I played Pac-Man Vs. with some friends last night, the latest from Wizard Shigeru Miyamoto. This game is perfectly simple, the Pac-Man we all know and love, but with the character's roles turned upside-down.
Connect three regular controllers and a Game Boy Advance with your Gamecube. The basic rules are the same - three ghosts (Blinky, Stinky & Creaky or whatever their names are) chase Pac-man around a maze. The three players with regular controllers are the "ghosts," and Pac-man is the player with the GBA. While the ghosts have only a limited field of vision, Pac-man gets to see the entire board on the GBA's screen. The ghost who catches Pac-Man trades their controller for the GBA, and the cycle continues until one player achieves a certain score. At any given moment, 3/4 of the players find themselves playing from the unfamiliar vantage point of Pac-man ghost.
The game starts slow, but once you get a taste of being Pac-Man, you're hooked. There is an illicit thrill in seeing the entire board when your opponents cannot, multiplayer games usually don't partition the visual information and clues this way. The ghosts attempt to corner and catch Pac-Man before he eats all the pellets. Of course, the Pac-man player is privvy to the ghosts' strategy and adjusts his or her plan accordingly. This also creates a prisoner's dilemma among the ghosts, since only one of them can catch Pac-man, but if they don't cooperate none of them will succeed. The most loyal and valuable ghost may never get to play Pac-man, and therefore will finish with the lowest score.
Pac-Man Vs. debuted for an underwhelmed audience at the E3 conference this past year (although some saw the potential right away). Nintendo fans are very similar to Apple users, always sticking up for their underdog platform of choice. Even when the big name games and software titles are slow to migrate over, the focus on a well rounded user experience never wavers.
In an interview with IGN.com, Miyamoto and Toru Iwatani (the inventor of Pac-man) talk a little bit about the design process and priorities involved with the the production of the game:
Pacman itself is already a complete game. We did not wish to add power ups or items to the open buttons and lose the beauty of Pacman being playable with only the control pad. Keep things "as simple as possible" was the most important message we were giving to the development team.
and a brief discussion of the "Nintendo way" of making video games:
I believe interactiveness is everything. Historically, videogames have evolved by stimulating the gamer but I believe that we are now concentrating too much on only "giving" this stimulation. Of course I am involved in "giving" the player new stimulation, but I would like the player to voluntarily feel it. For instance when Link from the Legend of Zelda pulls on a lever and a grand demo movie shows a door opening, I think this is a "giving". I would not make it so pressing a button pulls a lever, Link would merely hold the lever. Then the player can use the controller to "pull" and open the door. I concentrate on this interactiveness the most.
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High spec hardware is good to have, of course, but if the game creators can relax and create, I don't see the necessity to concentrate on selling high specs. There will always be a computer in between the player and monitor. Programmers ask me "What is going to happen to my job in the future?", and I've answered that there would always be a job if you can program.
Good advice for producers and programmers of all media, not just video games.
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