Pac-Man & Scoring
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- Опубликовано: 16 июл 2014
- Some thoughts on Pac-Man and high scores.
There are a few omissions and simplifications for the sake of clarity.
The optimal path through Championship Edition stages are not always as obvious as they appear to be for a number of reasons, although I touch on this when I say sometimes not scoring short term can lead to a better score long term.
Also Pac-Man can pre-turn in both games which makes him round the corner faster so his movement is a little more complicated than it appears to be, the speed of championship edition makes it much harder to pre-turn for every corner but it's far from impossible.
I'm sure not every version of Breakout is completely deterministic (often the ball drop position is random) but the game can certainly be built that way and has been on many occasions. 
Игры
This guy could review paint drying for 20 minutes and I would still watch it.
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Here's an interesting example of a game achieving skill based scores: Spelunky's Daily Challenge Mode. Normally Spelunky is a game where the levels are generated procedurally based on a random seed. There is a limited amount of treasure to collect each game, and that is further limited by what resources the game generates, so players already are on uneven ground just by having a different seed.
The daily challenge however gives all the players the same seed and allows them only one attempt at it. This means that everyone has the same potential maximum score, but since nobody has the opportunity to practice that particular seed (outside of hacking) nobody can create a perfect strategy that achieves the top score every time.
I would agree if it weren't for the fact that there is, while relatively small, a percentage of runs that are unsalvageable and/or have purely RNG based interactions moment by moment within the bigger picture of the run as a whole.
Would love more random observations like this. Reviews are great but this really brought up a great point.
I like pac-man, it's fun but if you can just re-peat the best pattern with no change to always get the top score then what's the point in competing.
Then instead if you wanted the game to be more dynamic with pacman just make it so the first run is the same as always. But then next time you add it so if a player goes a set path. The game will remember that path and add some randomisation where it will go a certain direction then the whole goal of perfection would be to guide the AI a set direction. Which would make people feel more challenged by it. So it isn't luck it requires even more strategy to be perfect. (It's like when i play Pacman i avoid going to best predetermined route because i want a different outcome)
***** What will happen is players will reset the games memory, or save data. And they will solve the first run and never bother exploring anything beyond that. If my game behaves differnetly then your whats the point of us competing, You can't say they are a fair comparison because they are different from each other. The player isn't facing the same challenges
When the rubric of scoring elements was shown, I immediately thought of Super Hexagon as one that meets the dynamic-endless criteria.
Two videos in two days? You're really spoiling us Matthew.
I thought it was just going to be a 2 minutes update or announcement
:')
Without a doubt this is the best content I've viewed on RUclips. The amount of time and effort poured into each video is self evident.
Subscribed.
This was a very insightful video that got me to think of scoring systems in games in a way I hadn't quite considered before. Nicely done.
One minor note - the game you primarily show is actually Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which is different from the original Championship Edition as it includes multiple chains of ghosts, bombs, and slowdown when approaching ghosts.
Man you make me so happy with these new videos! I keep rewatching your old ones all the time.
Keep it up! we luv u.
This was a fascinating video! I've never really considered the way scoring systems would influence competitive play for arcade games, despite being deeply ingrained in competitive gaming in general. Without facing another player directly, the scoring system has to be much more carefully reasoned than I would have imagined.
Just wanted to add that in Championship Edition DX (I believe that's the game you were actually referring to), there is an additional dimension to the scoring besides following the optimal path; it's figuring out when to eat the power pellets + when to hold off (as to make the huge clusters of sleeping green ghosts appear) and when to eat additional power pellets to maintain your powered up state in order to keep your combo going. Granted, it can be seen as an extension of following the optimal path, but it's a far less obvious side to scoring optimally. Fantastic video!
There's also many different modes in the game that score you in different ways.
As somebody who makes arcade-style games in his free time, this break down of dynamic challenge & endless approach is super helpful. thanks
It's like I've had this thought in my head for years and years but only now I'm hearing someone who can eloquently put it into words lol
Really intelligent observation you made. Your videos are often eye-openers for either whole games or certain mechanics.
I love how thought-provoking your videos are. keep it up
8:05 a good example for the upper right is Black ops zombies. Once you hit about round 20 its just running in circles. And by about round 35 only the Thundergun/Wunderwaffe/other weapon with infinite damage is effective. So its just running in circles over and over until your game crashes at about round 170-200. Still find it fun though.
