CAS 117

Yihao He

Game Analysis

The game I would like to analysis today is a maze arcade game developed and released by Namco in
1980, Pac-Man. The original title of this game is called Puck Man in Japan at the beginning, since this
game is released internationally, they change the name to Pac-Man. Cause the game is so succeed and
so famous, Namco did released it in a lot of different platform including Apple II, Atari 2600/5200,
Commodore 64, Gameboy, etc.

The setting of the game is really simple, all player need to do is control the Pac-Man and eat all the dots
inside the enclosed maze without To be touched by four colored ghosts. But, I order to give the player
enough power to balance the energy strength, player can eat the ghosts by eat the large flashing dots
first, and then in the next few seconds, the player will be able to eat those ghosts and get the extra
credit. The score system makes the players trying to get the high test score with the prefect movement.

The whole game do not have an end, and there is no background story behind this game. But without a
obviously remind of the game rule, there is a lot of hidden rule that can be discovered by the players, for
example, players will get an extra life for every 10,000 point the player earn, or different ghost have
different behavior, and so on.

I think because of the limited elements it contains, it seems like this game can be remastered in to any
platform. I played it in a website. And the whole purpose is really comfortable to me. There is no stuck
and also do not have a lot instruction to the game. I just click the start and the game started.

Due to the simple design of the game menu, I was kind of confuse at the beginning. The rule of the game
need to be found out by the players themselves. Which makes The players a little struggle at the
beginning, but also makes the players want to dig deeper to find out the rule of Pac-Man’s world. I like
this kind of design, and also the background music is really fit this game, the narrows and space feeling
really moves me a lot. But the endless repeating and simplex mode makes me lost my interested to this
game very soon.

In my opinion, there is some thing can be improvement to this game, like more different mazes, more
different of enemy, difficulty can be increased with the level increase. More background music to avoid
the tried of listening experience.

When it comes to the parts that makes me learned a lot, there is a lot. But the most expressive part to is
the purpose to discover the rule of this game, dig deep into the game and find out the rule of the enemy
that is part I’m going to put into my design.