Pac-Man, but you're the ghost
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It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV.
Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down.
The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end).
It was a great couch 3v1 game.
The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV.
I miss the era of couch multiplayer games.
It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.
I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.
Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do.
The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did).
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007).
Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games.
(And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)
I fully intend to delay my kids' introduction to online play in favor of in person multiplayer as long as possible. I have had up to four 6-8 year olds playing Minecraft together on the LAN on my kitchen table already.
It's part and parcel of my whole "good screen time vs bad screen time" beliefs.
My gripe isn’t so much about what we can do, but just the fact that nobody cares as much about it these days (it’s not mainstream and most devs don’t think about it).
So while I agree the era may not be over, it’s mostly forgotten in favor of remote play without needing to be colocated.
This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.
If you like this kind of "players become hero" mechanic - highly recommend checking out Crawl [2] - a local multiplayer dungeon crawler where the other players possess the monsters, and if you manage to kill the hero, you become the new hero.
TIL my favorite Namco game was designed by Miyamato lol. I wonder if the Gameboy link was sort of a pilot program or a seed of the concept of the Wii U. I always wanted to try the Wii U but it never really had a “killer app” and I think the were very few games that took advantage of the gamepad.
It’s a shame that we’ll probably never get a unique console like that again since it was a huge financial failure that almost ruined Nintendo.
As a game it doesn't seem especially well-designed. In particular the author has missed a key aspect of the original Pac-Man, which is that ghosts have to run back to the start when they're eaten and that gives Pac-Man time to freely move around and eat dots. Instead, getting eaten teleports both you and Pac-Man back to the starting positions and consumes a life. You get three lives, so it's way too easy to just tank two power pellets and then keep Pac-Man trapped in the bottom half of the level forever (aided by his not-great AI logic, as other commentors mention).
Personally, I found this take on the "Pac-Man but you're the ghosts" idea more interesting and less obviously plagiarized: https://youtu.be/96xNkL1Z_8M
You can kind of get away with that if you're implementing, like, 2048 (although the official version at play2048.co doesn't do this), but it feels way too unresponsive to be usable in an action game.
They only reverse on their own when the mode changes or you get a power pellet, otherwise they have to wait until a corner, otherwise you end up with behavior like you see in this where you both quickly dance back and forth on the otherside of a wall
Replace ghosts with posts and you have dictated a normal HN user's life..
Once I got that figured out, it was mostly a race to catch pacman along the long straight path at the bottom edge with the ghost's superior speed.
The code was written by Claude, unfortunately, and hence no controls were probably even considered, or no tokens were left.
I jumped in with the love in mind, too, but when I checked the source repository, and saw the actual source... and then the contributors... it was... I am sorry... it hit hard...Interesting! I found them mostly ok, but I was playing with a keyboard. They definitely remind me of the controls of Pacman games I grew up with where (as sibling comment notes), you have to decide where you're going before you get there.
I wonder if tweaking the input buffering or adding some frames after the turn where you 'snap-back' would help, similar to ghost jumps in Mario.
The controls in this version are, for lack of a better word, sluggish compared to the tight responsiveness of the originals on a four-way joystick or using a keyboard with MAME. Even when you press an arrow key to "move" the ghost, there’s a noticeable delay, almost like it’s polling for the key-up event instead of the key-down.
We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
One person plays pac-man
Two people play the 4 ghosts, 1 stick for each ghost on a dual stick controller.
One person plays the floor, and can rotate the game world clockwise or counter-clockwise.
EDIT: Found it.
For reference - it's a Gamecube game where the other players play as ghosts released all the way back in 2003.
1. Claude couldn’t do a proper fence algorithm for the walls?
2. Controls feel horrible.
3. It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man? You do not move fast enough and the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes for the human player to take advantage of.
4. The tile based movement is not smooth, very stuttery.
Fine for a prototype, but we could do so much better. This is not a particular hard game to code up in an afternoon or even an hour if you’re experienced.
I caught him! So it's definitely possible. You move a little bit faster than he does so you need to anticipate where he's going.
It's not impossible. I just did. You just have to corner the man into an impossible situation. But I agree on the AI-slop or lack of quality production.
Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man?
You do not move fast enough
the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection
I’m not going to comment on the code (I abandoned the page early due to the terrible controls) but there’s no contradiction in that part you’re commenting on. “Slop” doesn’t just mean “doesn’t work”; “programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes” doesn’t mean “the code is perfect”.
To output text in a terminal you could use `echo`, but you could also write a 500 line function which does a bunch of unrelated garbage then finally outputs the text perfectly (i.e. no mistakes). That doesn’t mean the code is good or even acceptable or desirable, even if the outcome is technically correct.
I don’t think you understand. In games it’s not good to program an AI to be a perfect actor, because the difficulty becomes too insane for a human player. You want an AI that deliberately makes mistakes or suboptimal choices sometimes, and where its difficulty can be scaled. Being programmed for perfection is not a compliment.