Your discussion of ideal future inputs got me thinking about what the ideal input scheme would really be. I assume when you mentioned 'neural' inputs in contradistinction to tactile controllers, the idea was that it would remove all obstacles between that player's desire to act in a particular way in the virtual environment and that action being carried through. I think there's something right about that, in that the ideal is to create such 'transparency' of control - in other words, the ideal control scheme is to have that scheme create a perfect conduit for the player's will to act on the game world.
I would add that if when we thought of this ideal scenario, we pictured a player sitting in front of a monitor with his hands empty but somehow controlling the game purely through thought, this actually would *not* create that ideal transparency. This is because human beings are constructed in such a way that we are accustomed to navigating our own world in a rather tactile way, due to how we are embodied - so much so that it would be jarring and awkward for us to try to navigate a virtual environment without making inputs in any analogous tactile form (for example, pressing buttons on a traditional controller).
Even motion controls, if that technology were perfected, wouldn't be as effective as a traditional controller in this regard, since we are also used to getting feedback from our environment directly as we interact with it in tactile ways (not to flailing through empty air that provides no resistance, or walking in place, etc.); in-game feedback to button presses plus a rumble feature on a traditional controller can better meet this requirement. This latter point holds particularly if the game-world itself is meant to be immersive (unlike something like Pac-Man), but even playing something like Pac-man without any kind of tactile contol would be awkward in instances where the game did provide feedback meant to be satisfying in a vaguely tactile sense (like when the game pauses for a few frames and plays a distinct sound effect whenever Pac-man eats a ghost). Of course, new control schemes would encourage new ways of designing games around it, but its difficult to see how those new games would fill in that void of tactile responsiveness going both ways (to and from the player).
There may be better ways than we've thought of so far to perfect traditional tactile controls when used in conjunction with a monitor, but probably the true ideal control scheme would be full immersion VR environments (ala Star Trek Holodecks), which actually allowed us to navigate virtual environments using our own bodies and thus with the same embodied coping skills we use to navigate the real world (assuming this included some way to integrate realistic tactile feedback from the virtual objects/environment we encountered). But maybe this is what you had in mind.
You can hear him struggling at 1:49, desperately trying not to say "tree" instead of "three"
this was a great analysis. i've always thought a lot about scoring systems and how to improve them and you seem to share a lot of my own sentiments.
while i understand the flaw in limited/timing based scoring systems, though, i still find them preferable a lot of the time. with an endless game, as players continue to get better and better, you'll eventually reach a point where going for a high score is more of a battle of free time and patience than of skill, as the time required to compete becomes more and more inconvenient. even with the issue of limited games creating a maximum score, i think if your game is designed well enough, and the skill ceiling and potential score high enough, you'll never have to worry about that happening within the lifetime of any player.
some good examples i think are the Tetris the Grandmaster games, especially the more difficult modes in TGM2 and 3. a fully-optimized run of Death, Shirase, or Ti Master would require the absolute perfect combination of finger precision, forward thinking, and a bit of luck. it's hard to imagine it ever happening; i couldn't give you an exact chance but i'd imagine there are a lot of zeros after the decimal point.
oh my fucking god 2 new matthewmatosis videos in 24 hours
i'm shitting myself in pure happiness
Great thoughts Matthew. In the world of games as e-sports this is the kind of thinking that developers need to start with if games are to be balanced AND fun.
It's funny, I spent a good long time thinking about exactly this during the initial design phases of our currently in development game 'VIVID' (mobile arcade game, with Rez & Super Hexagon inspired aesthetic and sound).
That balance of dynamism or randomness vs live player skill within a simple set of systems is probably the hardest thing to get right, especially with regards to spawn locations. After all, you don't want the player to feel like they were cheated out of a highscore due to a totally unforeseeable and unavoidable series of circumstances.
Wow, it's cool that you look at the numbers and the narrative of games :)
Another video this fast? Damn, good job with the commitment lol
I think even back then it was more understandable oversight than lack of recourses.
256 states = 8bit = 1byte. For just 2bytes you get 256 x 256 states.
Also the extra processing to manage the mathematics of this on processors that may have natively understood individual bytes better, would have been tiny compared with almost every other even very minor aspect of the game.
Really really interesting stuff man, keep it up.
When considering deterministic game design and human limitations, it's important to factor in possibilities illuminated by tool assisted play, where human reaction times and errors are removed leaving only perfectly executed strategies.
