Pac-Man

Okay.

This one's from Hacker Alias Mr. Mr. Nelson, who says, what was your favorite video game themed breakfast cereal? For me, it was Pac-Man cereal.

The only way I would ever eat kicks was when they added those ghost monster marshmallows.

First of all, a lot of Pac-Man cereal.

Pac-Man cereal.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm sure I had that, too.

There's a doofus and then there's a woman named Regina.

and they have a ton of bullets they have guns that essentially as you kill dinosaurs and whatnot you get these points that you can spend at any of the save points to buy new weapons or refill your ammo or you can even upgrade your ammo so you can hold more bullets and so I have I think the guy has 500 bullets for his shotgun thing and Regina has 200 to 300 bullets for her gun and that's a lot basically kind of takes the tension out of the game but they also just have you know dinosaurs just spawning constantly into these areas so if you need to grind out some points to unlock a thing you can do that pretty easily there's not a ton of challenge to the game so far and I've already killed multiple T-Rexes and Allosaurus and stuff like that mostly by they're typically in these areas where you can go up a ladder to a higher area.

Maybe if you're close to the edge, they'll try to bite you and swipe at you.

Eventually we'll just jump up.

A few weeks ago, I was at the Bruno Mars concert, so there was that, and that was on a Sunday.

And then last week, I was in LA for a few days because I went to concerts for Metaphor ReFantasio as well as Call of Trigger.

And you guys know me.

I am a huge JRPG fan.

The big pen up top actually speaks games by what food actually does in them.

Is it a goal? Is it a resource? Is it a process they go through? Or is there kind of no food at all? So at the end of this session, hopefully you'll know why it's a pen and why there's a Pac-Man in there and why it almost ended up longer than it is.

So I've split up this presentation into five sections, five stops, one power palette each.

So if you've played Pac-Man, this shouldn't be a surprise to you.

So firstly, I'll talk about the idea, the story, the design, the data, and then I'll talk about the feedback as well.

So the first thing, let's start at the very beginning, finding the hook.

So I started laying down the dots my own way.

And wait a minute.

I would probably want to see...

I know Pac-Man's been done a few times to its original gameplay mechanics.

It's still pretty good.

Before we were recording this episode, I was showing these guys footage of Tetris 99.

There's also Pac-Man 99 and Super Mario Bros. 99.

Um... all really fun Battle Royale-esque games while maintaining their original mechanics.

So I'm thinking about something like that.

I remember in the 80s, I did used to play this sort of arcade game called Space Invaders.

And there was another one called Pac-Man.

So we use those as an example just to illustrate the point.

If you're playing Space Invaders and you're having a great game.

But you reach a point where you say, oh, I'm actually a bit bored with Space Invaders now.

I want to play Pac-Man.

Well, sorry, you can't.

Because you're on a machine which has been configured to play Space Invaders.

Every day that goes by, that game gets a little more expensive than it did yesterday.

But then on the arcade side, you can't open an arcade without a Space Invaders, a Galaga, a Pac-Man, a Donkey Kong, like the games that people that don't even... have an interest in arcades, they're expecting you to have these games because that's the ones that they've heard of, you know, whether they saw it on TV or they just remember it from, you know, a yesteryear, to see, like, what these characters have become today.

Like, Donkey Kong is a fixture in every Nintendo household, but, you know...

The arcade game, very different, very different.