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Tag: PAC-MAN

  • Salesforce A Has Building With An Awesome Pac-Man Wall

    Salesforce A Has Building With An Awesome Pac-Man Wall

    Businesses can expect to see a lot of Saleforce news this week as the company kicks off its big Dreamforce event on Tuesday. According to Forbes, it could just be THE conference of the year for entrepreneurs and startups.

    In fact, the news has already been coming out with a big announcement last week about the new Salesforce App Cloud.

    While it’s not exactly a major news story, Business Insider points us to a video from Chris Kubbernus that shows a pretty awesome Pac-Man video wall that Salesforce has in one of it’s building. It’s just too cool not to share.

    The wall reportedly appears in the lobby of 50 Fremont, which is part of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. It’s apparently the ninth tallest building in the city.

    All I know is that I want one of these walls in my house.

    On a sidenote, if you simply Google the word “pacman” Google serves you an answer box with a playable Pac-Man Google Doodle, which it ran on its homepage a few years ago.

    Screen Shot 2015-09-14 at 8.59.57 AM

    Images via YouTube, Google

  • Stop Working and Go Play Pac-Man in Google Maps

    I don’t know if you have important things to get done today, but if not you should probably head over to Google Maps and play some Pac-Man.

    It’s almost April Fool’s Day, and Google is starting a bit early. The company has just introduced PAC-Maps, which will turn any streetmap into a giant game of Pac-Man, considering there are enough streets in said area to support it.

    This leads to super fun, often impossible Pac-Man stages through places like New York City and Barcelona. I haven’t tried PAC-Maps in Boston yet. I don’t know if I want to.

    “With local place information and Street View, it’s easier than ever before to find where you’re going but there’s never been anything to let you know where *not* to go. With this update, we’ve added imagery of dangerous virtual beings, starting with Pinky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde. When navigating fruit-filled streets, determine at a glance which turns to pass to evade ghosts and get where you’re going safely. When you’re feeling a bit peckish, you can simply gobble up a few pac-dots or a cherry and keep on nommin’. PAC-Maps makes navigating around select locations as simple as left, right, up or down,” says a post on the Google Lat-Long blog.

    You can play on desktop, iOS, and Android. There are going to be a lot of crappy April Fool’s jokes coming from tech companies this week. This is not one of them. This is awesome. Enjoy.

  • Bud Light’s Super Bowl Ad Features Giant, Real-Life Pac-Man

    If a Super Bowl ad with a slightly drunk bro getting chased by giant, lit-up ghosts inside a giant, lit-up real-life Pac-Man game, featuring generic EDM, with the sole prize of more bud light doesn’t scream America, 2015, then I don’t know what does.

    Bud Light has just dropped (at least part of) its Super Bowl XLIX commercial. The company is sticking with the “Up for Whatever” theme it’s been running since last Super Bowl. This time, a dude finds a giant quarter in the middle of the sidewalk, and when he inserts it into a giant coin slot, doors open and he’s inside a real-life Pac-Man game.

    For many people, the commercials are the only reason they watch the Super Bowl. That, and the likely never-ending discussion of Tom Brady’s deflated balls. Does this one bode well for this year’s crop? I dunno, what do you think?

  • The Atari E.T. Game Land Fill Legend

    The Atari E.T. Game Land Fill Legend

    The year is 1983. The Alamogordo Daily News reported in September that between 10-20 (actually 14) semi-trucks coming from a storehouse in El Paso, Texas, traveled 90 miles to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. At night, they would unload, cover deep within the earth, and seal with concrete, Atari boxes, cartridges, consoles, and the shame brought with their creation.

    Among the gizmos lay purged was one of art’s greatest abominations: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Atari videogame. An estimated 750,000 copies lay crushed in their dusty graves; the cause of death being rock-bottom sales due to abysmal quality by rushed development.

    Whispers of what happened that day trickled into an urban legend of doubt, intrigue, and mystery… until…

    31 years later.