I am sure that the hypothetical scenario of a perfect score in a perfect time has been achieved in tool assisted Pac-man, and if not, can be done.
Another excellent video, thanks!
Rapid fire videos, I like it
From what I understand, the ghosts actually have their own AI that works differently between them.
Blinky is always heading straight for you.
Pinky tries to anticipate your movements and go where she thinks you're heading.
Inky tries to "compliment" Blinky's movements, staying behind in empty space most of the time.
Clyde just wanders around aimlessly.
Wow you uploaded on 2 consecutive days i love all your vídeos
This game looks fun. When does it come out? Will there be Oculus Rift support?
I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts on the Metroid, and Final Fantasy games/series if you ever do another marathon.
Heck, I'd be open to hearing your thoughts for just about any game to be honest
Thanks for posting this on my birthday
An interesting idea for a video would be an retrospective on the variety of ways Sega has tried to balance speed and platforming in recent Sonic games, including a proposal for the best mixture of them. I'd argue that the series has failed to balance them ideally, and it would be great to see your ideas. You could even look at the mechanics individually and critique them. Examples of them being
Racing-esque gameplay (secret rings, black knight, etc.): high speed and excitement, but at the cost of less platforming and exploration, maybe mentioning the fine-tuning needed to find the "perfect speed" (a maximum speed without you crashing into objects to quickly)
Boost-games (unleashed, colors, generations): increases speed but at the cost of creating blind spots, having a higher speed would increase the amount of content needed for a 5-minute level, etc.
2012 was a different time to be a Sonic Fan...like man things have changed now a lot! (Wouldn't be surprised if you fell off of Sonic a bit now...I'm kinda the same. lol)
@@Alienrun I was never a huge fan but I enjoyed Frontiers for what it was. Not gonna lie I'm kinda cringing at how naive my original post was but I guess that was typical of games discourse a decade ago.
This is really really good!
You deserve more viewers, my friend!
Ever since Billy Mitchell crafted the first perfect score on Pacman, people in a nearby arcade (I don't know how many other arcades partook in this) would hold tournaments, the objective being collecting all pellets except one on the first stage, then outrunning the ghosts and lasting as long as possible. Eventually people found patterns to exploit but usually a winner will be claimed within a day.
This hasn’t aged well
its crazy how little pac man nowa days because when I was growing up in the 90's people still had something to say about pac man until like 2009
That escape at 1:35 ..amazing :D
While I agree with the random being not good for competition, it can still be used. For example if there is an "optimal path" as there can also be a variable determing if how many times the path has been used in comparison to other paths, and a variable determing in which way has been most chosen from a turning point, making a routine path predictible for the computer. Therefore if the player runs always an optimal path, a random value, which will dynamically change based on the path the player chooses, may determine the probablity of the enemy to intercept rather than to chase; If the same path is run over and over again, it is more likely that the enemy will take a turn to predict the player movement as the computer "learns" to predict the player movement, but if the okayer upholds a random entrophy, the enemies can not predict the movement. Surely in this method an optimal path may be determined, but the length of that optimal path would be extremely long.
Another thing to add the difficulty, even if the path is monotoneus, is for example to replace the hard set time limit with addition to the delta time (basically the speed the game runs) based on either a time interval, that would sustain the "time is score" element, or based on the score. Either way, it would be harder to memorize the path blindly, as the tempo would constantly speed up, and it would become "impossible" to solve, while still giving an option for someone with better reflexes to get a higher score, as in competing how fast can one play a musical score.
Combining these two elements could create a method of challenge to make the gameplay dynamic, as the player must react to what is happening on screen (and actually become more aware of the habits of one), as long as allowing the best score always to be theoretically improved.
And to make the scoring system dynamic, it may be possible, for as "small" game as pacman, to read the amount of memory the device has and reserve the variable to the score according to that.
That said, I am not saying that these would either be the best or only methods, or if there wouldn't be a problem, but it is an idea, and if someone can spot holes on it, then when those holes are known, the method can be collaboretelly improved, as well as different "solutions" for this "problems" may be presented.
