Pixellated Ghost

There is no data inransfer into #4, but then again, it would be difficult to figure out a convincing reason to have it, as there's little relation to the previous stories and few returning characters. Anyway, I'm about 15 hours in and from what I believe, about 2/3 of the way through. The encounter rate is a little high, but not consistently so. The quickness of the battle system helps in this department though. The character voices are mostly good, though a few are rather irritating. You can turn down the voice volume separately though if you don't want to hear them. My only real complaints are the huge swaths of ocean you have to sail (slowly) across to go between the islands, docking at a port is an unforgivingly precise task, and the cutscenes are interrupted at times, but otherwise, I'm enjoying it.

Oddly erough, I liked #3. I imported the Limited edition of #4 and played through a couple of times. Can't read the story but was able to get though it without too much trouble. To me, it seems like getting the 108 stars in this one is harder than progressing the story. The naval battles are fun as are the mini games. Controlling the ship is rather awkward at first, but you do get used to it. I'll find out Tuesday when I get #4 how well the story survived translation.

I have the US HDloader and the Japanese HDAdvance. Either will read/write to a hard drive formatted with the other.

Interesting to know. I guess the trick would be to make sure they only go in there if they're following you in or you're in it and they pass by.

Can the MS Pac Man engine handle dead ends in the maze? I thought it'd be interesting to have a maze with a couple of "tunnels of death."

#2 fixes the stuck bat and has some screen obstacle changes. The behavior of the dragons is different as well, and if I remember right, the object placement is a bit different as well. #3 is more heavily changed from the others. I find this one to be the most difficult of the three. This one has the entire kingdom on all 3 levels, more extensive areas of catacombs, new shortcuts of which some are one way dead ends, a flashing maze, flashing dragons, and invisible keys in b/w mode.

That's what I was referring to as the "generic" label.

The two I have are set up on a 1950 Motorola TV/Radio/Phono cabinet, and are at the perfect height for standing to play. I'd put them lower but every other possible spot for them is taken by something else.

Nope, no custom labels were ever made. I have #1 and #2 on cartridge currently with generic Hozer Video labels.

Astro Invaders. Many years ago I got really frustrated playing this one, and kicked its coin door, hard. The screen went black. No one saw me do this, and needless to say I high tailed it out of there.

Jitter free, just those phantom dots in places at times. I made it to the first galaxian level. What happened to the intermission music? Sounds way different now.

Wow, I died in a cheap way... was playing hackem 2 and followed a ghost rather closely when I went to get the orange. Ate it, that ghost was the only one that didn't turn blue. It reversed direction and nailed me. Haven't seen anything screwy aside from some really minor graphic glitches. So far the apple level is the best I can do. I'll probably get better at it once I can play it on full hardware.

I actually managed to pass through a ghost! I can live with the maze the way it is, especially given the much more forgiving collision detection. Really just needs a better sound for the dot eating. There's an older pac man hack I did on this forum ages ago where I changed it. Unfortunately, I don't know what byte I changed, as I was just playing with the code in Hack O Matic.

I don't necessarily collect arcade games, but I've managed to build up a rather interesting "game room." I have a bar-top Arkanoid, two pachislots, and three pachinkos.

Power up the PS2 without a disc and go to the browser. Look on the memory card and see if it uses 4 individual save files. If it does, delete the 3 you don't want.