MAME ROW #8: Pac & Pal

GtBFilms

@meleu what have we done?!

It's like the shock U.S Election result all over again!

meleu

@GtBFilms hehe I remembered it too. But our little yellow fellow is a bit more friendly.

obsidianspider

I won't be playing this week as I can't get that game to work on my system. Have fun all.

pjft

@mediamogul I had started as well, trying out Mai. Played a bit yesterday

@meleu Great that we had 11 votes, it's good to see this get more traction :)

@obsidianspider What problem are you finding, and what emulator are you trying it on? I believe I'm running it on lr-mame2003. Have you tried "cat /dev/shm/runcommand.log" to see what error you're getting?

Still, looking forward to playing a bit of Pac & Pal with everyone, should be fun.

Cheers!

obsidianspider

@pjft I didn't know that there was a log file you could look at after the fact. Thanks!

$ cat /dev/shm/runcommand.log
Parameters: 
Executing: /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-mame2003/mame2003_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/arcade/retroarch.cfg "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/arcade/pacnpal.zip" --appendconfig /dev/shm/retroarch.cfg
papi3.cpu    NOT FOUND
ERROR: required files are missing, the game cannot be run.

I unzipped the pacnpal.zip and pacnpal2.zip. Looks like I am missing stuff.

meleu

@obsidianspider why don't you download a "mame 0.78 reference set"? We use this romset version for the MAME ROW.

obsidianspider

Darn you meddling kids, making me "learn stuff"

I finally dug into this whole "romset" and "versioning" thing for MAME. I found a 0.78 version of pacnpal.zip and it works fine with lr-mame2003.

I still liked Galivan best. ;)

obsidianspider

@meleu I looked at that and it's 13.7GB for the whole set. I'll just get individual games when I need them now that I know of a good place to find them.

meleu

@obsidianspider so, you are back to the game, right?! :-)

obsidianspider

@meleu Yeah, but I'm still trying to figure out how to play Pac & Pal. This is not the normal Pac-Man.

pjft

@obsidianspider Yeah, it's kind of a mess in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it it's not bad at all.

Still a lot more complicated than it needs to be, I feel - Pac-Man is much more streamlined.

I feel part of it is that, when you get a card, it's not easy to spot which item is now accessible unless you stop and take a second to take a good look at the screen - which may, in turn, prove fatal to you. I feel that they could have done a better job at highlighting it with a different color or something but, hey, it was over 20 years ago so usability was not necessarily top of mind at the time.

And maybe it is deliberate as well - part of making it artificially harder.

Also, took a bit to find out that here you actually need to shoot at the ghosts, rather than just eating them after you ate the pill.

What does the orange section do? Is it an area where the ghosts cannot hurt you?

pjft

Hah. Just found this as I was searching for a review of the game:

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/weekly-classic-pacpal

It shares the same sentiment - that it's more complicated than it needs to be - but states that "Pac & Pal is so convoluted that it becomes downright fascinating". I feel this will be a fun trip down game history lane. A painful, but fun trip :)

GtBFilms

@pjft Not really sure about the orange section, it seems to switch on off as well sometimes?

It does look like they were desperately trying to widen the whole Pacman concept with this game - but had already run out of the obvious ideas of different mazes, female pacman, etc. and tried to come up with something a bit different.

It's quite fun, but far, far too complicated, I agree. There does appear to be scope for tactics (the order you do each level in) but at the same time the bonus stage appears to be totally random, meaning you can miss out on a lot of points there, through no fault of your own.

I'm still not sure about that 'Pal' stealing the fruit - what kind of friend is that, that deprives you of points by stealing the items?!

You can 'shoot' ghosts through walls as well, the whole 'powerpill shooting ghosts' thing doesn't seem to have been very well thought out!

pjft

@GtBFilms Yeah, still haven't figured it out, but I'm sure we'll have the chance throughout the coming days.

And yeah, your 'Pal' is like that unreliable friend that always messes up your plans, or wants to be first at everything.

I also notice that sometimes the ghosts seem to slow down or stop altogether out of the blue.

Some more info on the game:

http://arcadeclassics.net/80s-game-videos/pac-pal/

backstander

@pjft
I read the link you posted and it says:

Revealing Miru allows players to receive twice as many points for flipping over cards.

So I guess when your good-for-nothing point-stealing "Pal", Miru, is on the screen, then flipping over cards gives you twice the points. So maybe she's not all the bad ;-)

pjft

@backstander I didn't say it was all bad :D

And, truth be told, sometimes she'll pick up the item and you just need to wander around the ghost house and pick it up from her, so yes, it's a curious dynamic.

I believe, though, that that refers to the bonus stages only - during the game you are flipping cards that only have items in them. Still, fair enough :)

mediamogul

@GtBFilms said in MAME ROW #8:

Not really sure about the orange section

The orange section seems to be a replacement for the tunnels found in most other Pac titles. Ghosts will slow down around the outer edges and are not able to enter from the top. You can of course use both factors to give ghosts the slip when things get tight.

Namco may have got the ball rolling when creating the world's obsession with the little yellow pill popper, but they never had a clear vision on how to move forward with the concept. Seeing as how Bally/Midway was responsible for creating what most consider to be the superior game, 'Ms. Pac-Man', without even having Namco's permission, the first true official sequel to 'Pac-Man' was 'Super Pac-Man'. I personally love that game, but it too was criticized for having a muddled concept and over-complicated play mechanics. 'Pac & Pal' uses it's hardware (originally the 'Galaga' hardware) and even seems to have a few of it's quirks. Most notably, the tendency for ghosts to stall out every once in a while, giving the player a random break from pursuit.

Like I mentioned earlier, I've been meaning to learn this game for a while now, so I'm glad to have the opportunity to experience it here, warts and all. This should be fun.

obsidianspider

NOW I understand why this game won. It's very addictive once you get the hang of what to do. I can see this using up my lunch breaks for the rest of the week.

pjft

@obsidianspider ...and when you manage to get it to work ;)

Good score - I think my highest when we were just trying the games was around 36k or something. I think I made it to stage 4 maybe - the first or second after the first bonus round. Likely the first.

Still, hope to get to play some during the evenings these days, after putting the kids to bed!

backstander

Arcade Hunters Review: Namco's Pac & Pal