PixlBit

Yeah, playing so many fighting games with controllers makes me realize why pro gamers use those big gaming pads. The input feels different on a controller joystick than an arcade machine.

I'm noticing it a lot lately in all sorts of games. You have to make such tiny movments on such a tiny stick with probably the clumbsiet digit, your thumb. It infuriates me in certain games where every slight move of my thumb messes up what I'm doing. Also, in this Pac-Man case, chosing a discrete direction. It's almost impossible on a multidirectional stick that's barely an inch long and controlled by your thumb.

Pac-Man is my all time favorite video game and the first video game I ever played.

That second statement isn't ENTIRELY true, as the first game I ever played was a Pong clone on a TV my dad built.  But I didn't realize that was a video game.  I thought it was something you could do on the TV when there wasn't anything interesting on.  So Pac-Man was the first time I REALIZED I was playing a video game.

When I was very little, I was watching the news with my dad and they showed people building these big yellow machines.  I didn't know what they were, but they had a lighted marquee and a coin slot, so I thought it was a soda machine.  A few months later, I was with my mom at the Kroger grocery store and saw that same machine that was on TV.  I asked my mom if I could go look at it while she was in the checkout lane, and she said yes.  When she was finished buying groceries, she came over and gave me a quarter to try it.  Turns out that big yellow machine was a Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and if my mom only knew what she started by giving me that quarter!  All the way home I was talking non stop about that Pac-Man game (keep in mind I was like, 5).  

Ever since then I was hooked.  As a kid I watched the Pac-Man cartoon, slept on Pac-Man bedsheets, and carried a Pac-Man lunchbox to school. And as an adult, I still have a full size Pac-Man arcade machine in my garage.  So yeah, that game is kind of a big deal to me.

I think my first arcade game was Gran Trak 10 but the memory is kind of vague. I don't even remember exactly when I started going to arcades on my own but it was probably '79 or '80. All the classics were there especially those from '80: Pac-Man, Defender, Tempest, Centipede, Missile Command, etc. . . I remember a particular arcade I went to and it had all of those.

I'd love to have an arcade cabinet. It would probably be Xevious or 1943: Battle of Midway. Maybe Lunar Rescue, since I'm kind of obsessed with that game right now.

You got Pac-Man fever for sure. Not a bad thing either.

Since I first played Pac-Man in a Kroger grocery store, I didn't realize there was such a thing as an arcade until a little later.  A few months after I first played Pac-Man, we were visiting relatives in Alabama.  My aunt said she was going to take me to a place called an 'arcade.'  When I got there I was in shock.  All these video games in one place?  Wow!  I still remember the name of that arcade, too.  "Electric Castle."

The US Xevious arcade cabinet is really cool, art-wise.  Xevious actually has a huge lore that's larger than the game itself.  Look it up sometime.  It has a huge backstory and is probably the first game to use pre-redenered graphics on the sprites.

Speaking of Pac-Man Fever, I sitll have the record album of it that I got as a kid.  There was a restaurant called Larry's that we would  go to sometimes and they had a jukebox that had Pac-Man Fever on it.  I would always ask for a quarter for the jukebox.  After a while, though, my mom wouldn't give me any more quarters for it.  Wonder why?  :)

Mine was called Space Port. There was Space Port II as well when the mall added a second one. Of course, that was only one place I went. Us kids would bike to all sorts of smaller arcades in hotels or pizza shops. 

I remember the exact placement of the Xevious cabinet in my arcade. I would try a bunch of different games first and then go to Xevious and stay there. 

I stumbled upon that album at my used record shop a few years ago and grabbed it. It's one of two vinyl albums I still keep around. I just don't have the space for all those boxes I used to have. 

I LOVE Pac-Man, but I love Ms. Pacman more. Of course, as Cary will tell you, it's not a real pacman game. Still, I love them all.  The whole pac-man concept is just wonderful. You can use it as a metaphor for anything. I remember reading a book and a criminal character comparing it to running from the cops.  Ha ha. 

I was watching Mark play Pac-Man and then Ms. Pac-Man and, yeah, Ms. Pac-Man is even better. I realize it was made by two Americans and approved by Namco later but it still feels like a true sequel.

Last night I was thinking how it sums up consumerism. I'd call each ghost something that prevents you from following the capitalist way.

ha ha. Those ghosts get eaten too though!

Right, Pac-Man eats everything, even the ghosts when he can. Like swallowing your guilt or something.

of course, no matter how much you eat them, they come back!

And darn fast too. Don't they every stop to take a break?

Actually, you're wrong about one thing.  I think Ms. Pac-Man is just as legit as any other Pac-Man game.  Midway got the license from Namco fair and square.  It's Namco that doesn't want to admit that Ms. Pac-Man is a real Pac-Man game, even though it tops everything they did.  So yeah, I actually kind of side with Midway on that one.

That's true. And they actually willingly accepted Ms. Pac-Man at the time since it was making them a lot of money. It was all the later stuff like Jr. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, and Professor Pac-Man that ticked them off. It's kind of weird how they seem to be phasing out Ms. Pac-Man now.

I actually side with Midway on those other Pac-Man games, too.  Namco let that stuff slide for a few years because it was making them money.  So they're at fault as much as Midway was.  It would be very dumb for Namco to phase out Ms. Pac-Man, as most consider it a better and more memorable game.

How Midway fits into all this is interesting. Yea, Ms. Pac-Man is the real deal. A great game that improves on everything in the original. I saw Ms Pac-Man in the arcades just as frequently as Pac-Man. 

My first exposure to Pac-Man was actually through Ms. Pac-Man, as well as the infamous Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man is a better game, but Namco seems to be quietly ignoring it of late. They haven't put it in many of their recent collections, including the Switch collection.

Did you ever play Jr. Pac-Man or Baby Pac-Man? Those games and a couple of others made Namco management mad and that's when they took the license away from Midway. Jr. Pac-Man wasn't as good as Ms. Pac-Man, but it wasn't bad. I never saw Baby Pac-Man in the wild but I have an emulated version of it through a make-your-own-pinball-table program (it was a hybrid video game/pinball table.) Namco's "official" sequel to Pac-Man was Super Pac-Man.

I've seen Baby Pac-Man in quite a few places over the years.  I even saw it last month when I went to PAX South!  It's hard to find because that machine is a pain in the butt to maintain, supposedly.

Super Pac-Man is one of my favorite Pac games.  It's so crazy and I got really good at it because when I was a kid, it was at the front of the local Wal-Mart for the longest time.

I might have seen a Super Pac-Man machine from time to time. I had the Atari 8-bit version of Super Pac-Man, and now I have it on Namco Museum Volume 2.

Namco Museum vol. 2 was the first PlayStation game I owned.

I've played them all at one time or another. I like the scrolling screen in Jr. Pac-Man. I'm not a huge fan of Super Pac-Man. Baby Pac-Man is a pretty unique cabinet. I think pinball machines were beginning to add gameplay on screens to compete with video games. This was the other way around. Weird, but cool. 

I've been debating with myself whether to play Championship Edition but I think I'm going to stick with just what was out in '80 for now.