Hangly-Man
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Hangly-Man is a hacked clone of the Pac-Man arcade game. It appeared sometime around 1981, at the height of the Pac-Man craze. "Hangly" is said to be an Engrish corruption of the word "hungry". The word only appears in the phrase "Bonus Hangly-Man at 10000 points", which is displayed when a coin is deposited.
Hangly-Man was typically in a Pac-Man case, implying that it was a regular Pac-Man game. When a coin was inserted, the Hangly-Man name would appear on the screen instead of Pac-Man, along with the company name "Nittoh" (which is hot tin spelled backwards). A 1981 date appeared on the screen, but there was no copyright notice.
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[edit] Character names
Hangly-Man used the original Japanese Pac-Man's ghosts' names:
- The red ghost was Oikake, nicknamed Akabei
- The pink ghost was Machibuse, nicknamed Pinky
- The light blue ghost was Kimagure, nicknamed Aosuke
- The orange ghost was Otoboke, nicknamed Guzuta
[edit] Game description
The major difference from the original Pac-Man game is that the first two boards and every even-numbered board after that are slightly altered versions of the original maze. The third board and every odd-numbered board after that are not mazes at all, but contain only the ghost house, the board's boundary outline, and the pills, arranged in straight vertical and horizontal lines. On these levels, in addition to the horizontal sideways left/right escape passage; there is also a vertical one connecting the top of the screen and the bottom, which the ghosts cannot enter. If the player moves the Pac-Man to anywhere in this passage, and then pushes the joystick to the left or right as far as it will go; the Pac-Man will become stuck in that position, and the monsters cannot catch him, even if he is far enough out that they can touch him. But releasing the joystick or simply moving up or down frees him, so one cannot leave the game running with this method.
Otherwise, the game-play, sound and graphics are exactly like Pac-Man, except that the original patterns are not possible being that the mazes are different. In many copies of the game, an added feature on the even numbered boards was that when an energizer was eaten, the entire maze turned invisible until the energizer wore off. In some, it would remain invisible until the player loses a life.
In addition to this game, there was an older hack version with a different altered maze, sometimes called "Scandal", and sometimes called simply "Puck-Man", the Japanese name for the original game. Ms. Pac-Man also had several hack versions in which the mazes were changed.
There was even a hack of this hack called Caterpillar Pac-Man made in 1981 by Phi. In this game you play as a caterpillar, and the ghosts are replaced by four spiders.
[edit] Ports
Because there were so few differences between Pac-Man and Hangly-Man and because the game was a bootleg, Hangly-Man was never ported to home video game systems or computers. However, there have been efforts by some homebrew game developers to port Hangly-Man to classic game consoles such as the Atari 5200 [1], and the Atari 7800 [2].
[edit] External links
| Pac-Man Series | |
| Arcade titles | Pac-Man – Ms. - Super – Plus – Baby – Pac & Pal – Jr. – Professor – Pac-Land – Pac-Mania |
| Console & Handheld titles | Pac-Attack – 2: The New Adventures – Pac-In-Time – Collection – Vs. – Pac-Pix |
| Pac-Man World subseries | World – World 2 – World 3 |
| Pac-Man World spin-offs | Adventures in Time – Maze Madness – Fever – Pac 'n Roll – World Rally |
| Mario Kart Games | Arcade GP - Arcade GP 2 |
