![]() ![]() Additionally, the ghost AI isn't very good, so with a little practice it's easy to get them stuck in an infinite loop, during which you can take a break. It's just about survival and clearing maze after maze. Good news is, the power pellets stop working, so you don't have to worry about getting points from ghosts anymore. Pac-Man actually reverts to his level 2 speed, making recovery from a missed turn very hard - on the flipside, the slower speed makes pattern execution much easier. A good "slow board" pattern will clear the board in under a minute, meaning the remaining 235 levels will take about about 3 hours. You will use the same pattern over and over until either you make a mistake and die or reach the end. From that point on, every single level you will play for the rest of the game will be exactly the same. This can happen anywhere between 1-2 hours into the game, depending on how good your patterns are and how fast your grouping is. The game changes entirely at level 21, turning into a pure endurance run. Here is a table outlining how the game changes between each level (Elroy is the term for how Blinky accelerates once a certain number of dots have been removed from the maze - I have no clue where it comes from, and it seems most people don't either). It only takes 1 mistake over 2 hours - perfect run over, try again. Messing up a pattern means either death or having to switch to manual grouping, and if you aren't really good at it, you can easily miss a ghost or lose a life. You have about 10 seconds after the end of a level to remember the next pattern you need and how to execute it. Some patterns may work for multiple levels, but most don't. It's a necessarily skill, especially when the pellets start lasting for only 1 second). (Manual grouping being guiding the ghosts through the maze a certain way so that they stack directly on top of each other and stay that way. This means that each level plays slightly differently, and you need to learn either manual grouping or a dozen or so different patterns. There are also three different scatter/chase timers over these levels. The speed values of Pac-Man and the ghosts change 3 different times, and the number of dots remaining for Blinky to go faster bumps up 8 or so times. In my opinion, most of the challenge in reaching the killscreen comes from the first 20 levels. If you want an in-depth read on what reaching the killscreen is like, it's down below: Being able to miss a ghost or die one or two times removes a lot of the burden. Just getting to the killscreen is much easier - a lot of the difficulty of the perfect score is playing for 3-4 hours without making any mistakes. On paper, a perfect Pac-Man seems easy, but it's an extreme test of focus and endurance. How easy is it to get a perfect score (or even to just get to the kill screen) in Pac-Man? Is what the other person in the thread accurate? It's nice for all this knowledge to finally be of some use □ Pac-Man takes longer than one of Pac-Man, even though the killscreen happens at level 132. As a result, each board takes considerably longer to clear and awards less points from the random fruit. It's completely uncontrollable, which means that you have to manually group the ghosts and then execute patterns from there. However, unlike Pac-Man, the RNG seed is taken from the Z80's DRAM register, which updates several times per frame every time a CPU instruction finishes. Additionally, the fruit that spawns on level 8 and onwards is chosen randomly. For the first 7/5 seconds of every maze (pre/post level 5), Blinky and Pinky move randomly, continuing regular behavior when the first chase window begins. Pac-Man introduces two new sources of randomness. There is no randomness in the game nor ghost movement outside of when they are frightened, and their frightened behavior can be controlled with patterns. The rng function pulls from the game state, not player inputs or some other pseudo-random seed, so preforming the same actions will lead to the same output every time (you don't have to be frame perfect, just buffer inputs correctly). Bit of a late response, but I figured some might still be interested in the technicalities if they come across this later. ![]()
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