| | | I originally got this because it has a port of the original arcade Ms. Pac-Man on it. I was young and innocent then and didn't realize that the game played squished on a horizontal screen (the true vertical Ms. Pac-Man can be found, exclusively as far as I know, in Namco Museum 3--refer to entry 179). Other than being all squished, the port seems pretty good, although sadly MPMMM does not support VGA.
The disc also sports three or four multiplayer minigames for up to four players. These aren't really that fun, you sort of run around trying to be the first to eat X number of pellets while enduring assaults of various powerups.
The main single-player game, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. It's quite amazingly long, and you go through maze after maze of colorful 3D worlds, chomping dots through little puzzle and obstacle courses. Sounds pretty weak but is very well done for what it is. The music in particular is surprisingly good, with semi-ambient techno tunes that give the whole thing a kind of blissful chill-out groove. You can probably find it for $10 or so and it's well worth it for a relaxing and lengthy action/puzzle adventure. |
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| | | While struggling with Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, I somehow thought "I could be playing Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness instead of this." ^ _^ I HAD been thinking about it now and then since I got more into Dreamcast here lately, and, checking it out, it IS a fairly proper maze game with just more mazes, which is what I always told myself I wanted Namco to make. So I'm picking up another copy of it (because of course I sold all my old DC stuff when I moved 6 years ago).
Was made by US developer Mass Media--not the best company name perhaps. Ex-Cinemaware devs, according to Wikipedia. I checked their other credits but they went on to make less-fun-looking Pac-Man and other minigame stuff and gun games and things; still around though. |
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| | | | (I also checked out the Pac-Man World games but those are 3D platformers rather than maze games; some of the stages have parts shaped like maze games but they're really awkward to control as you're just tottering around and bouncing off things in all directions and the camera is trying to go everywhere, etc.) |
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| | | Actually, it's not clear that Mass Media are still around in any real capacity; their web site has no obvious updates of recent years, and their last credited game is 2022.
MobyGames refers to them (partially) and their web site in the past tense; maybe it was offline at some point. (I'd notify MobyGames the dev's site is there now but MG doesn't seem to have a way to post a correction or notice.) |
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| | | | Oh Mass Media maybe just handled the porting of the DC version; Namco themselves are credited with the PS1 version, which came out a month earlier. |
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| | | Actually, PS1 version was 6 weeks earlier. N64 version was a month earlier (that one was two weeks after the PS1 version, you see).
MobyGames says PS1 version did come out on PS3 PS Store, but only in Hong Kong! |
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| | | DreamShell (see entry 1626) ripped three of Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness's 19 tracks as .iso files, which causes them to compress into separate .chd files when you run CHDMAN (see entry 1742) on the rip; they appear to run okay if you put them in a folder, but each appears as a separate entry in Flycast's game browser window 'p'.
Saw in another rip of the game that those tracks were .bins instead of .isos, so I renamed them, then CHDMAN put everything in a single .chd, which seems to run fine in Flycast. |
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| | | | Oh silly silly me that was unnecessary: CHDMAN already included the three .iso tracks in the main .chd it made; the three separate .chd files of the .iso tracks were superfluous. : P |
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| | | Ah it did get releases in Japan but the original (PS1) game was actually developed by Namco Hometek Inc., Namco's "US consumer division," as MobyGames puts it.
