Two-Player Pac-Man

[Hornpipe2]

Wasnt that Gamecube Pacman 2 player as well? Or was that only with one player controlling the ghosts and the other, Pacman.

Pac-Man Vs. for Nintendo Gamecube. One player plays as Pac-man on a connected Gameboy Advance, while the other three use controllers and play as the ghosts (who get a limited view of the playfield around them). If Pac-man eats the fruit he gets to move much faster. Whichever ghost gets Pac-man swaps the GBA with him and tries to complete the round. Whoever gets the most points wins.

 

It's fun for a while, but the ghosts are at a huge disadvantage since Pac-man can see the whole level and the ghosts just wander around aimlessly hoping they can find him.

 

This game came out as a free promo along with Pac-man World 2 (I think). I imagine most people probably had more fun with this tie-in than with the regular game!

[Video]

Which player would the AI for the ghosts key in on?

 

I suppose you'd have one human player one, and one human plwyer 0. And you'd have to have 2 ghosts on player one and two on player 2.

 

But when I said, it wouldn't flicker any worse than Pac-man already does, what I was thinking, was actually useing Ms Pac-man as a starting point.

 

Of course, if you used Pac-man, all the ghosts are player zero, aren't they? So you could have both players as player one and only affect pac-mans flicker.

 

It's a bit more involved than that, because Pacman also uses the native collision registers. This works fine for the original game, since 1 sprite is always devoted to displaying the player sprite. In a 2-player game, it would cause the problem where each player was immune to 2 of the ghosts...they wouldn't be displayed on the same frame - so the collision would never happen. I split the player's sprite when making the 8k version (to display fruit objects), and used a routine to deal with collisions...but this was still set to deal with 1 player only. Not sure how much worse collision checks would get, unless the routines were altered to check all 8 on a frame. You'd save ram in that version, because the game wouldn't need to store a seperate dot pattern for the other player. So some of that ram could be used to hold sprite variables for the other player (then just swap them back/forth @ 30hz along with the display).

 

The AI would still be a problem, tho...because outwitting only 2 ghosts would be kinda easy Perhaps have all of them gang up on a player when the opponent hits an energizer (instead of giving bluetime)?

 

Hmm....I was under the impression you could set the collision routine to react when your player came in contact with a certain color. That's how I did it on the C64, but my understanding of how the Atari works is limited at best.

 

Seems like You could use this method, as long as the system can handle it, and as long as none of the ghosts were the colors of either human player characture.

 

As for the chase routine, the first part could react like the arcade where they go to their respective cornors. As for the second part, when they chase, you could have them check distance and chase the player that is closest. AS you run around the screen, they should seemingly randomely switch who they chase due to becoming closer to the other player. [edit] That could actually give you a fun variant of the game, where instead of staying alive, or eating the most dots, the object is to have the most ghosts chase you for the longest time[/]

 

Or, how about allowing a playor to pick one of the ghosts and try to kick Pac-mans arse? That would be cool.....maybe....

Edited February 16, 2007 by Video