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.
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.
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.
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...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.
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.
Why are people still upvoting obvious AI slop garbage?
It’s literally impossible to catch Pac-Man?
You do not move fast enough
the Pac-Man AI is programmed for perfection
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.