Your path into the center may be either path D or path E, depending upon the danger posed by the monsters.Īfter Chart 6, merely clear the energizers, without worrying about chasing monsters. When you get to the northwest corner in Chart 6, eat some dots (you don't have to eat the energizer at this point) and then get the symbol a second time. If you do, you will rack up 6000 bonus points (400 + 800 + 1600 + 3200).įor Charts 5 and 6, follow the patterns. You will often be able to eat all four monsters as you continue along the path shown in Chart 4. Then continue clockwise, eating the symbol when you get to point C, you will start eating the invisible monsters. On Charts 3 and 4, hesitate and make a brief reverse at point B. When you approach point A in Chart 2, you may be tempted to move away from the light blue monster. Scores will vary because points per board completed fluctuate even more in P+ due to the larger monster-eating bonuses.įor Charts 1 and 2, just follow the path as depicted. Most players will have a six-figure score by that time. The pattern in Figure 1 works consistently up through the first Galaxian board and sometimes a board or two beyond that, depending upon the player's timing. The Pac-Man Plus boards are arranged as shown in Table 1. In the slow game, the first several boards are quite easy to clear improvisationally the pattern can be used to clear the advanced boards. (In conventional Pac-Man, the 100,000+ scorer must memorize several patterns.)Īs is the case with Pac-Man, there are two types of Pac-Man Plus games, a fast game and a slow game. The pattern is fairly easy to learn and is the only one that must be memorized for the first ten boards or so. I have developed a pattern that should allow the average player to score about 100,000 points on P+. When the monsters are in their vulnerable state, they occasionally become invisible, and one monster occasionally remains in his normal, dangerous predatory condition. Points awarded for eating monsters after eating a symbol (not an energizer) are twice as high as in the conventional game (400, 800, 1600, and 3200 points, respectively).ģ. The monsters revert to their vulnerable state if the player "eats" either an energizer or a symbol (only the energizer causes this transition in Pac-Man).Ģ. But there are key differences from the original game:ġ. Pac-Man Plus (I'll refer to it as "P+" from now on) has the same board layout as conventional Pac-Man (shown in Figure 1). The coin-op manufacturers went to court and succeeded in getting a ruling making these illegal.) The Pac-Man Plus chip, which fits into the regular Pac-Man cabinet, is legal because it is manufactured by Bally, the makers of the original game. One of the new games, Pac-Man Plus, has a secure place in the annals of the arcade history because it is the first widely-used legal "speed-up chip." " (In 1982, third party manufacturers began producing revised chips for some of the coin-ops to make it more difficult for players to score millions of points and tie up the machines for hours on end. It's good news once again for methodical, cerebral-type players, because both of these renditions, in varying degrees, can be mastered by using patterns. Bally, mindful of the Pac-Pot of gold behind the well-known smiling yellow video megastar, soon came out with two more versions which have been popping up in arcades across the country over the last several months. (I have seen some patterns that lead to high Ms Pac-Man scores, but they don't work with the consistency of the Pac-Man patterns.) Pac-Man because, unlike the Pac-Man monsters, the new pursuers did not move in totally predictable patterns through the maze. In early 1982, the first Pac-Man spin-off appeared on the scene, a distaff version of the monster maze game, called Ms. Some patterns enabled players to continue almost indefinitely. Hundreds of players racked up enormous Pac-Man scores, well into the millions, using pre-determined patterns of movement through the maze. It far out-scored the two previous hits: Space Invaders, which is credited by many with starting the arcade explosion in 1979, and Asteroids, the star of 1980. Pac-Man, of course, is The King Of The Coin-Op Games. In this article, Ken brings us up-to-date on how to play the two recent Pac-Man variations now popular in the arcades. Mastering Pac-Man was listed for weeks on best-seller lists across the country, including those of The New York Times and Publishers' Weekly 1.7 million copies of this classic were printed. Ken Uston is the author of Mastering Pac-Man (Signet Books, January, 1982), the first and most widely-sold book on how to play the classic arcade game.
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