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Playing The World's Biggest Pac-Man at https://worldsbiggestpacman.com!
It's a 2011 thing by Microsoft, Namco, and an Australian web developer to show off Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser running HTML5--but I was running it in Google Chrome; I tried MS's "Edge" browser on it briefly, but it didn't seem to run it any better than Chrome, ie there was pretty horrendous input delay when playing it in either.
I didn't use my normal Firefox browser because it ran the game a lot slower, and had trouble with the sound not starting, although I think that may have been partly due to my uBlock Origin ad blocker; the site is coated in ads 'p'.
Partly because of the ads, I cut off the left side of the screen, so you can't see the map view's upper-left Navigator thumbnail window, which shows a sort of continent-scale view of the local galaxy of mazes, and lets you scroll across them faster than clicking and dragging the main window.
There are over 600K user-created mazes to explore, and they're all interconnected by 1 to four exits around the sides of each maze, I guess. Most of the ones I bumbled into were pretty awful, and without being able to go back to the map overview without losing your score, it's easy to get kind of stuck in a maze of horrible mazes.
Also, when I loaded up RandomPac afterwards for a palette cleanser, I realized right away that WBPM is missing the way real arcade Pac-Man leans into rounded corners of turns, so--in a good Pac-Man game--you can start taking a turn several pixels before you actually reach it. Without that, cornering is harder and stiffer--and of course it doesn't help that most people seem to have made mazes with corridors that are either too wide, or too close together, making turning really awkward anyway.
And, the game plays in a fairly small on-screen area--the map can extend just about full screen, but the actual play area is 512x560; yeah you can scale your browser window up, but that makes the graphics somewhat blurry.
So: tiny screen, bad cornering, horrible input delay, horrible maps.
There IS this sort of weird meta experience of exploring a crowd-sourced near-infinite torture chamber...but now that I've experienced that a bit, I think I'm good for a while. = oo
(Once you clear a maze of dots and pellets, the ghosts disappear, and you can go back to it and it will remain clear--in fact, even if you don't finish a maze, when you go back, the dots you did eat remain gone. However, returning to the map ("HOME") resets the mazes.) |
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