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Playing through the Japanese arcade version of Pac-Land--extracted from the Steam version of Pac-Man Museum Plus--in MAME 0.268, with some extra looping at the end (you get through "trip" 8 (round 32) and then it keeps looping 5-8, or something like that, w/ different object/enemy placements).
No continues, so thank to copious save-stating! ^ D^
This is the censored version of the ROM, extracted from Pac-Man Museum Plus -- along with a few other Pac-Man games -- from Steam for PC, using scripts from https://github.com/shawngmc/game-extraction-toolbox and additional directions from https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2997730346 . The ROM replaces Ms. Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man--owned in part or something by the original MIT (school ID'd via https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_Ms._Pac-Man_legal_issues ; I think I said Harvard or something, that was incorrect!) student hackers from GCC who made Ms. Pac-Man, and uh...oh, maybe by whoever now owns Bally Midway (WB?), who made the Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man pinball game in which Baby Pac-Man first appeared! (I was confusing them with Jr. Pac-Man, another GCC creation ^ _^))--w/ legally distinct, wholly Namco owned plastic imitations "Pac-Mom" & "Pac-Sis." = P
(Forgot to mention that the Pac-Mania ROM extracted along with this from Pac-Man Museum Plus didn't seem work correctly, and would hang before you could get into actual gameplay. You can extract a working Pac-Mania ROM from Namco Museum 50th Anniversary (PS2) though! See the description of my recent Mappy video for more on that https://youtu.be/9GSRc_P6vkM .)
It's also the Japanese version of the arcade ROM, rather than the US version; the US arcade version was apparently sped up to double the speed of the Japanese one, according to https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/Pac-Land#Trivia ! = o So this is the original, slower version; maybe also the version followed for pretty much all console releases of the game?
I originally set up control via the keyboard, to sort of imitate the layout of the arcade cabinet's control panel consisting entirely of four buttons in a wide row: Run Left and Run Right buttons about 3-4 inches apart in the middle, and a Jump button spaced wide outside those on both the left and right--imitated on the PC keyboard with Alts as the Run L/R buttons and the CTRL buttons as Jump. Works pretty well, and I was better at hammering Jump fast enough to get over long pools or out of quicksand than I was on the DualSense pad (set up like I think it was in Namco Museum on PS1 with Jump on d-pad L/R, Run L on Square and Run R on X)...but the pad is overall more convenient and comfortable especially since I have like MAME hotkeys on there for fast-forward and save state / load state, so I kept switching back to pad when I could and eventually got okay with hammering on them face buttons well enough to tough it out.
When it starts looping after stage 32 it would be kind of easy to miss that they weren't new levels since it varies up items and enemies on you, but you do start to recognize a few item clusters or whatnot that didn't change. Still, it certainly keeps the challenge going and if you were a wiz at it, could keep you happy with more Pac-Landing action for uh as long as you could handle it? = o
Anyway, fun game! The unique controls (you have to keep hammering the Run button for Run Right to keep going right at decent speed, for instance) make it a hoot and uh make the playback look incredibly clumsy, like why does he just keep falling off platforms or jumping into the same ghost repeatedly. ; D The playthrough up through stage 32 wasn't as tough as I'd feared it might be, billions of Pac deaths notwithstanding. ; ) |
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