Mr. Brow

Finally got around to writing up a full review of the game, which you can read here. Also, I can't stop staring at this polar projection of one of my playthroughs. It connects the ends of the wrap-around tunnel at the bottom of the image (you can see Pac and the ghosts disappear briefly when they go through it). It looks like the game is on the inside surface of a tube.

The sources I have read say that the movements of the ghosts in frightened mode (at intersections, anyway) is determined by a random number generator, and that seems consistent with my experience. Or are you just saying that their post-pellet movements are predictable until they hit the first intersection?

I wondered the same thing when I started playing these games. I found that the mid-range scores in the MAME high score club (a subforum of this one) usually made for a reasonable challenge without requiring a ridiculous time commitment. It’s very much dependent on the player though. Once you start playing, you’ll probably get a better feel for what would be a good personal target.

In the last few weeks, I've been working on sprite extraction and insertion scripts for use in animations. As a test case, I made a mosaic of Space Invaders aliens: The animations were compiled from the arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, MSX, NES, and ZX Spectrum versions. How many of these have you played and which is your favorite?

Here are my scores, with more details on my progress in a new blog entry. Pretty slow improvement, even for an arcade game, but it never seemed to get stale.

Right? I don’t get how that would be fun. It’s like playing an adventure game with a walkthrough.

Yeah, me too, I didn’t play it much as a kid. I often wondered how the best players could afford to get so good at these games.

It’s true that the initial pattern in a given level is repeatable, but as soon as you eat a power pellet the ghost motions gain a random component.

So my latest game obsession is Pac-Man. The mechanics and AI have been analyzed to death all over the internet, but I wanted to dive in and see what it was like to play it... like, a lot. I detailed some of my adventures with the game in my latest blog entry, with another one forthcoming. I intentionally chose not to consult any strategy guides before playing so that I would have the opportunity to organically develop my own strategies. Where does this game stand for you among the golden age arcade greats? Are there any masters here?

I've been doing a lot of playing around with the MAME joystick configuration, in particular the joystick_map parameter. I didn't realize before this how much freedom you had to configure the way the joystick is interpreted in-game. I did a write-up demonstrating how it works in my blog. Does anyone else play around with this setting or have any custom maps that they like to use?

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I hadn’t seen that site before, thanks for pointing it out. It has a big database, which is nice, but damn that interface is awful.

You really only need a rough idea of how many games you’ve played. The difference between the number of predicted high scores for 100 games is only one more than for 50. In my Asteroids example, I only played about 100 games, but would have been beating the random case for even 1000 games. Admittedly, even keeping a rough track can be tough if you’re spreading plays out over a long time, but if your plays are too spread out then it will be hard to maintain improvement anyway.

Sorry, I think my question is a little too ambiguous. I’m referring specifically to the high score table in the animation in my first post. The animation is actually a composite of three pieces: a moving pacman/ghost image, an incrementing score (the white numbers), and a high score table that I took from a particular arcade game. The question is whether you can figure out which game I took the table from. Hint: the incrementing numbers were taken from a sped-up playthrough of the same game.

Also, a virtual cookie for whoever can figure out where that high score table originally came from (it’s not Pac-Man).

One of the things I find frustrating about high scores is trying to figure out what a reasonable target is. The Twin Galaxies records are never going to be within reach of my time budget, and it's not always clear what to make of the scores I see in other people's tables. How much did they play? How were they playing? Lately I've been leaning towards setting rate-of-improvement targets, but to do it really well I need to keep track of all of my scores, and that can be tedious. Recently, I stumbled across a paper online where they showed the likelihood of achieving high scores when the outcome is just random and there's no player learning. I spun that into a way of testing my progress on a game using only my high scores, which I explain in detail my latest blog entry. Do you ever keep notes on your progress on a game, whether by high scores, all scores, or other measures? For example, I seem to remember Galaga reporting a hit rate.

Good point. I neglected to mention it in either of the blog entries, but that is one respect in which it's more forgiving than many other arcade classics.

Oh yeah, I remember that. Those things could hurt!

It does seem like a game that depends a lot on the interface for its appeal. Even the basic concept of commanding missiles seems tailored to an arcade cabinet. A handheld game controller hardly feels like a military control panel.

I just posted a review of the original arcade game. Thanks for everyone's comments so far. Concerning my own history with the game, count me as another one that grew up with the Atari 2600 version. I wouldn't say it was a favorite, but I did enjoy it -- the concept was especially memorable. Now that I've spent a lot of time with the arcade version, I do think it's considerably better, but still leaves me wanting a bit. I'm thinking I might try Super Missile Attack, anyone played much of that version?

Thanks for pointing that out, should be fixed now.

Yeah, it looks like the controls are crucial here. I started playing with a joystick and that did not go well. I eventually moved onto mouse controls, but it's just a touchpad and I suspect I would do much better with a trackball or standalone mouse. I bet we have one in storage somewhere, I'll have to do some digging...

I just did another measurement and I think you're right, that's a mistake. I'll amend the article. Thanks!

After picking apart Asteroids, I thought it would be fun to move on to another arcade classic, Missile Command. This game always struck me as brutally difficult, so I was curious to study its mechanics in detail to see exactly what made it so. My detailed breakdown is here: Missile Command Deep Dive Are there any masters of the game here? What the furthest you've been able to get?

I'm not very enthusiastic for sports games either, they have a tendency to feel mechanical and unimaginative. There are plenty I have played and enjoyed over the years, but few that have left much of a lasting impression. Real sports, however, are a remarkable thing. Aside from stretching the human machine to its limits, the games themselves are ripe for detailed analysis, not to mention emergent to the extreme.