Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years, I’m pretty sure you have at least heard the name of the next arcade game in our list. That’s because Pac-man is one of the most popular and influential games of all time! If not THE single most recognized and widely acclaimed video game! After all, Pac-Man is universally regarded as one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture.
You control a little, yellow pie-shaped dot-muncher character named Pac-Man who runs around a maze eating every pac-dot and power pellet (and the occasional fruit or item) that he can find in the board in order to advance to the next stage.
To be able to do that, you need to avoid contact with any of the four ghosts that roam the maze and chasing you wherever you go. As you will often cross paths with them, you’ll come to realize that each ghost has its own unique personality: the shy blue ghost Bashful (Inky), the trailing red ghost Shadow (Blinky), the fast pink ghost Speedy (Pinky), and the forgetful orange ghost Pokey (Clyde). One touch from any of these ghosts and a life will be lost. When all lives have been lost, the game ends.
But don’t worry, you can easily turn the tide on your pursuers and become invincible to them for a given period of time by eating one of the four larger, flashing dots (super dots, “energizers” or power pellets) located near the corners of the maze. During this time, the ghosts turn deep blue, reverse direction and usually move more slowly, so Pac-Man can devour them for bonus points before their turn back to their normal color. Once eaten tough, the ghost's eyes float back to their ghost home in the center box, and regenerate in its normal color ready to chase after Pac-Man again. Blue ghosts flash white before they become dangerous again so if you think they’re about to change don’t go after them! The amount of time the ghosts remain vulnerable varies from one board to the next.
Each maze has its own unique bonus fruit or object with bonus points increasing as the game progresses. And if you are running out of lives, you’ll be pleased to know that you’ll be awarded a single bonus life at 10,000 points by default. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can relax your concentration and start losing lives like crazy!
Follow the link to play a free pacman game in your browser and bring back old memories! You’ll find other great free arcade games too! You just need to have the latest flash player version and that’s it! Go ahead and try it out, and if you manage to survive a few rounds of gameplay, you’ll be treated to a series of humorous intermissions between Pac-Man and the ghosts after certain levels. Once you play you’ll be hooked up for good, as this is one insanely addictive and classic arcade game. You’ll have one hell of a time! I kid you not.
Here are other very interesting tidbits and details that you should check out, such as the history behind the game, or the fact that Pacman being used to test cognitive reasoning on chimpanzees.
Pacman Trivia (from Wikipedia) :
-Initially, Pac-Man's enemies were referred to as monsters on the arcade cabinet, but soon became colloquially known as ghosts.
-A perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player achieves the maximum possible score on the first 255 levels (by eating every possible dot, energizer, fruit, and monster) without losing a single life then scoring as many points as possible in the last level. As verified by the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard on July 3, 1999, the first person to achieve the maximum possible score (3,333,360 points) was Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, who performed the feat in about six hours.
-The game was developed primarily by Namco employee Tōru Iwatani over eighteen months. The original title was pronounced pakku-man and was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeic phrase paku-paku taberu, where paku-paku describes (the sound of) the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession (munching). Although it is often cited that the character's shape was inspired by a pizza missing a slice, he admitted in a 1986 interview that it was a half-truth and the character design also came from simplifying and rounding out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi as well as the basic concept of eating. Iwatani's efforts to appeal to a wider audience—beyond the typical demographics of young boys and teenagers—eventually led him to add elements of a maze. The result was a game he named Puck Man.
-When first launched in Japan by Namco, the game received a lukewarm response, as Space Invaders and other similar games were more popular at the time.
-For the North American market, the name was changed from Puck Man to Pac-Man, as it was thought that vandals would be likely to change the P in "Puck" to an F, forming a common expletive.
-After being overlooked by "experts" who judged Namco's Rally-X to be the better of the two games, Pac-Man went on to unprecedented success and became an icon in Japan and in America.
-Pac-Man is often credited with being a landmark in video game history, and is among the most famous arcade games of all time.
-The character also appears in more than 30 officially licensed game spin-offs, as well as in numerous unauthorized clones and bootlegs. According to the Davie-Brown Index, Pac-Man has the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers, recognized by 94 percent of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment