iPad World

Ever since savvy manufacturers realised that gamers were prepared to pay top dollar for pieces of near-useless plastic that claim to improve their gaming experience, there’s been a flood of largely pointless peripherals for home consoles. Right now, countless Wii Remote tennis racket attachments sit gathering dust in cupboards the world over, waiting forlornly for that dreaded day when they are unceremoniously recycled as landfill.

Traditionally speaking, these regrettable money-wasting exercises are largely confined to domestic hardware. Attempts to augment the functionality of portable consoles have proven largely unsuccessful in the past (remember the D-pad cross attachment that … Continue Reading

Sonic generations.

Namco Bandai cites “miscommunication”.

You CAN delete game save data in Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions on Nintendo 3DS, Namco Bandai has confirmed.

To do so, you need to press “ABXYLR” when you boot the game.

Last week Wired reported it was impossible to delete game save data in the arcade game compliation.

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Ancient arcader Metro-Cross revived.

Metro-Cross is the next vintage IP to get the Namco Generations treatment, following Pac-Man Championship Edition DX and Galaga Legions DX.

Re-dubbed Aero-Cross and currently in development for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, the game casts you as a futuristic athlete attempting to beat other runners round various hazard-strewn courses.

You’ll need to slip-stream behind other runners to pick up speed, perform “air dashes” to complete long jumps, jump on a hoverboard for extra speed or hit jump pads to avoid hazards in the track.

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Arcade classic gets super-sized reinvention.

A new super-sized twist on the Pac-Man franchise has just hit the web.

As detailed on Gamasutra, The World’s Biggest Pac-Man is a new, free-to-play browser version of the game with a focus on user-created levels.

Developed by Australian web specialist Soap Creative in tandem with Namco Bandai and Microsoft, it allows users to make their own levels via a Facebook application.

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Namco 3DS twofer reboots retro classics.

Two-for-one retro bundle Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions is on its way to 3DS, publisher Namco Bandai has announced.

The double pack will include two separate games. Pac-Man Tilt ditches the classic top-down pill-guzzling gameplay of old in favour of motion-controlled 2D platforming. You’ll be wobbling the 3DS about to guide the titular hero to the end of various puzzle-strewn levels, with the help of pinball flippers and springboards.

Galaga 3D Impact sounds a little more punchy. It’s a 3D on-rails shooter in which you’ll have to use the handheld’s gyroscope to maneuver your perspective and blast invading … Continue Reading

Will bring pill-munching classic “to life”.

What with its disembodied floating heads, terrifying supernatural antagonists and dark, pill-strewn corridors, we wouldn’t have pegged Pac-Man as an obvious candidate for a reality TV adaptation.

However, it seems US TV production company Merv Griffin Entertainment sees things a little differently. Apparently it’s teamed up with Namco Bandai to work on exactly that.

Merv Griffin boss Roy Bank told Deadline that the plan is to make a “big, crazy Wipeout-type event with a lot of energy. The idea we have is to take what Pac-Man is and bring it to life, to bring what is essentially … Continue Reading

N.O.V.A.! Crossfire! Divergent! Rogue! Sackboy!

56 roundups and more than 300 games later, you could say that it’s been an eventful nine months since we started to focus more of our attention on the downloadable games arena. But when we kicked things off back in March, little did we know just how many great games would fall into our laps.

And it’s not just the high-profile Pac-Man Championship Edition DXs or the Limbos of the world that are up there with the best games released all year. Things like And Yet It Moves and Art Style Light Trax on WiiWare, or Apple … Continue Reading

QOTD

• “Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
• For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.”

– Seattle start-up RescueTime estimates the lost productivity costs associated … Continue Reading

30-year-old game in playable logo.

Google’s celebrating the 30th birthday of Pac-Man (tomorrow) with a playable version of the game for its logo.

The search engine’s homepage has a basic Pac-Man game built around the word Google.

Clicking the “Insert Coin” button button next to “Google Search” begins a two-player version.

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