Kenta Cho’s Paku Paku

Kenta Cho, also known as ABAgames on Twitter and the web, has been at this for a good long while now. He has an amazing way of distilling the essence of gameplay down to its absolute barest essentials. He’s especially known for bullet hell, but my favorite games from him are his many many gameplay experiments. This is one of them: Pac-Man boiled down to its very essence, with the whole maze being a single corridor. It’s Paku Paku:

The single control, any keypress, reverse the direction of travel of Pac-Man’s green cousin up there. The single ghost chases Paku single-mindedly, slowly getting faster. Paku can wrap around the screen at the edge, which causes Blinky to chase them directly. (They’re not that bright.) Eating the large blinking dot that I insist on calling an Energizer makes the ghost vulnerable for a few short seconds. If the ghost is eaten, they regenerate if their eyes made it off the screen. Clearing the whole board of dots instantly produces a new set.

You only get one life, but new games start rapidly. The nearly five minute video above contains dozens of plays. No one gets you over losing and into a new attempt like Kenta Cho does.

Think you can do better? You might! Give it a try!

Paku Paku (Github, browser-playable link)

Matt Sephton’s Blog, “Get Info”

Us remaining (or even new!) blogs in the distant future year 2022 have to stick together, so I feel it’s important to point you to the blog of Matt Sephton, which is on a variety of tech and tech-adjacent topics, including sometimes games!

The particular item of interest there that I want to point you to today is on the obscure Japanese handheld P/ECE, released in 2001, which is a lot like a foreshadowing of Panic’s quirky elite gamer fixation/lust object, the Playdate. It too was a purposely-monochrome device in an age of color, and it also hosts a range of quirky homebrew games. It even still has a website!

Re:

f special note is that it was a place that notable and prolific small-game homebrew design genius Kenta Cho, a.k.a. ABA (Twitter), released their wondrous work even way back then! And where else can you find a demake of Rez that pits you against a malevolent Microsoft Outlook icon?

Please, check out all of these far-flung and varied links!

Matt Sephton’s blog, Get Info, and its article on P/ECE.

ABAgames’ “Good Old Game Sound Generator”

Kenta Cho is a brilliant game maker, and he’s come up with a couple of generators that can generatively make short stretches of music, suitable for classic-inspired arcade games.

Short VGM Generator is on itch.io, and works by taking a pre-existing piece of music and attempting to make another piece of a similar style.

The Good Old Game Sound Generator is on GitHub, but for playing around you might be more interested in its Demo page. It takes a bit more effort to make something with it, but it’s a much more flexible tool. I must leave you to your own devices to make something of value, or at least of interest, using it.

The process that let him to create these tools is up on a page he made on dev.to. If you’re interested in generative music you should take a look!