This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1]
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.
Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.
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.
I came to mention the same game. I have many fond memories of playing co-op games on the Gamecube with my cousins back in the day (Mario Party, Shrek 2, Lego Star Wars… Pac-Man Fever). But Pac-Man Vs. was possibly my favorite. It had the novelty factor because of the Gameboy link, but it doesn’t feel gimmicky or cheap - it makes a classic game better in such an elegantly simple way.
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.
Yup - I mentioned it in an earlier comment [1], came out all the way back in 2003.
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.
That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.
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.
It's a past that's readily accessible in the present and has carved out a niche in the gaming scene. Is that really "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.
Oh, my kids are older now (18 and 21), but when they were younger, we definitely did plenty of LAN-party games like Minecraft, StarCraft (1 and 2), Terraria, Torchlight, and (when they were older) TFC (which we had some hilarious times playing with/against some terrible bots).
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 project appears to be vibe-coded; the game itself was added in a single squashed commit, but the author then used Claude for an extremely trivial "add a link to the bottom of the page" follow-up. The code for the game also has some comments that look pretty reminiscent of AI (e.g. describing the game board as being "validated", as in the LLM double-checked that it made sense).
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
Sometimes I manage to make the ghost move on mobile but I don't understand how to do it in a consistent way. Maybe there should be a tap area of 90 degrees above the ghost (from -45 to +45) to move it upwards, 90 to the right to move it rightwards, etc.
On mobile, you just swipe in the direction you want to move (e.g. swipe up to go up). You can also queue the move ahead of time. So even if you are nowhere near the intersection yet, you can swipe up and trust that the ghost will automatically turn once it reaches the intersection.
I think what's actually happening is that the game only counts your swipe as an input once you lift your finger off the touch screen.
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.
What does it mean for the ghosts to be "unable" to reverse direction? Isn't that just another way of saying that the original ghost AI was programmed to never choose to do so? There are, in fact, a lot of things they never choose to do. The whole appeal of this idea is to see if you can make better decisions than the original ghost AI.
The original ghosts had specifically written patterns:
Blinky chases pac man where he is. Pinky targets 4 spaces in front of you. Inky targets based on Blinky and Pac's positions. Clyde sticks to a corner until you get too close.
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
Ghosts can only change direction at intersections. Otherwise it's just not Pac-Man. It's one of the many many other maze games from this time period. Pac-Man means something just as much as "vintage maze game" means something.
Seems the solution is to immediately leave and follow Pac-Man to the bottom-right (by alternating right-down) and chase him across the long corridor on the bottom. Keep following him and you'll just catch him, since he never goes for the power pellets.
This reminded me of a high school thing we had with my colleagues.
There was Java game called Pac-Man that had multiplayer built-in that was based on a Bluetooth connection. One of the players was Pac-Man and up to 4 players were ghosts. What a great game. We played it non stop for the whole semester. Even during boring classes.
Back in the glory days of hackathons my now-wife and I wrote a multiplayer version of pac-man where one player controlled pac-man and the other was a ghost.
We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
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.
I grew up playing Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man in dimly lit arcade parlors and bowling alleys.
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.
pretty nice. I had a multiplayer demo a decade back where one player would be pacman and rest would be ghosts. and it would swap as you cycle. Whoever collects most coins won.
I think at one point Namco had a multiplayer Pacman Party Game which had a similar premise - whoever manages to eat Pacman gets to be him in the next round.
Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
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.
You don't even need to anticipate, you can just push him towards the bottom and follow, he just goes in a loop so eventually you'll catch up. I caught him first try without thinking of any strategy. The controls are horrid though.
> So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it?
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.
> So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it? :)
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.
> 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.
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.
This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1]
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Land
Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.
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.
I came to mention the same game. I have many fond memories of playing co-op games on the Gamecube with my cousins back in the day (Mario Party, Shrek 2, Lego Star Wars… Pac-Man Fever). But Pac-Man Vs. was possibly my favorite. It had the novelty factor because of the Gameboy link, but it doesn’t feel gimmicky or cheap - it makes a classic game better in such an elegantly simple way.
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.
Yup - I mentioned it in an earlier comment [1], came out all the way back in 2003.
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.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524414
[2] - https://www.gog.com/en/game/crawl
That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.
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.
It may not be completely over, but it’s far from the focus of multiplayer gaming.
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.)
It's a past that's readily accessible in the present and has carved out a niche in the gaming scene. Is that really "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.
Oh, my kids are older now (18 and 21), but when they were younger, we definitely did plenty of LAN-party games like Minecraft, StarCraft (1 and 2), Terraria, Torchlight, and (when they were older) TFC (which we had some hilarious times playing with/against some terrible bots).
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.
That Pac-Man Vs. looks awesome. I'd love to try that with the full setup on GC. Even has Mario as an announcer!
I had a version of this for old Nokia phones (Symbian), playing via blutooth. Really fun
Pac-Man Vs. is also available on the Switch.
This project appears to be vibe-coded; the game itself was added in a single squashed commit, but the author then used Claude for an extremely trivial "add a link to the bottom of the page" follow-up. The code for the game also has some comments that look pretty reminiscent of AI (e.g. describing the game board as being "validated", as in the LLM double-checked that it made sense).
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
The game, for those without YouTube access, is https://distractedcoder.itch.io/reverse-pac-man.
Based on your description you did play it. So thats a win for the author.