I remember trying to analyze scoring on other types of games, specifically, shoot'em ups. I concluded that while it is difficult to make a shoot'em up where skill is rewarded well, it's not impossible. However, this means that two things need to happen: either reward the player for skillful shooting (instead of just holding down the fire button) and/or making the player to dodge stuff (instead of "shoot them before they shoot you") for extra reward (bullet grazing is one but not the only option).
have you played many shoot em ups? the genre is chock full of complex scoring systems that readily transcend simple shooting and dodging rewards.
What was the game where the objective was to make sure that the enemies are alive as long as possible?
Interesting analysis, though I'm perfectly content with how pac-man is designed. If the ghosts were random it would make the other gameplay mechanics less interesting. The ghosts were designed to work together chase and corner you, making power pellets a necessity and adding tension.
Maybe one way they could fix it is randomizing the order of ghosts come out of the barrier so it isn't always red, pink, cyan and orange making advance players think on their feet more because a of the pause before the next ghost shows up. (Edit: I later realized how this would be hard to implement with Inky's AI being determined with Blinky's position)
Though I think Ms. Pac-man does fix some of these problems by having different maps and randomizing the fruit making perfect scores almost impossible (correct me if I'm wrong).
Interesting video. Scoring points is all but dead in most videogames now. First game I ever played was Astro Warrior for my brand new Sega Master System, which was a shoot 'em up with 3 levels that repeated endlessly, so points were the only way of measuring progress past a certain point. I never enjoyed it as much as Zillion (1987) though, which my dad bought for me- no points there, just a basic story and a mission to complete. Took me about 20 years, emulation and savestates, but I finished it in the end!
I never really got the appeal of Pac Man, I'd rather play Joust or DigDug, which came out a couple of years later but were still from the same era imo (1982). That Pac Man sequel does look like fun though.
Scoring points was dead because it was misused and abused since the NES era which inclued tons of games where the developers included the score without either realizing why the score was implemented in the first place.
You either make a game where high score is something you have to achieve or make the score do something. Either way this should be implemented in a way that you can't just farm the score. I think Super Mario Bros. series is one of the more well-known offenders when it comes to this.
Surprised by the lack of any mention of Ms. Pac Man - correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the most similar to the dynamic+endless Pac Man game you propose in the table?
It’s pretty obvious that pac man could just be remade to not end so soon, not really worth bringing to the discussion.
Pac-Man is just a launch into the discussion
If there is an optimal run of timed, deterministic Pacman then ultimately that same run could be applied to dynamic, timed Pacman. It would take a long time but eventually the random decisions made by the ghosts would be the same decisions of the deterministic ghosts. Making the optimal run of both versions one in the same.
Something I'm thinking of with the scoring in championship addition. The wandering ghost are still worth points when eaten so ones ability to choose between corralling them to follow behind you versus trying to pick them up after eating a power pellet should have an affect on score.
Wouldn't it be preferable to have a game with a collosal skill ceiling and varied-but-deterministic gameplay than have to resort to randomness to prevent players from just learning patterns and sticking to them? Take a game like Quake for example. Yes, there may be a fixed pattern of enemies with fixed AI and yes, there may be an optimal way to move through the level but it requires so many perfect variables that you can basically rule out anything but a TAS run producing a "perfect time". There are so many high-skill movement options (bunny hopping, edge hopping, fast fall etc) and so many different tools (variations of guns) and so many different levels that completely rules out the possibility of anyone getting a perfect time. This means that speed running the game is perfectly viable, even if nothing is left up to chance.
Take chess for an example whenever discussing this topic. Its simpler and still obviously deterministic.
I look forward to the future games with neural controls
You should receive more attention, your critiques are very good!
great video
I think your table is slightly off-base. The problem isn't the time limit, or the challenge's randomness. The problem is in the simplicity if the game itself.
A player can have a time limit and deterministic gameplay and ALSO have the more skilled player come out on top. The problem with pacman is the gameplay is so simple that players have reached the skill ceiling in the game. They all can get perfect scores so they might as well all be of the same skill. The "whoever can last the longest" endless scenario doesn't really show who the "best" player is. It shows who of them can stay awake the longest etc. It de-emphasizes skill. Outlasting another player only shows you are "better" than them when they are defeated via their lack of skill in the game. In pacman if these people have the ability to perfect score every game, and they have essentially "solved" the gameplay. Then there is no situation in which a player's skill is not enough to tackle the games challenge.
