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Arcade Game Series: Ms. Pac-Man
  PS4PuzzleUC  
  opened by paleface at 20:57:36 05/02/16  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS4; cat=Puzzle; reg=NA]
           
After appearing in a bit of a blurry attempt in the previous generation (see entry 1334), Ms. Pac-Man finally gets a proper 1080p outing in this stand-alone version on PS4: it loads fast, it's beautifully crisp and sharp (although you can add filters and scan lines and stuff if you want...), and you can even do weird things with a multitude of incredibly in-depth sound options; there's even an option to fix the kill screen problem on round 143 or whatever. Not that I'll ever get there, but it's nice to know they thought of it. : o
 
Technically, this isn't perhaps the most arcade-perfect port in terms of the control, because whereas in the original (and the aforementioned PS3 version in Pac-Man Museum), if you for instance were going up and moved the stick to diagonal up/right and then back to up, you'd go right at the next intersection--even though you were currently holding up--because the game always used the last *new* direction input, in this version, it doesn't do that, and would continue moving up as you would expect. That's a big plus for anyone playing the game on a controller that accepts diagonal inputs, which is pretty nearly every modern controller, and it makes the game actually pretty playable on say the default PS4 control pad.
 
Oh yeah, almost forgot; if the insanely in-depth sound-amplifying options were too subtle, you can tell the Japanese team porting this game was a little weird by the incredibly bizarre, very ostentatious border art around the emulated game screen, with its huge, lumpy, pop-art illustrated, even upside-down Pacs and ghosts. There are two options, and both are incredibly bizarre.
 
  paleface 04:18:34 05/07/16
           
Despite the bizarrely obsessive attention to pitch-shifting and other highly unusual audio options, they omitted the obvious one: volume control. :P
 
  paleface 19:40:22 11/13/18
           
These "Arcade Game Series" PS4 ports (I've played Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man, and Dig Dug) are not actually "beautifully crisp" as I wrote enthusiastically at the beginning of this entry; perhaps they just seemed that way when compared with the PS3 version. But no, unfortunately they're still slightly blurry.
 
They're also presented at a curiously small default size, surrounded by the aforementioned huge garish border art. You can zoom the view in, but that just enlarges the blurriness.
 
 
  paleface 12:11:06 09/15/22
           
Finally realized I can *mostly* make YouTube show 3:4 vert-screen game videos--Mushihimesama, Ms. Pac-Man, Dig Dug--in up to at least 1080p60--and usually 1440p60--if I double their starting 1080p resolution in OBS (using "Point" scaling--seems pretty CPU-cheap, and since these are narrow screen anyway the file sizes still aren't too bad).
 
YouTube still allotted ONE (https://youtu.be/IGCzozFFaAU) of the resulting 4K Ms. Pac-Man PS4 test videos I uploaded a mere 720p60; I think that was because most of it was while it was paused and I was twiddling with the screen scaling, which in this probably final Namco Ms. Pac-Man port--seeing as how they're currently working to eradicate her from human memory, replacing her with Pac-Mom so they don't have to pay those Ms. Pac-Man royalties to the old GCC hackers who invented her--is awful: no discrete scaling values, or even to screen border; it just scales some distance based on how briefly you manage to tick the "Zoom" button, UGH; also it's always slightly blurry--probably due to the unavoidable rescaling--which probably makes YouTube figure hey it's already blurry why should I bother making it HD blurry.
 
Anyway it'll probably work (https://youtu.be/Dl74aaSnCc0) most of (https://youtu.be/CrLuan_i0sw) the time (https://youtu.be/DZcmuECLueM), so now I can stop having to side-border them to 1:1 to get that YouTube 1080p60, and they'll come up nice and big on phones in portrait mode.
 
  paleface 22:45:07 09/23/22
           
With Namco replacing Ms. Pac-Man with a generic "Pac-Mom" in their recent releases of other games (Pac-in-Time in Namco Museum+, and Pac-Land in that and Arcade Archives Pac-Land), it's looking likely this 2016 release may end up being the last Ms. Pac-Man we get for quite some time!
 

 
- Oops, the red dot stage is only the 3rd maze. : P The 4th maze is dark blue dots, I don't know if I've ever actually got that far: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Ms._Pac-Man/Walkthrough#Dark_Blue_Maze ; and the mazes don't loop after that, they just alternate between #3 and #4.
- The rotating 4/8-way restrictor gate is on the bottom of the Sanwa JLF I've put in my Hori RAPV 2017 PS4 arcade stick, so I'd only need to unscrew the bottom of the case to adjust it--but doing that every time I wanted to play Ms. Pac-Man would end up putting a lot of wear on the screws and plastic screw holes. It would also increase the throw range of the stick, which is already longer than it was for Ms. Pac-Man in the arcade.
- I went back and played Ms. Pac-Man in Pac-Man Museum on PS3 (entry 1334) and wasn't getting the wrong-direction stuff I built a custom stick to avoid back in the day in that version (you could be moving up, graze diagonal up-right, say, move the stick back to up, but find your Ms. Pac still taking the next right, because that was the most recent new input, which is how the arcade version processes input); I've never had that problem in this PS4 version with any controller, I think they prevented it in software this time.
 
  paleface 12:54:38 12/05/22
           

 
Jeepers! Well, this game is hard. I wish it wasn't a bit blurry, that can't be great for the eyeballs. Man life is tough! ;_;;; I guess I had fun though, it's weird. = o
 
Going right through a non-blue ghost (through Blinky @12:30 = D) without getting hurt is apparently called a "booey"; good Pac-Man players can even incorporate it into their patterns, for instance Donny DJ's "Big Ben" pattern for Pac-Man's 9th key youtube.com/ watch?v=XbAWU-CsPDI incorporates "an extremely rare double booey" (through two ghosts at once!), as well as two regular single-ghost booeys. = oo
 
It's not a "1 in 256 chance" as I pulled out of no real place in my stunned state after the booey; I've seen one optimistic estimate saying if you're facing certain doom you should always plunge directly toward the ghost as there's a "5-10%" chance you may go through safely; that seems a little optimistic but hey, it could happen! This seemed maybe a little more accurate:
 
"The collision detection works by keeping track of what 8x8 pixel square all the objects are on. So if you step off of your square onto a ghosts square and he steps off his square and on to yours simultaneously you didn't ever occupy the same square."
 
"Dave" quoted by Hoopz on ArcadeControls.com, 2007
    
downloads:
· 01_bli_booey.jpg
 
references:
· Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug (PS4)
· Arcade Game Series: Ms. Pac-Man (PC)
· Mad Catz Street Fighter IV Tournament Edition Fightstick (PS3)
· Ms. Pac-Man (SNES)
· Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness (DC)
· Namco Museum Vol. 3 (PS1)
· Pac-Man Museum (PS3)

 
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