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.

Ms. Pac-Man Twin Recreation

Since I'm still as much of a Pac-Man nut as I've always been, I thought I'd share this with you.

While looking through a list of un-dumped MAME titles, my eyes caught onto this unauthoritised pseudo-sequel to Ms. Pac-Man called Ms. Pac-Man Twin. It was created by a company known as "Susilu" and it allows two players to play the game simultaneously, with the second player operating a green-colored Ms. Pac-Man.

As opposed to the millions of other two-player Pac-Man games (such as Tengen's Ms. Pac-Man or Pac-Man Arrangement), there are two layers of pellets that have to be cleared from the maze; a red layer and a green layer. These layers can only be removed by the Ms. Pac-Man that matches the color of the layer (Power Pellets are universal, they can be eaten by either player and don't exist on a layer). Once both layers are gone, the players can advance.

So rather than giving you low-res distorted arcade screenshots, I went and made my own recreations, which includes layouts of the other three mazes.

Update: Here's V2 of the mazes, with a palette that replicates the original screens more closely.

Pac-Man's Maze Craze; Wendy's Kids Meal Scans

The downfall of the Pac-Man tribute project

Greetings everyone.
Originally I had written a post on this before a few months ago, however I decided to rewrite it with a more mature approach along with some backstory.

Let me introduce you to Shaun LeBron, the key developer of the iOS title Pterodactyl Attack and for some time was the owner and creator of an online incarnation of Pac-Man that was in-developent for some time until Namco Bandai reared it's ugly heads into the window and shot down the project's GitHub page, failing to see the concept of a fan-made non-profit tribute. I'm sure if this project was made in Japan it would be safe, as games that are obvious clones like Rosenkreuztilette have existed far longer and are much more well-known than this project, and no form of copyright from Capcom has slain those series' existences.

The project was simply known as the Pac-Man Tribute Project, and it's final version prior to it being canceled can be found here.
The biggest part of the project to some was it's extreme accuracy to the original Pac-Man (something that even World's Biggest Pac-Man, something that was sponsored by NBGI themselves couldn't even get halfway right), but it's primary selling point was the "Cookie-Man" variant, which generated randomly-built mazes that a good Pac-Man maze designer would create, and something that would be appropriate for an actual arcade Pac-Man title designed professionally. An in-depth document showing how level generation is done is shown here.

As I was going through a huge Pac-Man phase at the time, including creating hacks of the Atari 7800 Pac-Man titles, I was able to find Shaun's project through some careful Googling, and from there I found his e-mail and began discussing with him my own ways in which his tribute project could be taken to the next level, incorporating new design elements from various unauthoritised Pac-Man clones, the most obvious being the two Champ Pac-Em titles developed for DOS by CHAMPrograming, as well as the massively lesser-known Ultra Pac-Man featured in the "Super ABC" board released as a conversion kit for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man cabinets. Elements from Pac-Man Plus were also suggested, along with a newer maze generator that allowed for a wider selection of map designs with Cookie-Man. Also suggested was both a level and a level-set editor, allowing the tribute project to serve as a platform for one's own Pac-Man fan-game.

If you want the full resources collection I supplied to Shaun last year, you may acquire them below:
-Download-

Shaun at first welcomed these suggestions happily, even declaring me a conceptual artist, but due to development on his other project Pterodactyl Attack, as well as the above mentioned troubles with NBGI, Shaun would have to delay updates to the project.

I contacted Shaun later on a few more months down the line, and he still seemed interested in doing the Pac-Man tribute project revival, though as stated before Pterodactyl Attack would remain his big project, and come November the same year, he states that because of lack of interest and worry of Namco Bandai striking again (and possibly the complex nature of my features), development on the Pac-Man Tribute Project was canceled. In it's place, Shaun had discussed the possibility of making an educational legal guide about how Pac-Man worked rather than developing a game that recreated the existence. I contacted him back further questioning the cancelation of the project, and he announces his idea to terminate our short-lived friendship by blocking me on Twitter and ignoring any and all e-mail attempts since I had tried convincing Shaun to revive the project after he stated the eventual fate of the project in Janruary.

Shaun, wherever you are, and if you're reading this, please accept my apology for making a fool of myself and not understanding the legal troubles that you went through and were trying to avoid with this project at first. I wish you with the best of luck on any further projects that you may decide on, including Pterodactyl Attack. If you begin responding to my e-mails again and un-block me on Twitter, I promise I will not pester you to continue the project you canceled. I'll just wait till I learn programing myself and create the revival from scratch, or find if anyone out there wants to experiment with this and bring it into existence with altered graphics and etc. to remove the Pac-Man feeling and make it less likely to encounter legal troubles (complete with disclaimers).

On an unrelated note, happy 5th anniversary to this blog.

Not Pac-Man x8 and x8+8

From the creator of A0zora and the Mari0 SJB Mod comes an expansion of StabYourself's newest game Not Pac-Man that will have you on your ankles till the day you succeed.

I'm proud to present, Not Pac-Man x8! Now featuring the four forgotten ghosts, Sue, Funky, Kinky, and Spunky, joining the original ghostly quartet!

Can't defeat the game with so many ghouls running rampant? Thanks to fellow forum member Qcode, you can now play Not Pac-Man x8+8, a special version that adds an additional four Power Pellets to the maze.

Get it here, and happy chomping!
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101251006/Not% ... n%20x8.zip 

You need LOVE (0.8.0) to run this mod.

Champ Ms. Pac-Em Maze Expansion

For anyone that plays the unofficial Ms. Pac-Man DOS port Champ Ms. Pac-Em, I got a special treat: A user-created expansion set that contains 78 additional different maze designs. Please note you must have Champ Ms. Pac-Em downloaded on your computer (or at least, in a folder where the game can be booted up by dragging the .EXE onto DOSBox if its OS is post-XP) before downloading this package, then extract the contents of the package (minus the README) into the same folder as all of Champ Ms. Pac-Em's data. Don't forget to check your computer's Program Files!

You can find the download for Champ Ms. Pac-Em here (look for v1.5, full version). If you're running in 64-bit Windows or some other OS that renders you unable to run the installer, contact me via any social media of your choice and I'll send you the contents of the game in one convent zip file.

Download the extra mazes package.

Preview of a Side Project I'm working on.

If you cannot guess what this is, I'm afraid I can't help you. But yet it's an excuse for me being unable to update my deviantART gallery, as I've put hours into this.

And as a bonus, the original reference sprite-sheet.