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.