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ms. pac-man

Did this geek spend 11 months filming a stop-motion arcade tribute?

It's good to have hobbies. Some people just have more unusual hobbies than others. Michael Birken says he spent 11 months playing with Post-it notes. He wasn't writing memos or reminders, he was sticking them on the wall to create an elaborate stop-motion video tribute to his favorite classic games. He calls it Post-it Note Arcade.

The video includes footage of both Ms. Pac-Man and Mario. Birken says he recorded actual gameplay footage and then printed the images out, one frame at a time, to replicate on the walls around his office. He spent holidays and weekends posting the little pieces of paper up and filming the results. It's probably just as well his co-workers didn't have to witness this madness.… Read more

Ms. Pac-Man gets full-room 3D treatment

The phrase "immersive experience" gets bandied about quite a bit, but it's often an overstatement -- unless you happen to be in a room completely surrounded by a fully playable Ms. Pac-Man game.

Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy, got to experiment with a variety of video games for the recent Babycastles Summit at the Museum of Art & Design in New York.

Takahashi's new take on Ms. Pac-Man involved projecting it onto the walls and ceiling of a room. It looks like what would happen if Tron and Ms. Pac-Man got together, minus the glowing skin-tight suits.… Read more

Artificial intelligence takes on Ms. Pac-Man

For the last 30 years, Pac-Man's estranged wife, Ms. Pac-Man, has been consuming countless coins and hours from gamers at arcades across North America.

Philipp Rohlfshagen, David Robles, and Simon Lucas, all of the University of Essex, recently launched a competition called Ms. Pac-Man vs. Ghost Team for those wanting to rewrite the flow of the classic chomper. The contest, held last week in New Orleans at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2011, was an open call for savvy Java programmers to create artificial intelligence routines that either control where Ms. Pac-Man or the four ghosts should go during gameplay. If you can't beat them, hack them.

Programming a successful strategy for a game like Ms. Pac-Man in real time is very complicated (click here for the software). A more competitive version of Ms. Pac-Man was used in the exhibition; fruits were omitted and the speed of Ms Pac-Man and the ghosts were identical. Entrants to the competition weren't allowed to use screen captures to navigate. They were required to directly interface with the game engine instead.… Read more

Ms. Pac-Man's still got it

NEW YORK--It seems people like any excuse to play any video game.

While Halo III and Guitar Hero may be drawing a crowd at DigitalLife 2007, so were classics like Ms. Pac-man.

Namco had a large space at DigitalLife to remind gamers that video games of the '80s are now available for their phone.

Namco offers games like Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Mr. Do, Popeye, Snoopy and the Flying Ace, Galaga and even board games like Scene It?.

The games are available, regardless of your carrier, for the Palm OS, Windows Mobile phones, the iPod and the Sidekick, as … Read more