Video games - Ms. Pac-Man

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	Video games - Ms. Pac-Man

Ms. Pac-Man is a popular arcade game released by Midway in 1981. The sequel to Pac-Man
, it is considered by many fans to be superior to its predecessor. It was also one of the more successful of early arcade games as its sales record is still unmatched.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Ms. Pac-Man is largely identical to that of Pac-Man, with a few differences.

There are now four different mazes, with different colors and "filled-in" walls (compared with the original Pac-Man's hollow walls). Each maze has two pairs of "warp tunnels" connecting the right and left sides of the maze (except for the third maze which only has one set of tunnels). The maze is changed after each of the first three intermissions.
The ghosts have pseudo-random movement, which precludes the use of patterns to beat each board.
The two "fruits" on each level now enter through one of the warp tunnels, wander around the maze for a while, then (if not eaten) eventually leave through a warp tunnel.
Clyde is replaced by another orange ghost named Sue, who was later turned purple in Pac-Land
to differentiate her from Clyde.

There are also a few cosmetic differences. The character controlled by the player is now Ms. Pac-Man, resembling Pac-Man with eyeliner, lipstick, a bow, and a beauty spot. There are new sound effects including new music at game start and a new "death" sound.

There are three new intermissions:

#"Act 1 - They Meet": Pac-Man is chased by Inky, Ms. Pac-Man is chased by Pinky; the monsters bonk heads, the Pac-Men escape, and a heart appears between them. #"Act 2 - The Chase": Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man chase each other quickly across the screen five times, with more speed each time. #"Act 3 - Junior": A stork drops off a bundle containing a tiny Pac-Man (later reused in the attract mode for Jr. Pac-Man).

Like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man suffers from a bug in the fruit-drawing routine, which renders the 256th board unplayable. While it may be possible to reach the 256th board using the "rack test" cheat available as a DIP switch (usable through MAME or other arcade emulator), the actual arcade hardware will crash around the 143rd board. At this point in the game, the data tables used to determine the maze and ghost behavior for a particular level are exhausted and invalid data is loaded. Eventually, a corrupt value is loaded into the pointer to the maze data, and the game becomes unplayable. There is a black screen and the only things available on the 143rd level are the ghosts and Ms. Pac-Man. In a sense that is the final maze but you can't beat it. So once you beat the 142nd stage then you have beaten this game.

History

Ms. Pac-Man was originally conceived as a bootlegged hack of Pac-Man called Crazy Otto, created by programmers under employ at the General Computer Corporation (GCC).

The programmers, surprised at the quality of the game they had created, showed it to Midway, Namco's American distributor of the original game. Midway had become impatient in waiting for Namco to release their next Pac-Man game (which would be Super Pac-Man
), and were enthusiastic that such a game had come to their attention. They bought the rights to Crazy Otto, changed the sprites to fit the Pac-Man "universe," renamed the game Ms. Pac-Man and released it into arcades. The game is considered by many to be Midway's answer to the question of how they could get girls to play their games.

After the game became wildly popular, Midway and GCC undertook a brief legal battle concerning royalties, but because the game was accomplished without Namco's consent, both companies eventually turned over the rights of Ms. Pac-Man to the parent company, fearing a lawsuit. Nonetheless, Ms. Pac-Man was the first of a series of unauthorized sequels that eventually led to the termination of the licensing agreement between Namco and Midway.

Ms. Pac-Man was later released on the third Namco Museum
game, however there is no mention of it in Namco's official archives (including the archives on all of the Namco Museum releases).

Home versions

Like many other games of its era, Ms. Pac-Man was ported to many home computer and gaming systems. It has also been included in Namco's, Microsoft's and Atari's late 1990s series of classic game anthologies.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Ms. Pac-Man ]

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