Part of Youtube’s doomed-to-fail Playables series, so enjoy this before it gets heartlessly deleted by Google when they decide games on their video platform don’t make sense, isn’t worth it, or whenever Netflix gives up on games and they don’t feel they need to compete on that front anymore.
The game is basically Pac-Man, but with a Championship Edition-like speedup gimmick. As you eat dots, the game slowly increases the simulation rate. it never really gets up to CE’s white-hot speeds, but it does get pretty fast. You get a slight slowdown when you finish a board and lose a life. Since you start with five lives, earn an extra one every 5,000 points, and each of a rack’s three (instead of the arcade’s two) fruit are worth at least 1,000 points, and even more as you advance to later boards, you are unlikely to run out of lives. The game ends after 13 levels, so you have a decent chance of finishing this one!
My best score is right around 150,000 points, but I was only playing casually. See if you can do better!
In case you haven’t heard of it (is that possible?)–you, playing the part of the Prince of all the Cosmos, have a sticky ball, called a katamari, which means “clump,” on a series levels that are laid out as kind of surreal versions of normal Earth environments. Typical places might include a Japanese living room, a modestly-sized town, and a larger city. The idea is to roll the ball so that it comes into contact with various objects. If they’re at most a certain size relative to that of the ball, they stick to it, and in so doing make its aggregate size a little larger. The more things that stick to the ball, the bigger it gets, and so the larger the size of things that will stick. If you reach a certain target size within the time limit you complete the stage. If you fail then the Prince’s father, the King of All Cosmos, expresses his disappointment in you in a ludicrously extreme manner. While not all of the levels are about achieving raw size, the most entertaining ones do, and they’re all about fulfilling certain goals with the katamari. This should give you a sense of how the game plays, if needed:
Since Katamari Damacy, designer Keita Takahashi hasn’t been idle. They also made the downloadable game Noby Noby Boy for PS3, worked on the Flash MMORPG Glitch, and made the weirdly wonderful Wattam. I’ve mentioned previously in these pages that I’m looking forward to his next project, To A T, presuming it survives the travails of publisher Annapurna Interactive.
Back to the Paste Magazine article, it mentions that the game happened due to a fortuitous set of events that involved a bunch of student artists looking for a project, and a number of programmers who worked on it so as not to be seen as idle in a time of layoffs. I personally remember that a substantial part of its legend, perhaps even the tipping point, was due to a particular review on Insert Credit by Tim Rogers. While it’s possible to see his review as a tad self-indulgent, I really don’t have any standing to criticize, seeing as how I created pixel art aliens to be our site’s voice. Hah.
Japanese cover
It did the trick of making people consider the game though, which may have been how this very Japanese game got an English localization, rainbow-and-cow festooned cover intact. I was in college at the time, and for a few months they had PS2s to play in the student union. I found a certain delight in taking in my copy of Katamari Damacy (it had been released in the US by this point) and just playing through Make The Moon. It was the kind of game that would arrest other people in the room and cause them to just watch for a couple of minutes. Another time, I played it on the TV at my cousin’s house when there was a certain teenager, at the age where they sometimes get into a mood to dismiss everything. They scoffed at the game when I put it in; eight minutes later, they were calling out “get the giraffe!”
That Katamari Damacy could happened was a miracle; that it had, and continues to have, this effect on people, seems like magic. It isn’t perfect, because it doesn’t ever make sense to say a created work is “perfect,” there are always tradeoffs, but it is a care where it’s difficult to say it could be improved. Sure, it could be a little easier, but it still never takes more than a few attempts to pass a level. It could be a little harder, but that would make it much less accessible. Suffice to say that it’s at a local maxima of quality, and that can’t be an accident, it’s there because strong effort put it there.
It was inevitable that it would get sequels. Critical consensus is that the best of them was the first one, We Love Katamari, stylized on its logo with a heart in place of Love. It’s the only one with creator Keita Takahashi still at the helm. It’s a little less thematically together than the original; the premise is that the King of All Cosmos from the first game fulfills requests made by fans, much like how the game itself was made due to fan requests. Later sequels were made without Takahashi’s efforts. They feel increasingly fan-servicey, in the sense that they were trying harder and harder to give fans what they wanted, without being sure of what that was.
With each sequel, the luster dulled a bit. There was a furor over the third game in the main series, Beautiful Katamari on Xbox 360, for having paid DLC that was actually just unlock codes for levels that shipped on the disk. There were mobile sequels that were mostly terrible. The last of the series until recently was Katamari Forever, a name that proved inaccurate. More recently, remakes of the first two games have sold fairly well, so maybe it still has a chance to redeem itself with a proper successor.