    On Sunday, at 12:45pm MDT, a film documentary seeking out the video game grave yard teamed up with Xbox Entertainment Studios and Lighbox Entertainment, went back to that old landfill and dug up the remains. There, in front of hundreds of spectators, revealed the epitome of what was one (of many) man’s trash, to be a treasured relic of gaming history.

    The E.T. Atari cartridge did not die alone; several cases of the game Centipede, Pac-Man, and others games were also found, surprisingly, to be in very good condition despite three decades – unfortunately none of them were playable.

     

    There’s a notion in the video game industry that the licensed movie adaptations of video games (and vice versa) wind up becoming laughable flops. The Atari E.T. game competes as one of the worst video games in history, but, as with all art, found a way to be enjoyed.

    Besides the novelty of his lovable wrinkly testicle-like face, critics found the gameplay of collecting Reese’s pieces and part of E.T.’s phone to be a repetitive and vicious cycle; try to watch the following without any hint of irritation:

    Doesn’t it just take you back?

    Image via YouTube

  • Pac-Man Is Making A Comeback This Fall

    Does anybody remember Pac-Man World? The trio of ill-fated 3D platformers never really did much in terms of sales, but Namco still dried its hardest to push its on-and-off again mascot into the third-dimension. After a successful revival of Pac-Man’s core 2D gameplay, it looks like Namco is going to try for a 3D platformer again.

    Namco announced that it will release a new 3D platformer later this year called Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures this fall. Check out the first trailer below:

    Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures will be out this fall on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U, PC and Nintendo 3DS.

  • Help Choose The Look Of Pac-Man’s Next Outing

    There has not been a “new” Pac-Man in quite some time. The last major iteration of the classic franchise came with Pac-Man Championship Edition. It’s been ported to just about every other platform since its original release on Xbox Live Arcade. Now Namco is ready for the next proper Pac-Man game, and needs a little help from the fans.

    Namco asked their Facebook fans yesterday to choose the look of the next Pac-Man game. There are four options to choose from, and they are all radically different from one another. In fact, some of the designs hearken back to the early days of Pac-Man when he was more abstract and the ghosts were actually kind of threatening.

    Help Choose Pac-Man's Next Character Design

    The current favorites seem to be C and D. Both designs are callbacks to previous Pac-Man designs without looking too retro. There are also a few votes for B, but we can rest easy knowing that many people don’t like the look of A. I’m partial to D, but that’s more because of the ghosts’ designs.

    It’s still unknown at this point what kind of game Namco could be making. It’s obvious that the game will probably be for mobile devices, but a console version is definitely not out of the question at this point. It all really depends on what Namco can do with the franchise. Pac-Man CE was about as perfect as the core formula can get. They could attempt another 3D platformer like Pac-Man World, but I doubt fans would want anything other than classic old-school Pac-Man.

    You can make your voice heard over at Namco’s official Facebook page.

  • Ms. Pac-Man Goes 3D with This Immersive Gaming Experience

    Growing up in the last couple of decades, it’s a safe assumption that you’ve played Ms. Pac-Man at some point in your life. But I bet you’ve never played it like this.

    In a feat of immersive gaming, some true visionaries built and displayed a 3D version of the game that surrounds the player on both sides and on the ceiling – as well as the traditional front screen.

    The installation demoed at the Babycastles Summit at the Museum of Art and Design, and is a creation of Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy. Being chased by those ghosts has never looked so stressful.

    “When Ms. Pac-Man moves from the wall to the ceiling…what was right is now up, what is up is now left,” says one player. Yeah, I can imagine this would take at least a few minutes to get the hang of.

    [Kotaku via MAKE]

  • PAC-MAN Fan Film Deserves to Become a Full Length Feature

    The video starts out with a sexy reporter covering a series of unexplained power outages that continue throughout the state of Nevada. She moves on to say that the source of the outages is believed to be the Maze Compound, which lies 600 feet below the desert’s surface.

    The secrecy surrounding the purpose of the facility has led many people to speculate about the research that is going on within its confines. Especially Project Yellow Sphere.

    The news shows documents that suggest the compound has been developing remote controlled weapons technology in connection to artificial intelligence.

