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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Nostalgia

Today I played my old version of Tengen Ms. Pacman again for the first time in many years.  There was a contest at "Hot Toyz" at the New Park Mall in Newark, CA.  Thanks to Jeff Yonan who arranged the contest and invited me to watch.  I didn't participate because, well,  that would be cheating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QKAS2TQ9tE

The above link shows some footage of the game.  The comments mention that a guy at Tengen did the game in four months without access to the source code.  Well,  that guy is me,  and while I didn't have access to the source code I did have an arcade machine in my cubicle wired up with a pause button.  I was able to do pixel perfect graphics and mazes by using that pause button a lot.

Amazingly (no pun intended) I just realized this afternoon that Pacman and Fat Jumper have similar themes,  sort of.  Maybe I'll put cherries, strawberries, apples, pears and bananas into Fat Jumper,  as a tribute.  Is it legal to put a banana into a game and make it worth 5000 points?  Well,  this is a non-issue anyhow because in Fat Jumper the food isn't going to be worth points anyway.  You'll want avoid the food!

I saw a few things in the game that I didn't remember putting in.  For example,  there's a "fruit" in there that's actually a badge from the never released Tengen Police Academy game. It's a star with the letters PA in the middle. Now that's some truly obscure trivia.  There's also some ads for Klax and Toobin',  two other Tengen NES games.   That's in-game promotion of other games way back in 1990.

-- fxl


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