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The ghosts are programmed for randomness, so there isn't a pattern that exists to beat it-the ghosts behave differently in each game. It wasn't long before everybody knew the patterns to beat Pac-Man. If you zigged and they zagged, they'd do the exact same thing in a similar situation. The ghosts, you see, weren't programmed for randomness. You could beat it by memorizing patterns. Pac-Man when it was thought impossible due to randomized ghost movement. I just came across an article from 1984 revealing how a secret "hold" position was actually discovered (through extensive trial-and-error) in Ms.
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(You'd use the hold in order to go to the bathroom, get a bite to eat, and then continue playing - assuming you had a compatriot who would make sure no one touched the machine.) I heard legends of Pac-Man players (think Billy from King of Kong) who had racked up unbelievably high scores by memorizing the ghosts' nonrandom movements and liberally using the hold positions over multi-day marathon sessions.īut the nonrandom ghost behavior is specific to the original Pac-Man. There were stories of people playing the game for days at a time by using the "hold" position - a specific location on each board where you could park Pac-Man and he'd never be hit by a ghost, since the ghosts moved in a repeating pattern. Now, the original Pac-Man was famous among game nerds for its nonrandom ghost behavior. (I must have assumed that her little red bow was the killer feature.) Pac-Man to the original Pac-Man, but I don't recall ever getting an answer about why. I was never any good at it - never much good at any arcade games, really - but my father and brother were skilled Ms.
#Ms pacman game patterns movie#
Pac-Man in my youth, sometimes plugging my entire $3 allowance into the machine at the movie theater, or the one at the pizza parlor near my grandmother's house.
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