    The camera then pans to the Maze Compound where scientists and military officials are experimenting in Tron-like environments with PAC-MAN at its center.

    One of the most interesting points in the video is the spin on PAC-Man’s purpose. It is revealed that the organism is a “polymorphic, autonomous, compound manipulator programmed to seek out, catch, and consume e-hazards … like oils spills and reactive leaks.”

    This revelation definitely opens the flood gates for PAC-MAN to be come an eco-friendly super hero and protector of the earth.

    I would love to see a full-length movie script birthed from this scene. It could definitely become a summer blockbuster.

    Twitter users enjoyed it as well:

    (image)@CRUSHGROOVES
    JEFF PINES    Impressive Fan Made Pac-Man Film – http://t.co/VdwXFkpt(image) 17 minutes ago via shareaholic_ ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@jjordanmossy
    James Jordan    Incredibly Awesome PAC-MAN Fan Film http://t.co/HBCTh77M via @GeekTyrant(image) 31 minutes ago via Tweet Button ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@Chris_Zeta
    Chris Zeta    Stupendo! PAC-MAN The Movie – Fan Film http://t.co/7RHdAsFg via @leganerd(image) 54 minutes ago via Tweet Button ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@spotvin
    spotvin    Words cannot express…http://m.geektyrant.com/news/2012/4/5/incredibly-awesome-pac-man-fan-film.html(image) 1 hour ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    The short film was written by James Farr.

  • Huge Pac-Man Game Chomps at IE 9

    It’s becoming quite common nowadays to show off when a discussing Internet browsers, especially when they launch. From Mozilla’s love of infographics and cool-looking maps, to Google’s use of “pop-up” reminders for visitors who show up sporting anything but Chrome, the browser war is every bit a display of who can pimp their browser the best, if nothing else.

    In fact, the desire of the big three — Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome (sorry Opera) — to outdo one another runs so deep, new version releases like Firefox 4 and IE 9 are celebrated for about as long as it takes to create the pages for the upcoming versions. Granted, that’s overstating it some, but to say there isn’t an strong undercurrent of “the next big thing” feeling would be a mistake.

    With that in mind, it appears has if Internet Explorer 9 is new enough to continue the celebration of its improvements, such as support for HTML 5. According to Gizmodo.com, in order to help flex some of IE 9’s new muscles, Soap Creative developed what they refer to as The World’s Biggest Pac-Man, a browser-based game based on the famous dot eating ghost chaser.

    In order to earn its title, the game features a large number of user-generated maps. These individual maps are linked together to incorporate a much larger map, all of which must be cleared before the master map is considered beaten. So far, it’s not even close to completion; however, the fact these user-generated maps use the same style as the original game is a nice touch.

    Some screenshots:

    World's Biggest Pac-Man game
    World’s Biggest Pac-Man, primary map. Click for larger image

    World's Biggest Pac-Man game, made with IE9 in mind


    As you can see with the second image, there’s no mistaking which environment the game is celebrating, but that being said, when these screenshots were taken, the browser of choice was Firefox 3.6.12.

    The games worked fine.

    As mentioned, each tile in the main map links to an individual user-created map, of which, there are over 5000, provided the statistics are current:

    World's Biggest Pac-Man game

    World's Biggest Pac-Man game


    What’s next? User-generated Galaga games for Firefox 5? Actually, that sounds like a winner. Who knows? At the rate these browser games are growing, coupled with the competitive spirit of the developers and companies involved, it wouldn’t be surprising if Internet Explorer 10 has a working version of World of Warcraft embedded in its code.

  • Google Releases Playable PAC-MAN Doodle

    Google Releases Playable PAC-MAN Doodle

    Google has released a really cool playable doodle of PAC-MAN to celebrate the game’s 30th birthday.

    The Google Blog offers all the fun details. "Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the ‘Insert Coin’ button or just wait for a few seconds."

    Google-PAC-MAN

    Google says it has included all the original sounds and graphics of the original PAC-MAN along with an easter egg for Ms. PAC-MAN.

    "We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys)."