Anyway, happy 20th birthday to Katamari Damacy. May it spend 25 more years of showing Playstation kids that gaming can be something more than Call of Duty and Fortnite.
I’m not going to say that famously Ms. Pac-Man is a more random game than Pac-Man, because who really knows things like that who isn’t a hardcore gamenerd. But among hardcore game nerds, it’s common knowledge. (If you didn’t know, A. congrats on your coolness, and B. sorry to now destroy your coolness.) Here a video about how randomness works in that game, from Retro Game Mechanics Explained (21 minutes):
Pac-Man is a game that is vulnerable to patterns: if you do exactly the same thing each time on the same level, the same results will occur. There is one pseudo-random element in Pac-Man though: when vulnerable ghosts reach an intersection, the code picks an arbitrary address from a range of memory addresses, then uses that value to pick a direction to decide which route to take. Two implications of this: vulnerable ghosts are most likely to head left at intersections and least likely to go up, and if any byte in that range changes the behavior of the game slightly changes too, even if it’s not an executable byte. Patterns still work in Pac-Man, despite this pseudo-random function, because the seed is reset at the start of every level, so if you do exactly the same thing, vulnerable ghosts will still have the same information fed to their movement routines.
Ms. Pac-Man has other sources of randomness: the ghosts, in Scatter mode, use a different source of pseudo-randomness to decide where to go, one that isn’t so easy to manipulate; and which fruit appears and which of four predefined routes (three for one of the mazes) it’ll take through the board.
Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have its ghosts scatter periodically through the level like they do in Pac-Man. They only scatter at the start of the board. It’s not much randomness, but it’s enough to upset rote pattern creation, since each ghost has the opportunity to make several decisions of which path to take during that period. The way the randomness is handled is interest itself. The ghosts pick one of the corners of the board, much like they would in original Pac-Man, but randomly, when making their choice of target to home in on.
So there! Now you can amaze your friends, if it were 40 years ago and your friends were then able to be impressed by your knowledge of Ms. Pac-Man! You’re retroactively welcome!
I did a search of the blog to make sure I haven’t posted this before. I’m really an obsessive tagger, and it didn’t show up under the tag pacman, so I think it hasn’t been seen here before. Let’s fix that now!
It’s a video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained from six years ago, and it’s 11 1/2 minutes:
Here’s a terse summary of the explanation, that leaves out a lot. Like a lot of 8-bit games (the arcade version uses a Z80 processor), Pac-Man stores the score in one byte, making the maximum it can count to 255. Since it doesn’t use signed arithmetic, it doesn’t use the high bit to signify a minus sign and so flip to negative at 128.
As an optimization, Pac-Man’s code uses the depiction of the maze in the video memory, itself, in the movement of both Pac-Man and the ghosts. If a spot has a maze wall tile, then Pac-Man can’t go there, and the ghosts won’t consider that direction when moving.
At the start of every level, the game performs some setup tasks. It draws the maze anew, including dots, Energizers and walls. One of these tasks is to update the fruit display in the bottom-right corner. It was a common design idiom at some arcade manufacturers, especially at Namco, at the time to depict the level number with icons in some way. Galaga shows rank insignia in the corner; Mappy has small and large balloons and mansions.
Pac-Man’s code shows the bonus fruit for each level, up to seven of them. If you finish more than seven levels, only the most recent seven are shown. If you get far enough eventually this will be just a line of Keys, the final “fruit.”
The code draws them from right to left. There’s three cases (the video goes into much more detail), but generally it starts from the fruit of six minus the current round number, draws it, counts up once and moves left two tiles, draws that one, and so on.
An interesting fact about Pac-Man’s graphics hardware is that the screen doesn’t map as you might expect to the screen! A lot of arcade games have weird screen mappings. Most consumer programmable hardware will map characters horizontally first vertically second, like a typewriter*.
In Pac-Man, the bottom area of the screen comes first in memory, starting at memory location hex $4000 (16384 decimal), and it doesn’t go forward like an English typewriter, but is mapped right to left. The first row of 32 tiles comes at $4000, and the second row is $4020. Then the playfield area is mapped completely differently, in vertical rows going down starting from the top-right of its region, then the next vertical row is the one to the left of that, and so forth to the left edge of the playfield. Then comes the score area at the top of the screen, which are two final rows mapped the same way as the bottom area, right to left.
