This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1]
It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV.
Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down.
The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end).
It was a great couch 3v1 game.
The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV.
Yup - I mentioned it in an earlier comment [1], came out all the way back in 2003.
If you like this kind of "players become hero" mechanic - highly recommend checking out Crawl [2] - a local multiplayer dungeon crawler where the other players possess the monsters, and if you manage to kill the hero, you become the new hero.
Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.
This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.
wffurr 6 hours ago [-]
That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.
It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.
I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.
jader201 6 hours ago [-]
It may not be completely over, but it’s far from the focus of multiplayer gaming.
Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do.
The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did).
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007).
Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games.
(And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)
wffurr 4 hours ago [-]
It's a past that's readily accessible in the present and has carved out a niche in the gaming scene. Is that really "past"?
I fully intend to delay my kids' introduction to online play in favor of in person multiplayer as long as possible. I have had up to four 6-8 year olds playing Minecraft together on the LAN on my kitchen table already.
It's part and parcel of my whole "good screen time vs bad screen time" beliefs.
jader201 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, my kids are older now (18 and 21), but when they were younger, we definitely did plenty of LAN-party games like Minecraft, StarCraft (1 and 2), Terraria, Torchlight, and (when they were older) TFC (which we had some hilarious times playing with/against some terrible bots).
My gripe isn’t so much about what we can do, but just the fact that nobody cares as much about it these days (it’s not mainstream and most devs don’t think about it).
So while I agree the era may not be over, it’s mostly forgotten in favor of remote play without needing to be colocated.
qingcharles 4 hours ago [-]
That Pac-Man Vs. looks awesome. I'd love to try that with the full setup on GC. Even has Mario as an announcer!
csande17 5 hours ago [-]
This project appears to be vibe-coded; the game itself was added in a single squashed commit, but the author then used Claude for an extremely trivial "add a link to the bottom of the page" follow-up. The code for the game also has some comments that look pretty reminiscent of AI (e.g. describing the game board as being "validated", as in the LLM double-checked that it made sense).
As a game it doesn't seem especially well-designed. In particular the author has missed a key aspect of the original Pac-Man, which is that ghosts have to run back to the start when they're eaten and that gives Pac-Man time to freely move around and eat dots. Instead, getting eaten teleports both you and Pac-Man back to the starting positions and consumes a life. You get three lives, so it's way too easy to just tank two power pellets and then keep Pac-Man trapped in the bottom half of the level forever (aided by his not-great AI logic, as other commentors mention).
Personally, I found this take on the "Pac-Man but you're the ghosts" idea more interesting and less obviously plagiarized: https://youtu.be/96xNkL1Z_8M
hoppp 5 hours ago [-]
Based on your description you did play it. So thats a win for the author.
Sometimes I manage to make the ghost move on mobile but I don't understand how to do it in a consistent way. Maybe there should be a tap area of 90 degrees above the ghost (from -45 to +45) to move it upwards, 90 to the right to move it rightwards, etc.
arcastroe 13 hours ago [-]
On mobile, you just swipe in the direction you want to move (e.g. swipe up to go up). You can also queue the move ahead of time. So even if you are nowhere near the intersection yet, you can swipe up and trust that the ghost will automatically turn once it reaches the intersection.
arcanemachiner 11 hours ago [-]
Just like the original Pac-Man game :)
akoboldfrying 10 hours ago [-]
Could be my shitty phone, but the swipe lag is huge. I can swipe ~1s ahead of time and still miss a turn.
tonmoy 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t think you can take a turn until you hit a wall?
akoboldfrying 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think so -- I managed to turn while on long straights, but nearly always after the turn I wanted to make.
csande17 3 hours ago [-]
I think what's actually happening is that the game only counts your swipe as an input once you lift your finger off the touch screen.
You can kind of get away with that if you're implementing, like, 2048 (although the official version at play2048.co doesn't do this), but it feels way too unresponsive to be usable in an action game.
tantalor 6 hours ago [-]
The swipe controls are solid trash
rambojohnson 1 hours ago [-]
I never laughed so hard at a game. bravo. great job!
peer2pay 5 hours ago [-]
Back in the glory days of hackathons my now-wife and I wrote a multiplayer version of pac-man where one player controlled pac-man and the other was a ghost.
We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
InvisibleUp 12 hours ago [-]
Seems the solution is to immediately leave and follow Pac-Man to the bottom-right (by alternating right-down) and chase him across the long corridor on the bottom. Keep following him and you'll just catch him, since he never goes for the power pellets.
ataru 12 hours ago [-]
Pacman can escape more easily now that there's only one ghost.