There are games where the skill ceiling is entirely in execution of a "perfect" strategy, route, etc. without any dynamic elements. These serve as excellent grounds for competition when that skill ceiling is essentially unreachable by a human. No human will ever be able to press a button 30 times per second, But the faster a players fingers the larger of an edge they can gain. The game needs to have a large # of options so that it can't be solved immediately or easily. But as players become better and refine it closer and closer, they will still essentially never be able to fully solve it.
There is some merit to a player being able to react to an unknown situation and make the correct decision. But the fact the unknown situation occurred in the first place is "sub-optimal". In an ideal field of competition the ONLY factor for a player being better then another should be their actions, nothing out of their control in the game. That is to say, If I am better then you, I should not have to rely on "luck" to win. If you are lucky and I am unlucky, You may come out ontop, even though I would have won if not for my unlucky situation in the game.
I'm definitely thinking in hypotheticals in this video so I agree that most games probably won't suffer from these issues even if they have a timer but it is interesting to question how better input methods in the future might make currently high skill ceiling games trivial in the future. If that were to happen the lack of a time limit and dynamic challenges would be the only 100% surefire way to avoid a player being able to perfect the game.
You're right to a large degree though and I'd say that another way of thinking about it - which is more in line with your thoughts - is to say the shorter the time limit, the higher the skill ceiling should be. In other words if you had some weird game that only lasted 1 second it better have one hell of a high amount of skill packed into that second or it'll be broken very soon. Bit of an insane example but I think it illustrates the point.
Keep in mind as well that I'm kind of thinking about games which already exist here. If I was building a competitive game I wanted people to play for a long time then I'd build a lot of skill into the control scheme but if I was working on a game or genre where I didn't feel that was possible (imagine I'm making a Pac-Man clone) I figure I'd have no choice but to arrive at the same conclusions as this video.
TheBird OfPrey
I don't like how endurance and patience are discredited to the point where they're not considered skills.
Everything is in the realm of probability. speed of input and reaction time is important, but has to be managed over time.
How skilled is a guy who is only effective 15 minutes of a 45 minute long game because he wasted all his effort when it wasn't necessary, or is demoralized by losing a bit early on, though having a clear advantage later?
Random elements are part of many games exactly to test reactions, and the player's abilities to recognize situations quickly and come up with an appropriate response. Random, as in the video, isn't exactly right though - unknown is the correct term. Finally having the enemy's units revealed in starcraft changes not only the immediate reaction necessary, but how to proceed long term. Had it been an AI it could've been decided by an RNG, but I'd like to see the justification for calling it random when a player does it.
Pardon that digression;
Deterministic patterns that have an achievable perfect run doesn't have anything wrong with it as it's enjoyable in itself, quite often as a single player experience - but in the competitive context, if it leads to several people being tied for first, then there's an obvious issue.
I find it fascinating how the skill you discredit, is exactly the one that ends up being promoted with the elements you try to remove:
You need to remove perfect predictability if you want to turn the games away from becoming endurance based rythm games, and the ability to know the probabilities and plan for them is usually then introduced via unknowns (or randomness in the case of single player experiences, as mentioned). I don't understand which element you think should be introduced to change that, or which skill ends up become a factor as a result, but if you have an answer for that, I'd like a direct one.
+Riokaii I think both of you are dismissing another important addition to the Championship DX edition which is speed increase. The more your score increases in each run the faster the game gets, to a significant degree, and it will eventually reach a point where any human player will eventually commit a mistake, even if it is making a turn just slightly later than they should've. The most optimal path is also not always so apparent (like just following the dots), since they also added the gimmick of ghosts trailing after you, which leads to huge multipliers, add to that the bombs you can use to reposition all of the ghosts (including the ones following you) and the game becomes pretty complex.
You basically have to find the route where you get the max amount of score multipliers while wasting as little time as possible, and also manipulating the 4 roaming ghosts so that they don't put you into awkward situations, this leads into a lot of unconventional or clever maneuvers around the level, even skipping ghosts or swapping the order in which you complete each side of the stage, and like I said, due to the speed increase the probability of you messing up gets higher the longer you go and you will eventually unavoidably have to think on the spot to deal with the roaming ghosts because of how much microspacing affects their movement.
This is obviously not the most complex game there is, and due to its deterministic nature it's likely that players eventually figure out the best possible, unbeatable route for every level (made a lot easier with the use of TAS and etc.), executing it is another matter entirely however and I think there are a lot of elements added in that you guys didn't mention that make it so it can still be an enjoyable competitive game that rewards the skills and creativity of players.
