Day 92, Ms Pacman

I used to be pretty shit-hot at video-gaming.

That was well before the home computer made it a simpler process - there used to be consoles in the 70s but they were a hoped-for dream that never materialised.  Gaming then had to be via the mechanism of the coin slot, 10p a go.  So it was off putting if you were rubbish at it as gaining skill costs money.

Galaxian, Firebird, Pacman, these were some of my favourites among the dozens of games available in the plethora of arcades around Deansgate and Oxford Road in Manchester.

Then I visited the USA in 1982.  The arcades in the States had a similar selection of games, but there was this other one I'd never seen before, Ms Pacman.  Pacman was a game where it was possible to memorise how to complete sets of levels, the difficulty increased as the player had to maintain very good timing with every move.  Ms Pacman on the other hand was non-deterministic, it wasn't possible to predict the moves of the ghosts in the same way.  There was also a change in levels, rather than the repeated, seemingly forever, screens in Pacman (actually the end comes at level 256 where it enters an overflow state ) there are a number of different levels in Ms Pacman which appear on a repeated cycle.  I spent quite a few quarters getting to grips with this new game.

Ms Pacman became my new favourite.

There is an artificial intelligence competition based around the game due to the difficulty in playing it.

I still occasionally play this game.  I've just spent an hour and a quarter here playing Ms Pacman, and recorded it.  I'm still pretty good at it, and generally I only Game Over in the end due to concentration lapses - today those lapses were me glancing at the approaching large snow clouds.

Unfortunately I routed the sound to the wrong output...  I'm not recording it again.  Pretty sure there is much more important stuff that ought to be being done in the preciously small amount of free time available to me.

So if you fancy spending over an hour staring at some pixels, here is my Saturday afternoon being consumed like pills in a darkened room.