Noehy 5 hours ago [-]
I actually love playing this and would love to see a more polished version. Really cool spin oon the PacMan concept.
Cool idea. Horrible controls. Reminds me of how frustrating playing pacman on my 2600 was as a kid.
serious_angel 14 hours ago [-]
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...
keyle 12 hours ago [-]
Where did you quote this from?
fphhotchips 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
vunderba 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nfw2 12 hours ago [-]
For me there seems to be latency registering the key press which results in frequently missing turns
omoikane 14 hours ago [-]
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.
staindk 12 hours ago [-]
Swipe controls on mobile worked well for me.
VectorLock 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah its AI slop without the corner easing. But maybe they can AI it better.
13 hours ago [-]
akoboldfrying 9 hours ago [-]
What about: Pac-Man, but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
x______________ 9 hours ago [-]
>but you're a dot. Time passes, ghosts pass through you occasionally, then suddenly: inky blackness.
Replace ghosts with posts and you have dictated a normal HN user's life..
flux3125 9 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of Coconut Simulator
sixothree 11 hours ago [-]
The ghosts are unable to reverse direction in Pac-Man. You should have your agent read this: https://pacman.holenet.info/
sparky_z 11 hours ago [-]
What does it mean for the ghosts to be "unable" to reverse direction? Isn't that just another way of saying that the original ghost AI was programmed to never choose to do so? There are, in fact, a lot of things they never choose to do. The whole appeal of this idea is to see if you can make better decisions than the original ghost AI.
xnx 8 hours ago [-]
Should ghosts be able to go through walls?
Chazprime 11 hours ago [-]
I’m struggling to even leave the ghost pen on iOS.
kristopolous 8 hours ago [-]
the ghost is slightly faster which makes the game winnable. thanks for that. I noticed
asadm 14 hours ago [-]
pretty nice. I had a multiplayer demo a decade back where one player would be pacman and rest would be ghosts. and it would swap as you cycle. Whoever collects most coins won.
vunderba 14 hours ago [-]
I think at one point Namco had a multiplayer Pacman Party Game which had a similar premise - whoever manages to eat Pacman gets to be him in the next round.
Your link is cut off or something. EDIT: the dot at the end is being cut off by the forum software it seems
vunderba 13 hours ago [-]
Thanks - link updated, went ahead and just percent-encoded the damn thing.
For reference - it's a Gamecube game where the other players play as ghosts released all the way back in 2003.
aiibe 5 hours ago [-]
Cool game
tommypham 14 hours ago [-]
haha just played so cool. I'm thinking of making online multiplayer game for this haha
lowlevel 13 hours ago [-]
I had this idea a very long time ago.. well before AI... so it was fun to see. Thanks... too easy tho.
paolomon 8 hours ago [-]
cool idea, good start!
VectorLock 14 hours ago [-]
Cool AI slop but the lack of corner easing like the original game makes it less fun.
epcoa 13 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about for the AI Pac-Man or the ghosts? Because the ghosts in real Pac-Man don’t have cornering.
VectorLock 12 hours ago [-]
Pac man in Pac-man has cornering.
ares623 13 hours ago [-]
Taste and care? In my slop? How dare you sir.
dfordp 13 hours ago [-]
kind of like the movie pixels :)
purple-leafy 12 hours ago [-]
should call it Nam-Cap
4 hours ago [-]
deadbabe 13 hours ago [-]
Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
1. Claude couldn’t do a proper fence algorithm for the walls?
2. Controls feel horrible.
3. It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man? You do not move fast enough and the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes for the human player to take advantage of.
4. The tile based movement is not smooth, very stuttery.
Fine for a prototype, but we could do so much better. This is not a particular hard game to code up in an afternoon or even an hour if you’re experienced.
Reubend 13 hours ago [-]
> It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man?
I caught him! So it's definitely possible. You move a little bit faster than he does so you need to anticipate where he's going.
NicuCalcea 9 hours ago [-]
You don't even need to anticipate, you can just push him towards the bottom and follow, he just goes in a loop so eventually you'll catch up. I caught him first try without thinking of any strategy. The controls are horrid though.
orphea 9 hours ago [-]
Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
Because it looks good enough to "pass". People are consuming low quality content all the time.
It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man?
Not true.
You do not move fast enough
Not true.
the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection
So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it? :)
deadbabe 4 hours ago [-]
> So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it? :)
I don’t think you understand. In games it’s not good to program an AI to be a perfect actor, because the difficulty becomes too insane for a human player. You want an AI that deliberately makes mistakes or suboptimal choices sometimes, and where its difficulty can be scaled. Being programmed for perfection is not a compliment.
latexr 8 hours ago [-]
> So is it slop or programmed for perfection, which one is it?