From the video, this chart shows how Pac-Man’s screen memory is mapped.
When Pac-Man’s score counter overflows, it breaks the check for the limit for only drawing seven fruit, and causes it to draw 256 fruit. This is why the tops of keys are drawn beneath the upper-halves of the fruit at the bottom of the split screen. It also breaks the tile lookup for the fruit.
As it continues writing its missourced fruit tiles in memory, it goes back in memory each time to draw the next fruit, and after the fruit section of the display it keeps going to the left, into the area where Pac-Man’s lives are displayed, then it keeps going and overwrites half of the maze tiles. Then Pac-Man’s lives (and any empty spaces that indicate the lack of lives) are plotted, overwriting fruit after the first ones drawn and obscuring some of the memory corruption.
Since the game’s actors use that data to decide where to move, and where dots and Energizers are placed, it means they can move outside the bounds of the maze, and that there won’t be enough dots for Pac-Man to eat to complete the level. That’s what makes it a kill screen: if Pac-Man loses a life, a few dots will get placed in the maze as the fruit are redrawn, but it’s not enough to bring the dot-eaten count to 244, which triggers the level clear function.
If the fruit-drawing loop didn’t stop at 256 (another artifact of using 8-bit math for the loop), it’d go on to clobber the rest of the maze, the score area at the top of the screen, then color memory (which has already been clobbered by the palette-drawing portion of the loop). Then, going by a memory map of the arcade hardware, it’d hit the game logic RAM storage, which would probably crash the game, triggering the watchdog and resetting the machine.
The visual effect of the split screen is certainly distinctive, enough that since Bandai-Namco has capitalized on its appearance at least once, in the mobile (and Steam and consoles) game Pac-Man 256. I’ve played Pac-Man 256: it’s okay, but, eh. It’s really too F2P unlocky.
* Yes, I just used a typewriter’s operation as a metaphor for something a computer does. It didn’t feel acceptable to use another computer thing as the comparison, since ultimately the reason they do it that way is because typewriters did it that way too. I guess the fact that it’s English reading order would be better to use, but I’m really overthinking it at this point.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s Waluigi, and he’s singing “Rainbow Connection.” You need more? Are you not entertained?
It’s from Matthew Tarando, aka. Bitfinity, the one who made the Brawl in the Family webcomic. It’s not the first of their works to make it to this site, and it probably won’t be the last.
The Muppet-like version of Waluigi is a highlight. He looks like Dr. Don from Point Blank, a.k.a. Gun Bullet! It feels like it’s come full circle, since Point Blank is essentially WarioWare with light guns!
Dr. Dan and Dr. Don, oft-emperiled protagonists of countless rapidly-shifting scenarios.
This one I find rather fascinating. There may be no arcade game ever made as purposely frustrating to play as Namco’s Japanese-only game The Tower of Druaga.
Hero Gilgamesh (often shortened to “Gil”) must pass through 60 maze levels, collecting a key from each then passing through the door to the next, while defeating enemies that get in his way, in order to rescue his love Ki from the villainous Druaga.
BUT almost all the levels have a secret trick to perform. If this trick is accomplished, then a chest will appear that, if collected, will grant Gil a special ability. Some of these abilities are helpful. Some, in fact, are necessary, and if they aren’t collected then on some future level Gil will be unable to advance! The tricks are explained nowhere in the game: it just expects you to know them, if not discovered personally then learned through word of mouth. (This was like a decade before most people had access to the internet.)
What is more, nothing in the game explains what the treasures are or what they do, or what you’ll find on each level if you do know the trick. And a few of the treasures are actually harmful! It means that, to win, you have to rely on a host of hidden information, obtained by both your own observation and from what you’ve heard from others. Which requires a ton of quarters to get, which suited manufacturer Namco just fine. Unfortunately (or, maybe, fortunately?), the game crash prevented Namco from trying its luck with this game in Western territories.
As a result, The Tower of Druaga is a game that’s probably experienced watching someone else play, rather than playing yourself. That’s what this video is, Youtube user sylvie playing through the whole game, not just advancing through, but explaining how it’s done along the way. It’s an hour and three minutes long:
Arcade Galaga has an interesting bug that’s been known of for a long time, that can be taken advantage of to cause the enemies to stop firing. The inner workings of the bug are explained on its page on the website Computer Archeology, but here it is in brief: on the first level, if you leave the bugs at the far left or right sides of the formation alive and wait long enough, 10 to 15 minutes, just surviving their attacks, then eventually the enemies will stop firing all together, and will never fire again for the rest of the game.
