
Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior - r11t
http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior
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csytan
To me, this was the most interesting part of the article:

“To give the game some tension, I wanted the monsters to surround Pac Man at
some stage of the game. But I felt it would be too stressful for a human being
like Pac Man to be continually surrounded and hunted down. So I created the
monsters’ invasions to come in waves. They’d attack and then they’d retreat.
As time went by they would regroup, attack, and disperse again. It seemed more
natural than having constant attack.” \- Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator

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holyjaw
It's interesting to revisit Pac-Man so many years later. As a kid, it was
always just a game with unpredictable behavior, incomprehensible in its
abstractness. Dissecting it now and providing concrete detail to every
movement feels like one of those "destroying my childhood" moments.

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orangecat
My reaction was the opposite. Now I know why my Pac-Men were
disproportionately killed by the red and pink ghosts, and learning that their
"unpredictable" behavior is the result of simple but clever algorithms makes
it even more impressive.

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m-photonic
The link is down for me, but I remember reading about this on another website;
the coverage is probably of similar quality between the two.

[http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...](http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html#Chapter%204)

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m-photonic
Heh, at the time I posted I hadn't seen that the exact same site was actually
linked in the article itself. Having now read the article I have to say this
is a great idea for a site and I'll be following it with some interest.

Also you should do Sonic next. ;-)

<http://info.sonicretro.org/SPG:Solid_Tiles#Slopes_And_Curves>

<http://info.sonicretro.org/SPG:Rolling>

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RexRollman
Wonderful article. I still play Pacman occasionally thanks to Mame, even
though I am much more of a Mr Do! fan (which I also play in Mame).

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igrekel
Ah, how it brings back memories! I did suspect this level of sophistication.

It also remembered me of that talk about collaborative diffusion which used
pacman as an sample application. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiobjects>

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silvertab
That was so much more interesting than I anticipated! Never was a big Pac-Man
fan, and I guess I always assumed that the ghosts were just aiming directly
for Pac-Man! To learn that they each have their personalities and targeting
mode is awesome and makes the game much more interesting!

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moses1400
awesome freaking post - i love pac man (i actually prefer ms pac man) and it
was well worth the very long and detailed review.

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wahnfrieden
That link is down, but you can see the full article at their homepage too:
<http://gameinternals.com/>

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elliottcarlson
Both links work fine for me though the server seems pretty slow at the moment.

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Deimorz
tumblr seems to be going up and down, I don't know if that's normal or if I
just had bad timing posting this. If it is actually normal I might have to
reconsider using it.

I also had some issues with the sheer number of incoming requests overwhelming
my server that I've got the images hosted on, but I think I've got that
resolved now.

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lotusleaf1987
If you're interested in this you might also check out King of Kong is also an
interesting documentary on Donkey Kong and the world record holders. Also,
it's one of the better documentaries I've seen.

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Deimorz
It's an entertaining movie, but I don't like to see it referred to as a
"documentary". They did a lot of manipulative editing and such to make things
seem a lot more dramatic than they actually are.

Twin Galaxies released a number of statements about misleading/inaccurate
things in the movie: <http://forums.twingalaxies.com/viewforum.php?f=86>

I've heard that the documentary "Chasing Ghosts" is very good, but haven't had
a chance to watch it yet.

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lotusleaf1987
After seeing the movie/documentary it's really hard to take anything Twin
Galaxies says as credible and that link is just a bunch of Billy Mitchell
apologists.

