Ms Pac-Man Twin, six years later

So it has come to my understanding that a little game called Ms. Pac-Man Twin finally got a dump after I had discovered the game and made mockups back in 2015 of what the game would have looked like had it been applied to more authentic hardware. I say that because the actual version takes quite a couple liberties with the source game.

To no one's surprise, it's a bootleg running off of knockoff hardware with a daughterboard slapped on, and many elements of the original game were straight up butchered or otherwise lost to SUSILU's attempts at getting a second Ms. Pac into the game.

Perhaps the most notable difference is how... different it feels to play. While you can play it solo, the experience practically begs to be played with a friend- each with a set of Pac-dots to themselves. And the round doesn't end until all of them are gone. Heck, a player can even steal the dots of the other player if they finish early to speed up the process (even earning double the points for eating the dots not of their color!). Its definitely got a more competitive edge and it does it far more confidently than Tengen's versions of Ms. Pac-Man through the early 90's, if only because players don't have collision with each other and dying doesn't force both players to respawn in a process that takes ten seconds. Fruit and intermissions are also MIA, in part due to the bootleggers deciding to stick in a fancy new title screen that overwrites all the necessary graphics and a longer death animation.

The other big noticeable difference is the sprite of the player characters themselves. For whatever reason, Ms. Pac received a whole new sprite-set edited from Pac-Man's sprites and they're... freaky to say the least. Smaller, single-pixel eyes, a larger bow, and going completely over on the lipstick department.

Of course being the sprite-artist I am (at lest, in a way) I tried to fix up the sprites to be a bit closer to the originals. Aside from the title screen, the revised HUD, and the new "double dot" tiles, there's no other custom spritework in the game.

With the game's most prominent elements covered, there was another thing I discovered upon looking at images of the game's title screen across the web and it may give some clues as to why the board was so rare. Take a look at the title screen one more time, particularly the bottom right. Notice the green "18" printed in the corner. That number never seems to change no matter what. Compare that to the oldest-recorded video of the game taken on Robbie's homepage:

The ones digit is cut off by the monitor's edges but here you can make out a 0 in the lower right corner in the tens digit. Likely, the full number is 01-09.

And here we have a 16, cleanly visible from photos of a board that was sold on eBay last December. If my understanding of this is correct, then these numbers would indicate the build number associated with each board- meaning the board the current MAME dump is associated with is Board #18, the one from the eBay auction is Board #16, and the one from Robbie's coverage is any board from #01 to #09.

With this, we may now know why Ms. Pac Twin was so rare to find and took almost three decades to get a dump: not only was it made in Argentina, South America in 1992/93, a time when Pac-Man bootlegs feel out of relevancy especially if you compare it to bootlegs like Hangly Man or Ms. Pac-Attack, the board had a very limited print run to boot, possibly having only twenty or so boards in circulation compared to the hundreds of thousands amassed by the more widely produced originals. It also never got its own dedicated machine and was stuck in generic cabinet after generic cabinet intended to be filled with other games, making it harder to spot and possibly leading to some confusing it for the original game.

So that's Ms. Pac-Man Twin, a charming little bootleg that I'm glad to finally play in an official capacity but I can't help but admit that I'm a bit underwhelmed, especially with the six years it took between me discovering the game and seeing it finally dumped and released. Then again it's a hack of a 40-year old arcade game so you can't expect too much.