Why does this happen? Galaga reserves eight hardware sprites for the shots of the enemy bugs. Galaga’s graphics hardware has no way to disable the displaying of a sprite, so if something isn’t supposed to be visible it’s kept off screen, at horizontal coordinate zero. A shot sprite at that coordinate is never updated, and never moves. This is in addition to the game’s internal records of which shots are in use. When a bug wants to fire a shot, the game looks at which shots are available, and if one isn’t in use, it puts it at the proper place, and sets its velocity (X and Y deltas). From then until it leaves the screen, it’ll be updated every frame. When it is detected as having gone off-screen, it’ll be marked as out of play, and its X coordinate will be set to 0. Shots at X=0 are never updated.
The problem is, it’s possible for bugs to fire shots while they are at X position 0. This happens most commonly when bugs at the far left and right extremes of the board attack. The shot is marked as in-use, but it’ll never be updated, and so it’ll never be cleaned up and set back to be available for firing. When all eight possible shots are in this limbo, the bugs can’t fire any more. The machine resets the shots at the end of a game, so the problem won’t affect subsequent plays.
Ben Golden Diamond performed the trick in a Youtube video, and he manages to get it to happen in around seven minutes. He doesn’t explain the precise criteria for doing the trick, but his description will still work, it just has unnecessary steps. It will work on any level, but it’s easiest to do on the first. In the video, sometimes the bugs fire wraparound shots from off-screen. That’s a good indication that the bugs are sometimes firing from the 0 coordinate.
Keep in mind, performing the trick on purpose will disqualify a score for world records. The scoreboard on a local Galaga machine probably won’t care, though.
PacStrats on Youtube has a video that gives three patterns that will take a casual player all the way to the kill screen at level 256.
I say casual because this doesn’t attempt to produce a “perfect” game, of 3,333,360 points. This is because it doesn’t attempt to eat all four ghosts on every Energizer while that is possible. It actually ignores the ghosts when they’re vulnerable. There are patterns for that on PacStrats too, but you’re not going to be able to do it by memorizing just three patterns. You can really push your personal limits, and that of your free time, trying to get better at video games, and most of us have a point where we have to say that’s enough, and then go and read a book/buy groceries/have sex/something else. The three patterns in the video below are a nice middle ground.
It isn’t easy to devise a Pac-Man patterns, and it’s much harder to come up with a small number of patterns that cover all the levels. Patterns work because the movement of the ghosts is completely deterministic, depending on how Pac-Man moves. If you can move Pac-Man with frame-perfect accuracy, then the ghosts will oblige you by always responding in the same ways. The frame-perfect requirement is eased up a lot by the nature of Pac-Man’s motion. So long as you don’t reverse directions or delay, Pac-Man can only change direction at intersections. So long as you have the joystick, or whatever ludicrous controller setup you’re using, pressed in the direction you want to go next three frames ahead of the turn, your gluttinous circle’s progress will be on track for that pattern.
So, if you try to perform a pattern and it doesn’t work, what went wrong? Most commonly it’s because you hesitated at some point, failing to make a turn at least three frames in advance. Sometimes that’ll be okay, but two of the ghosts, Pink (Speedy/Pinky) and Blue (Bashful/Inky) use the direction that Pac-Man is facing in their AI calculations, and that can change much more rapidly compared to his location in the maze. Even being a single frame off in your timing can produce a situation where Pac-Man will be facing a direction that will cause them to take a different path at a choice. Also, some of the motion of the ghosts is determined by the amount of time that’s elapsed in the current level, and if Pac-Man’s in a subtly wrong position then it can be disastrous later on.
The periods over which the patterns are good are the first four levels (Cherry to second Orange), levels 5 through 20 (first Apple through to 8th Key) and from 21 onward (9th Key to the kill screen). The actions of the ghosts are not the same throughout the run of each pattern. The second pattern, in particular, works over so many levels mostly because its creator, through trial and error, happened upon a pattern that’s good for so much of the game. Because the travels of the ghosts will be different on different levels, it’s important not to get spooked because they are moving differently than they did on previous levels. So long as you move Pac-Man through the patterns assuredly, without delay, and at least three frames in advance, then he’ll clear the boards in succession for as long as you care to keep going, until level 256, where Pac-Man’s All-You-Can-Eat buffet closes its doors.
