hepcat

Rant incoming about the Arcade 1up Pac-man XL. I wanted to play this machine before buying it. It finally showed up on display at my local Costco and hoo-boy am I glad I held off. My test was with original Pac-man. I scored about 90K and made it to the 2nd galaxian before quitting. I used regular mode, NOT the fast version. Let me start with the good stuff, because this machine does have some things going for it. 1. The screen is pretty good. Going from 17 to 19 inches makes a big difference. I don’t know the dimensions of the original arcade screen, but it seemed comparable. 2. The joystick was actually a bit better than I expected. I prefer a joystick with a shorter throw, but it was decent. I’m not sure if it’s a 4 way or 8 way, but other than the lag (which I’ll get to), Pac-man went where I wanted him to go. I was able to use my patterns without getting thrown off on levels 5-9. 3. Sound. Good. It sounded like Pac-man with no crackling or studdering. Also, the volume was only 1/3 of max and I could still hear it fine in the middle of a crowded store. 4. Emulation. Good. Except for what I mention below, it was the real Pac-man as far as I can tell. Now for the bad. Shorter list, but both of these are deal breakers. 1. Lag. The lag was just awful. I’m guessing it was about a quarter of a second. This is not the kind of thing normies are likely to notice, but if you’re trying to play Pac-man at an intermediate level or higher, it makes the game almost unplayable. I probably only got as far as I did because I was using patterns and inputting directions well in advance. But if you blow a pattern on a key board, the input lag present here will make it much, much harder to survive. I have heard that when emulation is involved, some lag is inevitable. I don’t have the technical knowledge to confirm or refute that claim. However, over the past 25 years I have played Mame Pac-man on dozens of computers with all kinds of screens, using keyboards and multiple different joysticks. In all that time I have never encountered lag anywhere near as bad as what I experienced tonight on this machine. 2. Performance. Astonishingly bad for what is supposed to be the best machine Arcade 1up has yet produced. Pac-man and the ghosts studder and skip as they move as if the game is constantly dropping frames. I have a Miyoo Mini (purchased for $60) that plays arcade games from well into the 90’s perfectly. Does Arcade 1up seriously expect us to believe that in 2023 they can’t put a computer in their machines capable of running Pac-man smoothly? Other stuff, specifically build quality. The machine rocked back and forth at the base and shook during what I would consider normal play. However, the machine was sitting on an uneven pallet in a store and it may have been hastily put together by employees who obviously weren’t prepping it for use in their own homes. I spoke to a guy who was also checking the machine out who told me he has carefully assembled multiple Arcade 1up machines and they didn’t shake like this one did. This is a rant, however I’m still trying to be fair here and I don’t want to blame Arcade 1up for build issues that probably aren’t their fault. Overall, this is a machine I might be willing to pay $200 for. I’ll give it a 4 out of 10 instead of 3 since they FINALLY added dip switches. Sorry I can’t be as forgiving as some of the people in this thread, not when Arcade 1up is asking $600 for this machine.

Thanks. It's expensive and I'm still debating, but having dip switches is a big plus.

I'm sorry if I missed an answer to this, but does any one have this specific Arcade1up Pac-man machine and, if so, can you tell me if it has dip switches for the games? https://www.costco.com/arcade1up-pac-man-xl-arcade-machine-14-games-in-1.product.4000194397.html Many of Q&A questions and answers under the listing for this unit on Arcade 1up's website seem to refer to different models.

Great project! Not exactly sure where I'd be in line, but I'm definitely interested in getting one.

I got it for Switch and overall, it is a good title for the price. The lack of dip switches however is inexcusable. Dip switches have been available in free emulators for over 20 years; there is absolutely no reason beyond laziness that they're not included here. The Steam version of Pac-man excludes you from online ranking if you change the settings from the default. Namco could have done the same thing in this title if they were worried about the leaderboards.

Thanks for your post Atariboy; I did not know that Midway had gone bankrupt. I did some searching after reading your post and found this article which makes AtGames sound like a pretty sleazy operation. It's much clearer to me now why Ms. Pac-man isn't going to be in this collection. Sad but understandable. https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/25/20884111/bandai-namco-atgames-lawsuit-ms-pac-man-pac-man-flashback-blast-copyright-infringement

On the fence about Pac-man Museum+ with the $29.99 asking price (it's out May 27). I understand Pac-man Plus not being in there, that's pretty obscure, but why can't Namco and Midway agree to put Ms. Pac-man and Jr. Pac in a collection like this? Do they really hate money that much?

