Our good buddy Pete from Game Head was also at the Pac-Man event yesterday, and he heard a little something about us while he was there...
Microsoft rep #1: "Hey, has anyone seen Pac-Man anywhere?"
Microsoft rep #2: "I think MTV has him in the bathroom...for real."
Wondering just what sort of hijinks we were up to? Well you'll have wait and watch the G-Hole later on to find out. MWAHAHA...
At the Pac-Man World Championships, we ran into the man that Xbox 360 fanboys and girls know and love -- namely, Major Nelson (whose real name is Larry Hyrb), the Director of Programming for Xbox Live. He keeps gamers informed of all things Xbox on his blog, including the new Pac-Man Championship Edition, available at 5 a.m. EST tomorrow. Major -- er, Larry -- was a cool guy, and he had us laughing our asses off with his enthusiastic explanation of the whole event (despite his bad run-ins with Pac-Man at the workplace). If there were achievement points for being entertaining, Major Nelson would get the full thousand.
Pac-Man has lasted for 26 years and with new mazes and modes on the way, it'll reach generations beyond what creator Toru Iwatani ever imagined. In fact, it already has: above is a photo of 13 year-old James Rodgers, who is the U.K. champion and placed sixth overall (ahead of legend Billy Mitchell who placed eighth). We didn't get a chance to talk to him, but I heard through the grapevine that he and his dad saw that the tournament was coming up and decided to use their quality time together just beefing up their Pac-Man skills (I guess they don't play catch in the U.K.). That's a pretty amazing feat for such a young kid. But he better watch out, because Billy Mitchell Jr. plans to live up to his dad's legacy:
So Jaded Cynic had the opportunity to get his Pac-Man marquee signed by two Pac-Man legends -- creator Toru Iwatani and Billy Mitchell, the first person ever to score a perfect score (3,333,360) in Pac-Man in 1999. When we interviewed Iwatani for our upcoming G-Hole segment, he said he had no idea a perfect score could be achieved -- that is, until Billy came along. However today, in this tournament, Billy placed eighth overall (I guess the new version of Pac-Man threw him off a bit). Regardless, Billy was as nice as could be, signing autographs, giving interviews and handing out bottles of his proprietary hot sauce:
Okay, so I have problems. Number one: I’m a nerd. Number two: I collect things. Number three: I try to do my best to be creative when combining the first two things. Case in point: when the opportunity arises for me to have a few minutes with the creator of one of my all-time favorite video games, I seize it and then go the extra mile.
Continue reading "Pac-Man Marquee + Creator = Awesomeness" »
Apparently, I’m the designated Pac-Man enthusiast for MTV.com. So much so, that my co-workers thought it would be a good idea for me to actually play against (read: get destroyed by) the newly crowned Pac-Man World champion, Carlos Romero, in an upcoming episode of our videogame show, The G-Hole. So what happened?
It’s kinda sad; I wasn’t even close. I barely broke 90,000 points in fives minutes of the Pac-Man Championship Edition, and Carlos scored somewhere in the realm of 170,000. I'll admit that he's far superior to me, but he also had a whole day (and an entire tournament’s worth) of practice. It was the first time I even saw the game...
Continue reading "Getting Beat at Pac-Man Championship Edition in Five Minutes" »
Speaking of Pac-Man, today we headed over to the first-ever Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championships. In a nutshell, gamers qualified to be in the finals by having the highest Pac-Man score in their region (on Xbox LIVE Arcade, of course). The finalists then headed to New York City to participate in the World Championships. After four intense rounds during the wee hours of the morning, the ten finalists were whittled down to two: Austria's Robert Glashuettner and Mexico's Carlos Romero. But the biggest surprise of all was not who were in the finals, but what they were playing....
Yep, that's right. A brand new rendition of Pac-Man -- the Pac-Man Championship Edition, which had creator Toru Iwatani working on new mazes for the lovable, pellet-muncher (the first in over 26 years!). Our own Jaded Cynic got a chance to play the game for five minutes. Click here to read his initial impressions (and how he got his butt whupped), then hit the jump to see more photos of the event...
Continue reading "Pac-Man World Championships: We Came, We Saw, We Didn't Conquer..." »
The most amazing thing I’ve seen today… at least until the Smash Bros. site goes live. If Pac-Man were real, this is what his skeleton would look like:
The sculpture was done by artist Le Gentil Garçon in 2004. One more step towards my dream of making Pac-Man a reality...
Centipede and Millipede are two classic arcade games that were released for download last week via Xbox Live Arcade. The games come as an addition that might tug at the heart strings of some of the older gamers on Xbox Live, and leave some of the younger ones in the dust. The titles were stalwarts in the arcades of yore, complete with some of the best arcade cabinet art to this day, and were played with a trackball and just one button. The games translate extremely well to the much more powerful Xbox 360, and comes complete with a couple extra modes, as well as achievements (and everyone loves achievements). This game is a must-have for any retro-gamer worth his quarters.
That’s right. Super Contra, the sequel to one of the greatest co-op games of the 8-bit era, Contra, will soon be available for download via the Xbox Live Arcade. The announcement was buried in Konami’s newsletter. Bill and Lance are back one year later to fend off the invading aliens in South America, with their huge arsenal of weapons. Unfortunately, this will be the arcade version that most current gamers most likely won't remember (and not the NES Version, Super C). But, on the upside there is the chance to whip out the Konami code once again.
