Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the Blinky,-Inky,-Pinky-and-???? dept.

Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game:

Released in America in October 1980 yet arriving in arcades closer to late November, Pac-Man rolled in like a guest at the wrong address. Since America was right in the middle of “the shooter craze”, when the competitive gaming scene was focused exclusively on mastering difficult multi-buttoned games, Pac-Man’s debut quite literally looked like a birthday party arriving on the front lines of World War III. Aesthetically, it didn’t fit in. Although some people migrated to it quickly, the press paid it little attention until full “Pac-Mania” finally hit in the Summer of 1981, its shift from a fad to a full-blown craze delayed by a historically brutal sub-arctic winter in many parts of America which kept millions of grade school gamers out of the arcades until things warmed up.

[...] If it’s been a while since you played Pac-Man on an original arcade game cabinet, let me refresh your memory:  Put in your quarter, hit the one-player button and grab the joystick. All you have to do is move Pac-Man through a series of tight cornered mazes, trying to eat all the dots and fruit on screen while also trying to out-maneuver a group of ghosts who will kill you as soon as they touch you. If you eat one of the energizer dots, though, you’ll have a short period of gameplay where the ghosts slow down and stop chasing you so you can eat the ghosts and pick up extra points. But something else happens, something I’ve never seen anyone ever mention in any article or video before.  It’s a physical response and it always occurs by the time the player reaches the second screen…

Pac-Man is more of a driving game than a maze game. As you’re playing, you’re jamming that joystick left  and right, up and down, movements that shifts your right shoulder forward and back, rocking your body side to side. When the going gets tough, and the ghosts start closing in, all of this rocking motion compels you to lean into the game and, whether you realize you’re doing it or not, you’re going to grab onto the game.  You actually need to get a grip…on something. You’re either going to lean hard against your left palm as it rests on the control panel which isn’t comfortable for very long or, like most people, you’re going to grab the side of the game and hold on tight.  You have to or you’ll lose your balance. You can’t take the sharp corners smoothly and quickly without doing this, ether. You need the extra stabilization to move Pac-Man around the corners accurately.

It's one of those things that I never thought of before, but seeing it pointed out, it seems obvious in retrospect. (The linked story has a plethora of pics showing the left-hand death grip. Get a load of the fashions back then, too.) I wonder how many other "obvious" things happen each day that I also fail to notice. Also, I rarely got past the second screen; how well could YOU play?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Monday March 04 2019, @11:51PM (2 children)

    by el_oscuro (1711) on Monday March 04 2019, @11:51PM (#810054)

    Interesting link. I didn't actually use any structs at all and had no special tricks. The screen was 80x25, so x/y and direction for both monsters and player, and last key pressed, all single byte variables.
    Plus the score (as actual ASCII digits), and a 2k character array for the playfield.

    That is pretty much it.

    --
    SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 05 2019, @06:45PM (1 child)

    by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday March 05 2019, @06:45PM (#810356) Journal

    so x/y and direction for both monsters and player

    There are two ways to organize that.

    Array of structs is common on machines whose indexed addressing mode is a small constant offset from a big (16-bit or more) variable pointer, such as Z80, 68000, and MIPS. It puts each entity's properties one after another:

    X for enemy 1, Y for enemy 1, direction for enemy 1
    X for enemy 2, Y for enemy 2, direction for enemy 2
    X for enemy 3, Y for enemy 3, direction for enemy 3
    ...

    Structure of arrays is common on machines whose indexed addressing mode is a small (8-bit) variable offset from a large constant address, such as 6502, and in BASIC dialects without structs. It puts each property in a separate array, where the properties of one entity are found at the same index into each array:

    X for enemy 1, X for enemy 2, X for enemy 3, ...
    Y for enemy 1, Y for enemy 2, Y for enemy 3, ...
    direction for enemy 1, direction for enemy 2, direction for enemy 3, ...

    Which did you end up using?

    • (Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:56AM

      by el_oscuro (1711) on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:56AM (#810952)
      No special organization.  Just single byte variables.  It has been almost 40 years, but it was something like this:

      pl_x:   db    0    ;Players x position
      pl_x:   db    0    ;Players y position
      pl_dir: db    0    ;Players direction 0-up,1-down,2-left,3-right
      m1_x:   db    0    ;Monster 1 x position
      m1_x:   db    0    ;Monster 1 y position
      m1_dir: db    0    ;Monster 1 direction 0-up,1-down,2-left,3-right
      m2_x:   db    0    ;Monster 2 x position
      m2_x:   db    0    ;Monster 2 y position
      m2_dir: db    0    ;Monster 2 direction 0-up,1-down,2-left,3-right

      lstkey: db    0    ;Last key pressed
      score: db    '00000'    
      --
      SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]