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AveryMaurice

Fully Functional Pac-Man Comes to Google

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For the remainder of today and the next 48 hours afterwards, Googles logo is replaced with a fully functional Pac-Man game complete with over 200 levels and the original cut scenes to mark the characters 30th birthday. Instead of the original maze, the board appears in the shape of the Google logo. This also marks the first time Google has ever made a fully-interactive "doodle".

To play it, go to http://www.google.com/ and click the "Insert Coin" button where the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button usually appears. Click this twice to enter a two player mode, featuring Ms.Pac Man as the second player.

So what are your thoughts on this? Do you think its a cool little tribute or a useless waste of time?

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I think this was the first thing I saw when I got on the computer today. F-ing AWESOME way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pacman I think. Google always comes up with some really clever site designs for different things and I'd have to say that this might be by far my favorite so far.

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What I notice is that this level is MUCH harder than the original Pac-Man maze, particularly with the dead-ends on the E and G, and the fact that the corridors don't always line up with each other, meaning you'll have to turn a lot more and might get hung up on a wall by accident. I still managed to finish this level, but died once.

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Lol. As soon as we noticed this at my workplace, we immediately hacked away at its Javascript source code, as the code monkeys we are. Surprisingly, it's not heavily obfuscated and it's quite educational to look at, after some beautifying.

For those who know, you'll have a WTF moment when you realize how they clip sprites from the PNG (keep in mind, JavaScript doesn't have a proper image buffer or canvas!) and how they play back sounds.

Other than that...enjoy ;-)

Spoiler

For all the code monkeys among us, check this out.

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Strangely, it revived my interest to play WOLFENSTEIN 3D. Guess why.

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printz said:

Strangely, it revived my interest to play WOLFENSTEIN 3D. Guess why.


Does it have anything to do with this? : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Demon

Ironically Wolfenstein 3D, a title widely thought to have later popularized the first-person shooter genre, featured a secret level based on Pac-Man and early in its development designer Tom Hall had suggested a name along the lines of "3-Demon" before id Software decided to do a semi-remake of the once popular Apple II game Castle Wolfenstein.

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AveryMaurice said:

Does it have anything to do with this?

Rather, teh muzak. The secret muzak from a very deeply hidden level.

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I saw this earlier today and played it for a bit. I got 18400 points or something like that. I like how it was a basic game instead of a picture.

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Deeforce said:

Pac-Man is great and Google is awesome! Very good! I played it and I won! :-() Now: let's play some Pac-Man Doom, yay! Pac-Man forever!


You mean you actually played through all 250 levels? I kinda doubt that. Anyone can beat level 1, I challenge you to every level! Mwhahaha.

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Some people have reported hearing police car alarms while FireFox was running.

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printz said:

Some people have reported hearing police car alarms while FireFox was running.


Wait, what?

Edit: Never mind, turns out its a sound bug which also has reported to occur in Google Chrome.

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anyone know if this can be replicated at another site so we can play later or make new maps? :3

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Maes said:

(keep in mind, JavaScript doesn't have a proper image buffer or canvas!)

Actually there is the canvas element. But they couldn't use it, because (you guess right!) every-web-developers-favorite-browser doesn't support it.

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Grubber said:

Actually there is the canvas element. But they couldn't use it, because (you guess right!) every-web-developers-favorite-browser doesn't support it.


Bingo ;-) Which means that you'll have to wait until HTML5 makes it mandatory. Which means in 3-4 years. Which is a pity, because current "AJAX graphics" rely on a lot of crude hacks such as SVG overlay, abuse of DIV tags, etc.

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Maes is right about the JavaScript. I'm surprised their clever hack actually works so well. My eyes hurt from staring at all that code now. :D

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Aliotroph? said:

Maes is right about the JavaScript. I'm surprised their clever hack actually works so well. My eyes hurt from staring at all that code now. :D


Then again...consider how it doesn't run completely smooth even on hi-end hardware because of the overhead, and compare it to the original 8-bit arcade. 30 years and several orders of magnitude of processing power later, somehow humanity came up with a tremendously inefficient way to re-implement it ;-)

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Maes said:

Then again...consider how it doesn't run completely smooth even on hi-end hardware because of the overhead, and compare it to the original 8-bit arcade. 30 years and several orders of magnitude of processing power later, somehow humanity came up with a tremendously inefficient way to re-implement it ;-)

Have you tried it on Chrome? It ran perfectly for me, but when I tried IE, it was extremely choppy.

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Mr. Freeze said:

Game of the Year all years.

You know, most old games bore me, but Pac-Man is actually really fun, all these years later.

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Danarchy said:

You know, most old games bore me, but Pac-Man is actually really fun, all these years later.


Pac-Man is timeless, just like DooM. When we are in our fifties, we'll still be playing and discussing both games.

PROTIP: Click "Insert Coin" twice and use both hands for SUPER HARDCORE MODE.

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Quite possible the most awesome thing that google has ever done and the new maze is more or less harder than the original in a very good way.

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If you just start the game and don't move it seems as though the ghosts can't get you, they just go around in circles. That is if you sit in the left space under the "T" shape under the small "g". It doesn't work though if you move out of the space and then go back into it.

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exp(x) said:

Have you tried it on Chrome? It ran perfectly for me, but when I tried IE, it was extremely choppy.


On what hardware? A Pentium IV @ 3.2 GHz has trouble in Firefox (mind you, that's still thousands of times more powerful than the arcade hardware ;-)

It creates and destroys a temporary Iframe with a flash plugin each time a sound is played. Of course unless your browser doesn't have an engine where this sort of garbage can be managed, it's bound to cause trouble in the long run. Everything I said about the overhead still holds (and it's comparatively much larger even than MAME).

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