You should add inky and pinky so you can corner pacman. Their movement is dependent on blinky, so you would be in control of all 3.
https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/Maze_Ghost_AI_Behaviors
If you go left or right as the first move on mobile you can't get out of the box. Pretty frustrating.
It's not imposible, but I agree that it's very hard.
I'm making a version where you're a pellet.
"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1PnNSF350
It's a Sim City like god game where you have to build up life on the pellet as much as possible until some startlingly-fast pac-man eats it.
Sometimes I manage to make the ghost move on mobile but I don't understand how to do it in a consistent way. Maybe there should be a tap area of 90 degrees above the ghost (from -45 to +45) to move it upwards, 90 to the right to move it rightwards, etc.
On mobile, you just swipe in the direction you want to move (e.g. swipe up to go up). You can also queue the move ahead of time. So even if you are nowhere near the intersection yet, you can swipe up and trust that the ghost will automatically turn once it reaches the intersection.
Could be my shitty phone, but the swipe lag is huge. I can swipe ~1s ahead of time and still miss a turn.
I don’t think you can take a turn until you hit a wall?
I don't think so -- I managed to turn while on long straights, but nearly always after the turn I wanted to make.
I think what's actually happening is that the game only counts your swipe as an input once you lift your finger off the touch screen.
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.
Just like the original Pac-Man game :)
The ghosts are unable to reverse direction in Pac-Man. You should have your agent read this: https://pacman.holenet.info/
What does it mean for the ghosts to be "unable" to reverse direction? Isn't that just another way of saying that the original ghost AI was programmed to never choose to do so? There are, in fact, a lot of things they never choose to do. The whole appeal of this idea is to see if you can make better decisions than the original ghost AI.
The original ghosts had specifically written patterns: Blinky chases pac man where he is. Pinky targets 4 spaces in front of you. Inky targets based on Blinky and Pac's positions. Clyde sticks to a corner until you get too close.
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
Ghosts can only change direction at intersections. Otherwise it's just not Pac-Man. It's one of the many many other maze games from this time period. Pac-Man means something just as much as "vintage maze game" means something.
Should ghosts be able to go through walls?
The less dots there are the easier to "freeze" the game https://files.catbox.moe/g03iwa.gif
The swipe controls are solid trash
What about: Pac-Man, but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
>but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
Replace ghosts with posts and you have dictated a normal HN user's life..
This reminds me of Coconut Simulator
Seems the solution is to immediately leave and follow Pac-Man to the bottom-right (by alternating right-down) and chase him across the long corridor on the bottom. Keep following him and you'll just catch him, since he never goes for the power pellets.
Pacman can escape more easily now that there's only one ghost.
This reminded me of a high school thing we had with my colleagues. There was Java game called Pac-Man that had multiplayer built-in that was based on a Bluetooth connection. One of the players was Pac-Man and up to 4 players were ghosts. What a great game. We played it non stop for the whole semester. Even during boring classes.
[dead]
Pac-Man: Chaos version
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.
Incredible concept. It's a little easy to figure out how to game the pac-man's movement, but I can't stress enough: incredible concept.
For 400+ lines of html, not bad, even if it is AI generated: https://github.com/garritfra/pac-hunt/blob/main/index.html
AI generated? The humanity!
Back in the glory days of hackathons my now-wife and I wrote a multiplayer version of pac-man where one player controlled pac-man and the other was a ghost.
We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.
Where did you quote this from?
> Horrible controls.
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.
I grew up playing Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man in dimly lit arcade parlors and bowling alleys.
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.
For me there seems to be latency registering the key press which results in frequently missing turns
I find that you have to decide which direction to turn before the turn.
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.
Swipe controls on mobile worked well for me.
Yeah its AI slop without the corner easing. But maybe they can AI it better.
"Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story."
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
I actually love playing this and would love to see a more polished version. Really cool spin oon the PacMan concept.
pretty nice. I had a multiplayer demo a decade back where one player would be pacman and rest would be ghosts. and it would swap as you cycle. Whoever collects most coins won.
I think at one point Namco had a multiplayer Pacman Party Game which had a similar premise - whoever manages to eat Pacman gets to be him in the next round.
EDIT: Found it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E
Your link is cut off or something. EDIT: the dot at the end is being cut off by the forum software it seems
Thanks - link updated, went ahead and just percent-encoded the damn thing.
For reference - it's a Gamecube game where the other players play as ghosts released all the way back in 2003.
I never laughed so hard at a game. bravo. great job!
I’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.
the ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed
haha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha
I had this idea a very long time ago.. well before AI... so it was fun to see. Thanks... too easy tho.
Cool AI slop but the lack of corner easing like the original game makes it less fun.
Are you talking about for the AI Pac-Man or the ghosts? Because the ghosts in real Pac-Man don’t have cornering.
Pac man in Pac-man has cornering.
Taste and care? In my slop? How dare you sir.
kind of like the movie pixels :)
Cool game
cool idea, good start!
should call it Nam-Cap
Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
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.
> It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man?
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.
You don't even need to anticipate, you can just push him towards the bottom and follow, he just goes in a loop so eventually you'll catch up. I caught him first try without thinking of any strategy. The controls are horrid though.
> So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it?
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.
Fair enough!
> So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it? :)
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.
> 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.
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.
Just down vote and move on. You're helping them generate better slop by providing input like this
You can’t downvote submissions, only comments.