Comment by Teknomadix

1 day ago

Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.

    The code was written by Claude, unfortunately, and hence no controls were probably even considered, or no tokens were left.
    I jumped in with the love in mind, too, but when I checked the source repository, and saw the actual source... and then the contributors... it was... I am sorry... it hit hard...

> Horrible controls.

Interesting! I found them mostly ok, but I was playing with a keyboard. They definitely remind me of the controls of Pacman games I grew up with where (as sibling comment notes), you have to decide where you're going before you get there.

I wonder if tweaking the input buffering or adding some frames after the turn where you 'snap-back' would help, similar to ghost jumps in Mario.

  • I grew up playing Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man in dimly lit arcade parlors and bowling alleys.

    The controls in this version are, for lack of a better word, sluggish compared to the tight responsiveness of the originals on a four-way joystick or using a keyboard with MAME. Even when you press an arrow key to "move" the ghost, there’s a noticeable delay, almost like it’s polling for the key-up event instead of the key-down.

  • For me there seems to be latency registering the key press which results in frequently missing turns

I find that you have to decide which direction to turn before the turn.

Once I got that figured out, it was mostly a race to catch pacman along the long straight path at the bottom edge with the ghost's superior speed.