I’m not going to comment on the code (I abandoned the page early due to the terrible controls) but there’s no contradiction in that part you’re commenting on. “Slop” doesn’t just mean “doesn’t work”; “programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes” doesn’t mean “the code is perfect”.
To output text in a terminal you could use `echo`, but you could also write a 500 line function which does a bunch of unrelated garbage then finally outputs the text perfectly (i.e. no mistakes). That doesn’t mean the code is good or even acceptable or desirable, even if the outcome is technically correct.
orphea 7 hours ago [-]
Fair enough!
blharr 10 hours ago [-]
Just down vote and move on. You're helping them generate better slop by providing input like this
latexr 8 hours ago [-]
You can’t downvote submissions, only comments.
csomar 13 hours ago [-]
> 3. It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man? You do not move fast enough and the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes for the human player to take advantage of.
It's not impossible. I just did. You just have to corner the man into an impossible situation. But I agree on the AI-slop or lack of quality production.
Rendered at 19:13:17 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV.
Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down.
The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end).
It was a great couch 3v1 game.
The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV.
I miss the era of couch multiplayer games.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Land
If you like this kind of "players become hero" mechanic - highly recommend checking out Crawl [2] - a local multiplayer dungeon crawler where the other players possess the monsters, and if you manage to kill the hero, you become the new hero.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524414
[2] - https://www.gog.com/en/game/crawl
This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.
It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.
I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.
Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do.
The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did).
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007).
Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games.
(And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)
I fully intend to delay my kids' introduction to online play in favor of in person multiplayer as long as possible. I have had up to four 6-8 year olds playing Minecraft together on the LAN on my kitchen table already.
It's part and parcel of my whole "good screen time vs bad screen time" beliefs.
My gripe isn’t so much about what we can do, but just the fact that nobody cares as much about it these days (it’s not mainstream and most devs don’t think about it).
So while I agree the era may not be over, it’s mostly forgotten in favor of remote play without needing to be colocated.
As a game it doesn't seem especially well-designed. In particular the author has missed a key aspect of the original Pac-Man, which is that ghosts have to run back to the start when they're eaten and that gives Pac-Man time to freely move around and eat dots. Instead, getting eaten teleports both you and Pac-Man back to the starting positions and consumes a life. You get three lives, so it's way too easy to just tank two power pellets and then keep Pac-Man trapped in the bottom half of the level forever (aided by his not-great AI logic, as other commentors mention).
Personally, I found this take on the "Pac-Man but you're the ghosts" idea more interesting and less obviously plagiarized: https://youtu.be/96xNkL1Z_8M
https://pacman.fandom.com/wiki/Maze_Ghost_AI_Behaviors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1PnNSF350
You can kind of get away with that if you're implementing, like, 2048 (although the official version at play2048.co doesn't do this), but it feels way too unresponsive to be usable in an action game.
We didn’t quite manage to make it fun to play but it sure was a huge amount of fun hacking it together!
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2736#comi...
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.
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.
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.
Replace ghosts with posts and you have dictated a normal HN user's life..
EDIT: Found it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E
For reference - it's a Gamecube game where the other players play as ghosts released all the way back in 2003.
1. Claude couldn’t do a proper fence algorithm for the walls?
2. Controls feel horrible.
3. It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man? You do not move fast enough and the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes for the human player to take advantage of.
4. The tile based movement is not smooth, very stuttery.
Fine for a prototype, but we could do so much better. This is not a particular hard game to code up in an afternoon or even an hour if you’re experienced.
I caught him! So it's definitely possible. You move a little bit faster than he does so you need to anticipate where he's going.
I don’t think you understand. In games it’s not good to program an AI to be a perfect actor, because the difficulty becomes too insane for a human player. You want an AI that deliberately makes mistakes or suboptimal choices sometimes, and where its difficulty can be scaled. Being programmed for perfection is not a compliment.
I’m not going to comment on the code (I abandoned the page early due to the terrible controls) but there’s no contradiction in that part you’re commenting on. “Slop” doesn’t just mean “doesn’t work”; “programmed for perfection so it does not make deliberate mistakes” doesn’t mean “the code is perfect”.
To output text in a terminal you could use `echo`, but you could also write a 500 line function which does a bunch of unrelated garbage then finally outputs the text perfectly (i.e. no mistakes). That doesn’t mean the code is good or even acceptable or desirable, even if the outcome is technically correct.
It's not impossible. I just did. You just have to corner the man into an impossible situation. But I agree on the AI-slop or lack of quality production.