Evan’s Been Playing- Ms. Pac-Man
Well, this is really embarrassing. I haven’t really played a lot of games this past month. However, I have a high quality excuse in that I was attending Tribeca Film Festival in one weekend of April, and had a blast of a four day weekend at PAX East 2016 immediately afterwards. I did a lot of demoing, interviewing and hustling about the expo that whole weekend, resulting in the coverage of about 8 games and a concert. You can find all my TYF @ PAX East content here.
Other than that, I haven’t played much. However, when in an uncommonly vacant Boston Convention and Expo Center, I stopped by PAX’s freeplay arcade and played on a Ms. Pac-Man game cabinet for the first time ever. Ms. Pac-Man played almost exactly like Pac-Man, but stars his very pretty wife. I actually wanted to check my facts so as to be respectful to her true relationship to the Pac-Man, because I was genuinely confused by why she was titled Ms. Pac-Man if she was, in fact, married. Wouldn’t she be named Mrs. Pac-Man? Nope. She, just decided to keep the Ms., but let’s not get too caught up in the lore of Pac-Man, because if I go too far searching to answers I may not like what I find.
It was a fascinating experience playing any arcade cabinet from the 1980’s like this, really, as it was in the hour and a half that normal attendees of PAX were filing into the convention hall, including my three friends that would be with me last Friday who didn’t have the good graces of a media badge. So while the majority of this hallway was empty, the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet sat alone, outside the vacant Freeplay room, calling to me. If you’ve read Ready Player One you may be thinking “oh great, he’s just copying what happened in the book.” First of all, that chapter is fantastic, amd I understand why you’d think that, but second, no I did not get a “Perfect Game of Pac-Man.” I did, however, play for a solid 25 or 30 minutes and lost complete track of time while munching away at the dots and cherries, and dodging Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Sue.
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