Unfortunately, PacStrats has made their pattern video non-embedable, so if you want to see these patterns in action you’ll have to click through to the video’s Youtube page.
I already shown it off on Mastodon, but I’m so pleased with getting this bug on video that I’m re-reporting it here! First, though, some background.
Still the definitive resource on the design internals of Pac-Man.
I’ve been looking into the various home computer ports of Pac-Man lately. One of the better ones is the one for Famicom/NES, probably because it was made in-house at Namco, which I presume because while it’s by no means perfect, it has ghost AI that much more closely matches Jamey Pittman’s definitive Pac-Man Dossier than the others. This is a bit more important than the other ports because, due to the relative familiarity (that is to say, inexpensiveness) of NES emulation at this point, Famicom Pac-Man is often put in compilations, especially in dedicated consoles, instead of the arcade game. In point of fact, the Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 that’s available for various consoles uses the Famicom versions of all its games, not the arcade, and Pac-Man is one of the included games. To tell the difference: if the score, fruit tally and lives are to the right of the screen, instead of above and beneath it, and Pac-Man looks a little too big to fit in a maze passage, then what you have is an inferior home conversion.
How is it different? Well:
The sound of Pac-Man eating dots is much worse, for starters, it never fails to bother me.
More substantively, the ghosts have slightly different constants in their chase routines: it’s slightly harder to fake out the Pink ghost (Speedy/Pinky), and the Orange ghost (Pokey/Clyde) gives up the chase a little more reluctantly.
The timing for scatter periods, relative the speeds of the ghosts, is a little off. Scatter periods are usually slightly longer.
The speed of the game as difficulty increases is also a little off. In the arcade, the First Apple board (Level 5) marks a noticable increase in Pac-Man’s speed, but it seems to happen around the Second Orange (Level 4) on Famicom. Yes, that’s how much of arcade Pac-Man and its port that I’ve played-it could be subjective, but maybe it’s not.
The bug that affects Pink’s and Blue’s (Bashful/Inky) AI when Pac-Man’s facing up doesn’t exist here.
When ghosts enter Scatter mode, they don’t reverse direction. This makes the game easier (one less sudden reverse to throw you off) and harder (no obvious indication that the ghosts are scattering, and one less thing to throw them off from immediate pursuit).
As the game advances in difficulty, in the arcade, on the 4th Key board (level 17), the ghosts won’t turn blue and vulnerable when you eat an Energizer, and instead will just reverse direction. And from the 6th Key (level 19) on, the ghosts will never turn blue again! NES Pac-Man instead gives them a very tiny bit of blue time, about a half-second’s worth. It never reaches a state where the ghosts become completely invulnerable.
And at last, the bug which I have confirmed. On the 10th Key board (Level 22), and every level thereafter, the ghosts will start out in an unusually long Scatter period. Their usual habit is to emerge from the box in the center of the screen and move to a corner of the screen, and circle there for a few seconds. Pink goes to the upper-left, Red (Shadow/Blinky) to the upper-right, Orange to the lower-left, and Blue to the lower-right. This period is called a “Scatter Mode” in the Pac-Man Dossier.
In most levels, presuming you don’t lose a life, the ghosts will enter Scatter Mode at exactly set three times: from the start, about 25-or-so seconds in, and about 30 or so seconds after that. These periods are usually five seconds long. There are some minor details I won’t get into-you can read the Dossier for those. These periods are lifesavers for intermediate Pac-Man players playing without patterns, as they are the only really safe ways to access the bottom passages of the board without getting trapped or wasting an Energizer.
Each Scatter Mode is only supposed to last five-to-seven seconds, but on Level 22 and after, all of the Scatter Modes last around 20 seconds. Here is the bug in action, demonstrated in Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1:
Why would this board be different from the others? In the arcade, the 9th Key (Level 21) is the maximum difficulty the game reaches. Any pattern that works on the 9th Key level will work for the rest of the game, all the way up to the kill screen on Level 256. It seems that, on the Famicom/NES version, after that level the game may not have data for the level to follow? But I haven’t looked at its code to know for sure. Maybe I should make that a future project.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Shiftylook was a great site with comics and animation based on Namco characters, with official permission. It’s been gone for several years now, but it was nice while we had it.