US release actually has a full color manual! And nice behind-the-disc art. |
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| | | | Hometek's last credited release on Moby is 2006; notes they were absorbed into Namco Bandai Games America Inc. on Jan 2 2006. |
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| | | | In a very crude eyeballing-it and hitting-l/r-rapidly comparison playing the 2D versions of Ms. Pac-Man in Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness on Dreamcast, and Namco Museum Vol. 3 for PS1 (see entry 179), in the emulators Flycast and DuckStation, respectively, the DC one may be slightly more responsive (Flycast has the magical ability to remove ~2 frames of input delay), and has a more accurate aspect ratio--that is, Ms. Pac-Man and the dots are noticeably more perfectly spherical in Flycast, whereas in the PS1 version in DuckStation they're slightly tall ovals. On the plus side for the PS1 version, the colors come out slightly brighter there. |
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| | | | Oh! The PS1 version of Maze Madness was released in Japan and Europe--but the Dreamcast version was North America only! |
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| | | | Oh well of course you can't set the DC 2D Ms. Pac-Man to play rotated for the full vertical (rotated horizontal) arcade screen size. : P Anyway you're better off extracting the arcade ROM from the Arcade Game Series version on Steam and running that in MAME so eh maybe that's a moot point; this chunky console version with the cute borders is just kind of fun in its own way. ^ _^ |
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| | | | ^ Oops that's in comparison to the Namco Museum Vol.3 PS1 version, in which you can rotate the screen. I don't know if you can rotate the screen in the 2D version of Ms. Pac-Man in Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness for PS1; I've never tried that version. |
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| | | | ^^ It looks like you can't rotate it in PS1 Maze Madness, like you can't in the DC version. Speaking of rotating it, in NMv.3 that fixes the aspect ratio, more or less, I think--although the maze is slightly uh wider or something than in MAME, and the colors are brighter. But it smooths out the motion and makes it feel pretty darn similar to the arcade version--really nice. Uh again this is the PS1 Namco Museum version of 2D arcade Ms. Pac-Man. ; ) |
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| | | | ^ 'Cause in DuckStation you can simulate rotating the screen, so it's quite easy to run the far superior "full screen" version finally. Huzzah for emulation! ^_ ^ |
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Trying--and failing!--to play through, in Flycast.
1:35 - Multiplayer
5:50 - Credits
8:48 - Classic
12:47 - New Game
14:35 - gaming
1:31:19 - horrible dog-sledding "bonus" stage
3:05:21 - horrible torpedo boat "bonus" stage
3:46:57 - horrible Frogger rip "bonus" stage
4:21:15 - jerk-into-the-screen action
4:25:51 - bad rotating tower boss battle
4:50:56 - stuck on conveyor belt
4:58:27 - star-gated
There's a bug in Flycast -- https://github.com/flyinghead/flycast/issues/786 -- that stops the game's music at certain points, for instance when going into the first maze in the first level; pausing and unpausing the game in Flycast restarts the music. : P
I had this game back in the day but I don't think I got too far through it, maybe, because my memories were fond. And it still starts that way--and the music is nice, despite the occasional Flycast playback hiccup with it--but it gradually becomes clearer and clearer that the game is not interested in classic Pac ghost chase action; nope, maze-running is pretty much entirely superfluous; what this is about is boring you to death with basic block puzzles. Worse, its means of trying to make these more challenging as the game goes along is leveraging cycling traps, lots of "hurry up and wait" gimmicks, and unrecoverable misdirection.
The three or so bonus stages I reached were remarkably awful--one was a straight-up rip-off of Konami's "Frogger!"--as were several attempts at boss or mid-boss encounters toward the end.
--The end of where I got to, anyway, because I finally came to a stage gated off by a requirement for more earned "Stars," which you get by getting all the dots or fruits in a stage, beating the Time Attack mode for a stage, or eh some other stage-related achievement I forget. Briefly tried but couldn't actually bear to replay any of the stages, so that's as far as I'm gonna get. = P
Not too keen on the stereotyping of the "Pac Ping Harbor" stage.
It does have the PS1 version of arcade Ms. Pac-Man--originally from Namco Museum Vol. 3--which is always nice despite its chunky graphics and movement. Can't rotate the screen in this port of it. Occurred to me that hey I can rotate the screen BACK in DuckStation and so have pretty much near-arcade-perfect Ms. P going on without having to flip my monitor; I've got the arcade ROM extracted from "Arcade Game Series Ms. Pac-Man" on Steam but always fun to noodle with the PS1 version--and I'm less likely to inadvertently delete my high score in that version ; D--so I'm gonna go get me some Namco Museum Vol. 3. = D |
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| | | | Hard to see all the credits in the game because they turned the credits screen into the torpedo-boat minigame, so you have to hit each boat target to see a credit or two--and if you miss, you've missed some names of the credits! Awful, awful. |
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| | | | Per https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_Through_the_Years and https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PieEyed , the "pie eyed" cartoon eye style was a feature of the 20s and 30s; Mickey Mouse didn't have it in his Steamboat Willy and other 1928 appearances, but did in the next year--but it quickly went out in favor of uncut oval Mickey pupils. |
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