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A Playable PAC-MAN On Google Doodle

Posted by kdawson on from the game-will-never-be-over-not-really dept.

Kilrah_il and several other readers made sure we noted Google's tribute to PAC-MAN on its 30th anniversary — a playable game implemented in JavaScript. "'To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it's too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the "Insert Coin" button or just wait for a few seconds.' There is also an Easter egg for those who want to recall one of the first multi-player games, but you'll have to RTFA to find it." This doodle may overshadow the Official PAC-MAN 30th Anniversary Destination.

12 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Meh by swanzilla · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm holding out for Q-Bert.

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    0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
    1. Re:Meh by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 5, Funny

      And in 7 years, you still won't be able to get more than 24 FPS out of the cinematics.

    2. Re:Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The ghosts don't stay blue forever. They work just fine.

      Sure, they had to compromise on the map to make it spell "Google". Oh well.

      The ghost logic is supposedly the same as in the original game. It's possible that it doesn't work as well on this map, though.

      Excuse me? Are you too much of a not-hardcore classic gamer to have the mental capacity understand the GP's very simple statement? If it's not clock-cycle-perfectly-identical to the original arcade box, it's COMPLETELY AND WHOLLY WORTHLESS and a waste of our precious, precious time.

      Time which could be better spent tweaking MAME so that it renders Pac-Man down to the nearest billionth of a second in timing accuracy. Or time which could be better spent scouring the internet for more replacement parts for our pristine arcade Pac-Man games. Geez. Don't you understand ANYTHING about how pedantic classic gamers work?

  2. Productivity by iPhr0stByt3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I saw this earlier this morning. Obviously, productivity around the globe dropped 30% today.

  3. Productivity by FalconZero · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google handled approx 88 billion searches in Dec-2009. (88b/31)*2=5.67billion searches in two days. If (conservativly) one tenth of those are work related, that's 567m. If one in ten work related users plays this once for 60 seconds, that's 3.4 billion seconds. 3.4 billion seconds is approximatly 108 person-years worth of productivity. (Which at US federal minimum wage is about 1.6 million dollars). That's a low figure as those who need google to work probably don't earn minimum wage. Now that's power! I personally played for more than 60s....

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    Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
  4. Re:How is this impressive in any way? by Pojut · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The point is the celebration of a load bearing pillar in gaming history, not the fact that JavaScript was used to do it.

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    Living With a Nerd
  5. Re:So... by sunderland56 · · Score: 5, Funny

    It isn't a banner ad - it isn't advertising a thing.

    I bet that most people will say this is the most awesome thing Google has done all year.

  6. Re:So... by CaseM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    +1 Anal Retentive.

    In all seriousness, you have the sound enabled on your PC in a professional environment?

  7. Re:So... by guyminuslife · · Score: 5, Informative

    They have a bug in the Pacman game.

    If you try to do a Google search in the search bar after you're done playing the game, the WASD keys don't work. Even after you do the search from the first page, and the first page of results shows up, you still can't use those keys.

    I'm betting that "pcmn" is going to be one of today's hottest Google trends.

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    I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
  8. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is the most awesome thing Google has done all year!

  9. Javascript is evil by bradbury · · Score: 5, Funny

    And I want to run a game programmed in Javascript on my computer WHY? I helped write a simulator for a PDP-10 that ran on a PDP-11 (36 bit machine on a 16 bit machine) 30+ years ago. And there was a concrete corporate need for it (we were modifying the Bliss-11 compiler which was written in Bliss-10). And even though I like PacMan (lord knows how many quarters I plugged into it at the local video game parlors in the 80's) I would still pause before I open my machine(s) up to running Javascript games.

    If only from the simple perspective that an interpreted, garbage collected language (such as Javascript) is inherently less efficient than a compiled language (C, Pascal, whatever) -- and it therefore is going to burn more CPU cycles than are required to perform the functionality the game provides. AND IT IS THEREFORE NOT GREEN!

    The goal of programmers (world-wide) should not be on "how do I implement something clever and cool". It should instead be on how do I reduce the CO2 footprint of my program? It is a sad state when one is promoting programs which may increase wasteful expenditure of energy (via Javascript). If /. is a "good" forum, should they not be promoting good directions?

  10. Re:So... by DarrenBaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I simply can't believe we've come this far and we STILL don't have a mute button as a standard item on web browsers. By Lucifer's beard!