost like a vocaloid without any consonants?

[davidn]

Yes, I think that the game bears more of a resemblance to Scribblenauts than I had first realized... they have an apparently very large range of reactions and interactions for the main character and it's really quite impressive how none of them seem like scripted set-pieces but that they blend in as the normal mode of operation of the game... but they didn't really consider that all of this attention to detail didn't really go very smoothly into creating an actual game. He seems to be afraid of quite a lot of things - some I can understand, some I can't!

I tried the tutorial again, and I did get a message about "LOOK" that time, when the letter fell on the ground - maybe it only appears depending on what other actions you take, although if it does, they sort of missed the point of its job as a tutorial. As for how the Look button is used... yes, the thought had occurred to me :) He does seem particularly childlike, having to feed him with desperate pleas to do something useful while his just stares over at whatever's caught his interest in gormless wonder.

The sound that I was getting through the emulator was... not fantastic (though looking at Youtube, the correct sound isn't much better) - I'm not sure about whether the voice was just a collection of samples or a vaguely voice-sounding instrument with some variations in pitch and intensity.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

he's trespassing on the farm, obviously.. after having been wondering the same thing for the past seven days or so.. :P

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

But the sign under the bottle says "free!" Unless that was just a last-minute retcon so they could say they weren't teaching kids to steal things (have they never played an adventure game before??) even though it made the entire rest of the scenario no longer make sense ;P

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I remember playing this game when I was younger! I thought it was cute, and I think they hailed it as an "interactive cartoon". I got to a point where you had to lead Pac-Man through a minecart ride, having him duck ("look down") or jump ("shoot him"), and it became as frustrating at the Battletoads Turbo Tunnel.

By the by, did you notice the Pac-shaped table inside the house?

Also, yes, the sound was a lot better than the water-bucket design that you were playing with. I don't know why yours sounded so bad!