Update: I tried it with a Hori Fighting Commander gamepad and a small joystick I had custom made a few years ago. Both worked immediately, but control was more smooth with the joystick. Also, the second of the three games was Dig Dug and its leader board was much more interesting. There were a couple of BS scores up there, but the other scores seemed reasonable given that you only get 5 lives (3 to start and bonus men at 20k and 60k. If you change the settings to give you more, you're excluded from the leader board. Props to whoever got the hi-score of 1.1 million under those restrictions.

There's a three-pack of arcade classics including Pac-man on sale for 75% off on Steam. $2.14 total. Out of curiosity, I bought it, mostly for the high score tracker. A couple questions if anyone else has this game. First, is there any way to control it other than the keyboard? Only thing I saw on this issue was a comment from 2017 saying someone was using a Sega Saturn controller of all things, which I don't have. Second, why is the high score on the leader board 1,874,919,423? Even with Level 256 bug turned off (there appears to be an option for this) someone would have to clear over 148,000 boards to achieve that score. Even if that were possible (lol, it isn't) scoring in Pac-man goes by 10s so a score ending in 423 isn't possible. Can Steam high score tracking be hacked? I know none of this matters since I can always go back to playing one of the dozens of Pac-man games on Mame. Just curious!

I got a letter from Paypal today saying a credit was put on my account for the amount I paid. The scammers have the next two billing cycles to provide proof that I actually owe them but there's no way that's happening so it looks like I'm good.

Yep, I'm screwed. Checked history and the site I ordered from was www.arcade1up.vip Maybe it's not to late to get a refund from Paypal.

I kept seeing Arcade1up ads offering crazy discounts last month and finally bit. I ordered the Pac-man cocktail machine linked below on January 15, 2022 and have heard nothing since then. I know shipping is slow atm but I think I should have received some kind of shipping estimate by this time. Did anyone else order one of the older cabinets last month during the sale and if so, have you received your game? https://arcade1up.com/collections/available-direct-from-arcade1up/products/blackseries-pacman

I just got a Nintendo Switch and signed up for 3 months of the NS Online Service. Sorry if I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t find a straight answer to the following scenario after DuckDuckGo-ing and searching this forum. If I buy River City Ransom today, will I still be able to play it when my 3 month subscription runs out? https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/river-city-ransom-switch/ Nintendo’s FAQ says the following: https://www.nintendo.com/switch/online-service/faq/ That sounds at the very least like I’ll lose access to my RCR save data once my subscription runs out, and possibly that I won’t be able to play the game at all unless I resubscribe. How does this work for more recent games like a digital purchase of Mortal Kombat 11 for Switch? Is that data saved in the cloud with an option to save it locally as well? Sorry again if these are noob questions, but I still buy physical games almost exclusively and I don't know how this stuff works on modern consoles.

Perhaps I’m thinking of another 2600 game, but this article contradicts some of the things I thought I knew about 2600 Pac-man. It states that Frye spent 80 hour weeks for 6 months creating the game, but I’d heard that he was given only 6-8 weeks and was stuck with 4K to work with even though 8K carts had recently become available. (Maybe I’m thinking of E.T. re: the time limit?) Anyway, after 2600 Donkey Kong Jr., Pac-man is the game from my childhood I’m most bitter about. I played it, as it was one of only a few carts I owned, but it was such a huge disappointment.

5200 Pac-man patterns are probably possible, but I don’t see the point. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by being able to play the arcade version of Pac-man at home for 15+ years via Mame, but 5200 Pac-man just isn’t that good a game. It looks fine for the time, and it is certainly better than the original 2600 version, but it still has serious problems. It is extremely difficult to control with the 5200's controllers, which will make any pattern you come up with very difficult to pull off consistently. Also, the game’s squashed screen makes everything move twice as fast horizontally as it does vertically. Because of this, turning quickly actually makes the monsters more likely to catch you even if you’re using a controller that responds accurately. There’s also the infinite blue monster bug. The levels that are supposed to have no blue time (17 and 19+) instead feature energizers that last forever. Thus, even if you don’t agree with me on the quality of the game, why bother with patterns when you’ve got infinite energizers available for most boards?

Level 7 is not that bad, I may have been able to clear it occasionally without losing a life or using pepper. 14 and 21 were much harder; I had to sacrifice many lives to clear them because I was so strict about saving pepper. About that bug, it was really strange and it only happened once. The chef would stand still, but an invisible version of you could still move and drop burger parts. The baddies couldn't get you unless you failed to move at the start of the board.