I would literally die if I read all this
impressive gameplay
Yay! You finally came to a decision on it.
Oh sweet, you decided to post it.
You're amazing. You should do professional journalism work with your own site. Do you already? I love your work.
dynamic and endless is good for a non competitive environment, but the issue is that you have no way of comparing your skill to others outside of comparing each others montage reels. 'dude im so good check out what i did here' "nah dode what i did here was waay more skilled" you need something fixed to have a more tangible comparison for the egos.
so yeh neither is the 'correct way' it all depends on the goal of the game.
That's a nice thought experiment but in reality all serious arcade score competition games abandoned infinite loops in the 90s. When difficulty and score increase throughout the game you get to a point where all that matters is late game survival. That might be good with some games but it is very limiting and makes the early game irrelevant. Most games implement a limited loop system because trying to optimize the scoring system is more interesting than survival. Yes, it does often come down to memorizing patterns but that is even more true in endless games.
A dynamic challenge with no time limit is just as affected by randomness as one with a time limit, only instead of unfairly influencing the time it takes to complete the challenge it will unfairly cause premature deaths. In both cases, a skilled player will eventually get the higher score after a large enough amount of games. A scoring system ought to be measured only by how well it measures skill. As long as the game is dynamic, then it takes skill. As long as skill is what's being measured then players can use it to compare their skill, which is what they want out of the scoring system. There's no advantage to not using a time limit as far as scoring is concerned.
Are you aware that the ghosts names effect the way the behave.
Red = chaser
Pink = ambusher
Blue = fickle
Orange = stupid
This was more pronounced in the Japanese version where their names basically spelled that out for the player, while in English speaking countries the player was left to guess what Pokey meant.
Love your wok Matt , keep it up. Could you review Skyrim?
I would be interested in your take on the two Space Invaders Extreme games for the DS.
Matthew, A Link Between Worlds NEEDS to be reviewed by you. Please! Or at least tell us you're working on it. Once again, PLEASE!
This vid feels like a BBC2 Educational show from 3AM :P
What if the ghosts had deterministic patterns that were randomly or more likely procedurally generated? The skill would come from picking up on the patterns and using them to your advantage. Rng would still be a factor, but you really could control what types of patterns are generated so that they aren't over or underpowered, just different
I have a suggestion for your next series of reviews, the hitman games are some of my favourite game and there are not great reviews on RUclips.
*****
Yeah, but even some Professional and Silent Assassin awards felt like failure to me. Blood Money is very forgiving and allows "accidents" which don't count against you, but which absolutely feel like violent murder and imo should at least count as half a kill.
The Hitman Absolution scoring method was terrible. If you look at the scoring charts, there are thousands of people with the same top score. Some of the conditions to achieve the maximum score required you to do ridiculous things that had nothing to do with being a hitman. There are some stages where one player has a higher score than the rest of thousands tied for second. That player must have taken advantage of a bug or something. I just don't a score belongs in hitman games.
*****
I think accidents are the best way to assassinate someone. If you shoot/stab/strangle someone, then others will definitely be aware of your existence once the body is discovered and subsequently prompt an investigation. With accidents, the target's entourage will just move on without thinking it was murder. At worst, there may be evidence of malfeasance, but that could take a long time to piece together and conclude that it was murder. That's why I think the scoring in Absolution sucked because you had to hide the body to get a higher score.
My friends circle compete in Mr. Driller arcade. Beating the game is easy, but beating the game while grabbing all of the pills for points and getting through as quickly as possible for the highest time bonus is difficult!
Pac Man Plus's random power pellet outcomes make it so players can't use a pattern to auto-win. If they just used modern technology to make the game endless, then we might have perfection.
the "ideal" version of pacman you described that is "random" is a lot like call of duty
HEY YO MY MAIN MAN MATTY.M. BE BRINGING THAT CRITICAL NOISE TO THE INTERNET ONCE AGAIN!
GOTTA LOVE THIS FOOLS VIDEOS MANG THEY MAKE MY DAY! Andalsoireallydothinkhisinsightmakesforthoughtprovokingstuffidigitalotbigups
Mi biggest problem with videogame scoring system is when you always have zeroes at the end of your score no matter what you do. That is wasting memory, especially in those old games where memory was such a scarce resource.
