PACMUNCH JR - new game (WIP)

Baby Blue Azure · December 10, 2018

Hey Fans! Happy Monday to you!

Late in the eleventh hour, reached into the vault and found yet another one by Michael Ferrell. This pre-empted the impending release of the top secret *******MAN, however, that’s coming shortly. Ferrell hasn’t complained yet, so here we go again. PAC MUNCH JR is a derivative of JR PAC2, whatever that is. It has different mazes than Bob's original JR PAC, and the code is massively re-organized. So translating what I have in Bob’s original JR PAC to port into JR PAC2 style games is a lot of work. But one by one, all my features ported successfully.

The game starts off with a RED Pac-man, which I hope PACMAN RED approves. And the rest, I’ve changed most everything to get into the holiday spirit. With the Pac-man red we’re missing the green so at BLUE time it’s GREEN time so the ghosts all turn green. The snow flakes have been imported as the new dots, and the dots that were red are now white. The fruit stamps are at identical locations in both JR PAC and JR PAC2 but I didn’t do anything with that, except cleaned up the skateboard a bit. We already have a Christmas Pac-man for 2018 so that should suffice. PACMUNCH could be an all-winter game.

Press start and you’re greeted with a welcome intermission, the only one in the game. By popular demand (one person), the intermission is activated in the both the normal and invincible games. As the game starts, it’s MUNCH time, not lunch time. The ‘ready!’ has been replaced by ‘Munch!’. In Germany, this should be replaced with ‘Munchen!’.

Now, for new features. Instead of watching 3 or 4 or 5 Pac-man indicators at the bottom of the screen munching all the time, I reduced that to one (and when you’re out of spare lives the single stamp disappears). At the top of the screen, in the scoreboard I added a mini Pac-man icon and a single digit number that tells you how many spare Pac-mans you have. Like a cat, the maximum is 9 lives. In the normal (non-invincible) game you start with 4 spare lives and the invincible game you start with 1 spare life. The game still awards you a bonus life at 10,000 points. But now I have a new feature that adds a subsequent bonus every 10,000 points for the normal game and every 50,000 points for the invincible game. So at 360,000 points on the invincible game you will finally achieve the maximum of 9 lives. After that, there will be no more lives granted. In the normal game, if you achieve 9 lives and then lose one, you will gain one at the next 10,000 point marker. This can be adjusted down to 10 point increments, so if people want more (or less) bonus lives it can be easily changed. The DOT remaining counter has been added, but the word ‘DOT’ has been removed and replaced with a dot stamp to allow room for the spare player count.

The only gripe I have with this game is the ‘fruit’ vertical offset can be as much as 6 lines off (estimated). Generally the ‘fruit’ is so high a Munch-man running through the ‘fruit’ horizontally won’t be detected. I’m looking for the table but can’t find it. Maybe someone can help me on that.

ENJOY the game!

/BBA

PHOTOS:

PACMUNCH JR TITLESCREEN:

PACMUNCHJR STRATUP:

PACMUNCH JR RACK 07:

PACMUNCH JR RACK14:

NORMAL NON-INVINCIBLE VERSION

PACMUNCH JR NTSC BIN (TESTED GOOD ON HARDWARE):
PACMUNCH_JR_6D48.bin

PACMUNCH JR NTSC A78:

PacMunch_JR_32K.a78

INVINCIBLE VERSION

PACMUNCH JR NTSC INV BIN (TESTED GOOD ON HARDWARE):