Some of its cartoons have managed to survive, transferred to other sites, and the entire run of their Mappy cartoon, 13 episodes at nearly two hours in total, is on Youtube, uploaded by Nicky. We’re highly cognizant here of the demands of maintaining a daily blog, and I probably should be spreading these out one a week, but eh, I’m sure we won’t run out of material any time soon…. Of everything Shiftylook put out, Mappy has an unusually high number of people fondly remembering it. I haven’t seen much of it, so there’s always a chance there’s something unfortunate in there. If there is, I’m sorry, but I doubt it could be that bad.
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
It’s one of those games that was made to fulfill the promise of a pun in the title, but turns out to be fairly interesting in its own right.
That’s not to say it’s perfect. Randomness plays way too much of a role in your success, although that could also be said of No Man’s Sky, honestly.
Pac-Man is stranded on a maze-like planet. The maze wraps around vertically and horizontally, but there are no helpful tunnels here to slow down the ghost pursuit, for the screen is always centered on Paccy. There is an escape rocket in the monster house, and the way inside opens up when you’ve eaten a sufficient number of dots. I wouldn’t bug out immediately though; as you eat dots, and also ghosts made vulnerable by the consumption of randomly-placed Energizers, you fill up a fuel meter in the upper-right corner of the screen. You want it to be as full as possible, especially in this first maze, where the game is still fairly easy.
For you see, when you enter the rocket, you blast off into a 2D universe of other planets, and you need fuel to travel between them. (A bit of advice: the rocket’s thrust is always to the right! Press up-arrow to go forward, and up and down to steer.) Use the map in the lower-right to pick the next planet to crash onto, and explore a new maze. You don’t want to run out of fuel! Although you have a total of four Pac-Lives, if you run out of fuel in space, you lose regardless!
You’ll soon find that most planets are much larger than your starting world, and the game sends in a number of ghosts proportionate to its size! You could end up fleeing from nearly two-dozen ghosts! Fortunately, there are new colors of ghosts in the mix, and none of them are as avid a pursuer as the classic hues, although their meanderings will often block escape routes.
Your goal is to collect Cherries, which are sporadically scattered throughout the planets. You want to eat at least 10, then launch with a full fuel tank, and then press the Space Bar to warp out of the universe, and the game.
As I mentioned up top, randomness plays a huge role in your success. Cherries are placed completely randomly: you might find Cherries in the starting maze, you might find a planet with four Cherries on it and all you have to do is find them, but many planets will be Cherry-less. The best strategy is to scout each planet you visit for Cherries as quickly as possible, snarf up the ones you find while refilling your fuel tank with dots, then quickly evacuate and move on to the next planet.
Some tips:
If you return to a planet you’ve already been on, it’ll be in the state that you left it! This usually makes it harder to refill your tank since there’s fewer dots, so get what you can and launch again.
To help you avoid revisiting planets, I suggest targeting particular planet colors first.
Energizers are placed randomly, and like Cherries, some planets don’t have any.
Ghost vulnerability times are roughly on a par with those of the first maze of the original game, but with so much more terrain to travel through it’s usually highly difficult to make a clean sweep of all the ghosts, even if there’s only the normal four.
The class ghosts have largely the same personalities as in the arcade games: Red chases you directly, Pink looks in the direction you’re facing and tries to get in front of you, Blue seeks to be on the other side of you from one of the Red ghosts, and Orange sometimes loses interest in attacking you when you get close.
The new colors have ghosts that try to lurk behind you, ghosts that try to travel in straight lines regardless of what else is happening, ghosts that just bumble around, and even ghosts that just try to get away from everyone else, Pac or ghost.
Like arcade Pac-Man, the ghosts periodically enter “Scatter Mode,” and give up the chase for a few precious seconds. Unlike the arcade game, the ghosts don’t reverse direction when either entering or leaving Scatter Mode. Your only clue to the behavior change is them turning away, or turning back towards you. That makes them a little less predictable.
Beware! Once in a while you’ll find a ghost that, instead of the usual blue eyes, has an Among Us visor. These ghosts will be one of the other colors, and the same personality as that color, but when you eat an Energizer, not only do they not become vulnerable, they also speed up greatly! If it’s one of the more vicious colors (Red or Pink), this makes eating an Energizer extremely dangerous!
Ghosts become dangerous again the moment they reform from their eyes in the home. If you’re venturing in to get to the rocket, and a pair of eyes rushes in behind you, you can easily lose a Pac without having much control over it. This happened to me several times, it’s worth being wary of.
If you want to play in the universe of this victorious game, you can enter this seed at the title screen. It had one planet with four Cherries!