I used to love Burgertime, especially the Intellivision version. I probably logged more Intellivision hours on this game than all others combined. I got pretty good at it and scored over 1,000,000 several times. As I recall, the game had 7 levels. If you cleared level 7, level 8 was the 1st level again with slightly faster monsters. Level 8 was also the first level in which the baddies would become faster than you if you took too long to clear a level. Those first 14 levels are where you needed to collect the majority of your points as the baddies' movements were extremely predictable and could easily be manipulated. For example, if you are standing to the right of an up/down ladder with baddies approaching from the left, hotdogs will always go down, while eggs and pickles will always go up. If there is only an up ladder, hotdogs will continue to go straight and if there is only a down ladder, eggs and pickles will go straight. It takes practice, but keeping these rules in mind will help you group and drop the baddies over and over again. The difficulty increases dramatically on Level 15. The baddies starting speed increases further and they will become faster than you much earlier than before. More importantly, the rules I described above break down and the baddies' movements become far less predictable. You can still get lucky and drop all five of them, but drops of two or three are far more common. On levels 22 and higher, you're just trying to survive as the baddies start out each level faster than you and their behavior remains erratic. You had to save ALL your peppers for these levels. I used to have memorized where the pepper would appear on each of the 7 levels and how many burger parts I had to drop to make each pepper appear. Also, since the game gives a free life every 10K, I would almost always sacrifice a life rather than waste a pepper to escape trouble on levels 1-21. I made it to level 43+ a few times; at that point it's pretty impossible since the baddies start out almost twice as you and the peppers immobilize them for a very short amount of time. Dropping and squashing them is your only hope; if you get caught with two or three parts remaining on the opposite side of the screen, it's over no matter how many lives/peppers you have left. I once found a bug/cheat that let me get much further. It's hard to describe, but I was able to pass through the baddies harmlessly and clear well over 100 levels. The baddies keep getting faster for a while but around level 100, they slow to a crawl kind of like the Dig Dug monsters do when you hit level 130 or so. Are cheats like unlimited lives/peppers possible with an Intellivision emulator? It has been so long since I played that I doubt I could reach level 20 without help. Good times though!

If I remember correctly, on the 2600 version you get a one second blue time on every board 8 and higher. It never drops to zero. Also, the 2600 Ms. Pac seems less stingy with bananas on the random fruit levels.

Kind of cool, I guess, but I doubt the all time human high score on 4 ghost 2600 Ms. Pac-man is a mere 266K. The game is not that hard; I'm pretty sure I broke 300K on it back in high school. Rolling it would be tough with only 4 lives, but I bet someone has done it before Microsoft's AI. Edit: Yup, I just checked the 2600 high score club results and the high score on Ms. Pac-man is a million...

But can you set up two accounts and simply log out of one if you want to play a game on the other? I'm not asking if you can use DLC from another region on a US game, no one expects that.

I'm very glad to hear the Switch will be region free, but I'm still looking for some specifics that I haven't been able to find. Is it region free like PS Vita, i.e., the carts are region free but you can't have DLC from two regions on the same device without jumping through ridiculous hoops, or will DLC be region free as well?

I'm still waiting for official confirmation on whether or not this thing is region free. I did notice that Konami is listed as a 3rd party producer; a look at Wii and Wii U releases reveals almost nothing from Konami since 2010, but there's huge potential there. I'm cautiously optimistic atm.

I have just two questions about the NX: 1. Is it region-free? 2. Will an Ouendan/EBA sequel be released for it? If the answers to both the above questions are yes, it's day one purchase. If no, it's an "eh, maybe someday" purchase.

Ms. Pac-man. I might reconsider if there were a hack that puts Ms. Pac-man's monster AI into the the original Pac-man. All Ms. Pac-man did to eliminate patterns was cause the red and pink monster to move randomly for the first five or so seconds of each level (until the first reversal). After that, I'm pretty sure the AI is the same, right down to the bugs from the original that make Inky and Pinky's behavior seem strange in certain situations. (See Pac-man Dossier for details. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossier.php?print=1) This would effectively make patterns in Pac-man impossible since you'd have to have a pattern that accounts for every possible combination of Blinky and Pinky's initial movements. Even if you could make up all those patterns, on every level you'd have to recognize which pattern you need on the fly. Maybe a computer could do it, but I doubt a human could consistently. Who am I kidding though, even with this change someone would have achieved a perfect Pac-man score by this time.

Hmmm...I was afraid of this. Looks like I'll have to buy used and hope I get something that's in good condition. Thanks for the answers everyone!