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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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..
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.
For 400+ lines of html, not bad, even if it is AI generated: https://github.com/garritfra/pac-hunt/blob/main/index.html
Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.
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!
"Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story."
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
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.
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 never laughed so hard at a game. bravo. great job!
I’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.
haha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha
the ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed
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.
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.