I don't know if you left it away on purpose since you are focusing on pacman, but a high score is not always determined by points. You also can make a high score just by the time you survive. For example Super Hexagon. It's super skillfull because is's all about reactions AND learning the patterns, but it's dynamic in what order the patterns come. There is no way you can survive without focusing on the game even more that with pacman and there is no time limit. The point is you dont score, you survive as long as possible.
2 videos in one day OOOOOOOOOOH!
Thought: there are numbers that are endless and deterministic but not self-repeating (such as Pi). Is it therefore not also feasible that there can be games that follow deterministic algorhithsms but offer situations that are unaccounted for and cannot be "practised" like you can practise higher stages in Pacman? Therefore there can be games that are both endless and deterministic but do not come down to sheer endurance among top players.
Now I want to play Pac Man Championship Edition. Where's that Xbox Live Arcade compilation disc...?
Games can exist in the top-left corner (deterministic, time limited) with an effectively unlimited skill cap if perfect play is too difficult to be humanly possible, like in bullet hell shmups.
love you :3
Wish you'd post more. :(
Love your work, mate. I just can't pinpoint your accent, it's driving me mad!!!!
My mom plays Championship Edition DX religiously. She's actually in the top 5% on the PS3 leaderboards.
That is not Pac-Man Championship Edition. That is Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which is a fundamentally different game. Also Iwatani had no involvement with DX.
Daum your good at pac man
Championship II is a good competitive game for 99% of players. Championship III in DX+ bumps it up by being much tougher, to the point where it's competitive for 99.9% of players.
I'mm not positive, but I think there was better audio quality on the voice-over in this video compared to your last ones. And if it was noticable and I'm right, then I appreciate the improvement.
What's your opinion of the defining example of what a video game is, Matt? Tetris, or something else?
It looks like they fixed all the problems that the original Pacman had with Pacman 256.
Okami! Okami!
If I recall correctly Pacman Championship edition has a scoring timeless mode. So that would be the thing for competition right?
Ripping on his score system makes Pacman super angry.
I really really, REALLY, like your channel and all of the videos you've uploaded. I very much enjoy your analysis of game mechanics and I don't really find it anywhere else. I would compare you to Extra Credits, but then really get on my nerves by being overly friendly.
Toru Iwatani had nothing to do with Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, the original Pac-Man Championship Edition is the one he was involved with, not DX.
What is your opinion on the endless iOS Runner: Pacman 256?
How does Breakout provide a dynamic challenge without randomization? I didn't quite get that part. If the player always has control of the ball's trajectory and has perfect control of the paddle, can't they always get the ball to move how they want? They won't ever have to face an unexpected trajectory then right?
Because it would be pretty much impossible for a player to play Breakout perfectly. In Pac-Man, it's just a matter of moving in four directions and thus is possible to perfect. Playing Breakout perfectly would require every single paddle movement to be pixel-perfect so that the ball would be launched in a predictable way, something that's pretty much impossible for humans (Also, Matthew mentioned Breakout as a relatively simple example, modern games with 3D movement would be even harder to perfect than Breakout).
Does Matthew plans to do a critique on the Mass Effect series?
It's a nice thought provoking video however there's a flaw in your argument in regards to Championship Edition which kind of throws your argument a bit off balance.
When talking about the random ghosts intersecting in the players path and suddenly their plan is thrown off cause they can't stick to the perfect path has one mechanic that changes that: Bombs, these things which appear in the mode you were playing on appear as items you pick up from ghosts when you consume them, you have a limited number of them but the way it works is that when you use one the randoms and ghost chain is sent back to the ghost box allowing the players to recover the pellets without delay. But because there's also a limited number of them, they need to decide when its best to use them.
Using a bomb cuts the games current speed in half and the player has to wait for the speed to build up again..
This makes the run sub-optimal
Wreckt.
wow
So how does Pix the Cat compare to later Pac Man games?
A very *cheap* way to make games endlessly get harder is to make it run faster and faster. Like Tetris.
Damn ... neural input would be awesome.
Grest video, but the argument was not very clear from the beginning. I could not tell whether you were simply commenting on score, or saying the first is better than the second, or vice versa. If you stated your argument in the beginning of the video, it would have been easier to understand. :)
I personally don't see what the problem is. Sure, Pac-Man might get "solved" as it were, and top-level players would have no reason to compete anymore. But we have so many competitive games coming out all the time that players aren't exactly void of alternatives.