| World's Biggest Pac-man | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Soap Creative |
| Platform(s) | HTML5 |
| Release date(s) | April 13, 2011 |
| Genre(s) | Arcade Game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player with multiplayer interaction |
| Media/distribution | Web browser |
World's Biggest Pac-Man is a browser game created by an Australian Soap Creative along with Microsoft and Namco-Bandai. It is a Pac-Man game which differs from the original by having multiple players playing together in a series of user-created, customizable and interlocking mazes. The game was announced at the Microsoft MIX Developer Conference on April 13, 2011.[1]
The game was built as a HTML5 project for Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 9 as well as a way for Namco-Bandai to celebrate the original Pac-man’s 30th birthday and to promote the future releases of Pac-man games. A week after launching it had 13,500 user-designed mazes and nearly 300 million dots eaten. Created as a community tribute to the original Pac-Man, it follows the guidelines that Namco-Bandai originally set for Pac-Man. The project is supposed to be community-driven and a team of moderators keep an eye out for any offensive mazes that might be created.[2]
Anyone feeling a nostalgic buzz can visit the site and start playing by clicking on any maze. In order to create your own mazes and to post your high-scores for the world to see, users need to sign in using Facebook Connect. Although created Internet Explorer 9 on mind, The World’s Biggest Pac-Man is playable on any browser supporting HTML5.[3]
Contents |
The gameplay for World’s Biggest Pac-Man is similar to classic Pac-Man. There are a few different things that you can do on World’s Biggest Pac-Man that differ from the classic version. Players construct maps and these are laid out side by side to form a single massive map, where every map is connected to other maps that other players have been creating. To create a maze a Facebook account is required, and it is accessed via the Facebook Connect platform. The game also has high score tables that players can attempt to top, either by competing against themselves or against other countries via country rankings. The player also has the option to show off the high scores online via Facebook.
Levels can be exited through any of the four exits provided, each on a different side of the maze. These allow players to hop in any of the adjacent levels, so leaving one maze and trying your luck on the next one is simple.
One aim of the game besides eating all the Pac-Dots is avoiding being eaten by the ghosts. Running in to a ghost will kill Pac-Man, unless of course Pac-Man has been lucky enough to have eaten a Power Pellet. These pellets, which can be more or less strategically placed when creating a maze, will make ghosts edible to Pac-Man and turns the table completely, since now the ghosts are running away from Pac-Man instead of him being chased by the ghosts. In the original game the ghosts are hunted in a very defined pattern of Scatter, Chase and Repeat.[4] This behaviour however has not been well emulated in the World's Biggest Pac-Man game, where the ghosts just aim for Pac-Man all the time.
| Enemy Color | World’s Biggest Pac-Man[5] | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Character | Nickname | Alternate character |
Alternate nickname |
|||
| Red | chaser | red guy | Shadow | Blinky | ||
| Pink | ambusher | pink guy | Speedy | Pinky | ||
| Cyan | fickle | blue guy | Bashful | Inky | ||
| Orange | stupid | slow guy | Pokey | Clyde | ||
The fruits on World’s Biggest Pac-Man give the player the opportunity to earn additional points. The fruits randomly appear on the maps and it is not mandatory for the player to retrieve them as they are only a secondary aim and will not affect the completion of the level. There are 8 different types of fruits that can be collected and they each give Pac-Man a different amount of extra points.
In World's Biggest Pac-Man the player has an option to leave the maze before it has been completed, i.e. Pac-Man does not have to get all the Pac-Dots. Exiting a level can be done by going through one of the four exits in the maze which each let Pac-Man to try his luck on the adjacent maze. In order to complete a level, Pac-Man is however required to have eaten all the dots.
World’s Biggest Pac-Man offers the option to create your maze and this feature is what defines this game and makes it different from the original one. User has to be connected to Facebook in order to create a maze, otherwise the levels are only playable for fun and no mazes can be created.Adding a maze to a certain location has been made easy, just hover a pointer to the plus sign which can be found adjacent to other mazes and press create. Instructions are given to the user on how to use the creation tool, where there is a pencil to use for creating walls, dots and power pellets, and a rubber which can be used to remove any mistakes or changes. The creating tool also has a time limit of 60 minutes which should be more than enough to create a maze, but if it is not enough, more than one maze can be created. The user has the option to reset the maze but the time limit does not reset when doing this. Once the maze is finished and the user is happy with the results, they have the option to preview their work or simply just submit it, and it would be added to the vast and growing world of all the other mazes other users have created on World’s Biggest Pac-Man. At the moment the game has a grid of 4,000 x 4,000, which supports 16 million levels.[6]