JavaScript-Pac-Gal 3D

"JavaScript-PacGal 3D" features a color variation of "JavaScript-MsPacMan 3D". The game is modeled after a classic color mod of Ms. Pac-Man called Pac-Gal.

Please mind that — even if this must have been ultra-cool and stylish color design in the early eighties (hey, the walls must be of neoprene!) — it may be hard to distinguish ghosts in frighten mode and "Inky" (the cyan colored ghost) in normal mode.
For a traditional color appearance of Ms. Pac-Man have a look at JavaScript-MsPacMan 3D.
For a fully featured Pac-Man game have a look at JavaScript-PacMan 3D.

This game is written in pure JavaScript and doesn't require any plug-ins or other extensions. If Flash-Player 9.0 or higher is detected, an additional Flash-movie is used to provide the sounds.

The use of sound may affect the animation speed of the game.
Set the sound slider to zero to optimize the game for slower machines.

Besides shuffle play there are three sets of levels selectable from the "Mazes"-menu:

"Ms. Pac-Man" uses the original level layouts of Ms. Pac-Man.
"Ms. Pac-Man Plus" provides the levels of the classic 1981 hack Ms. Pac-Man Plus.
"Ghost Levels" introduces four additional levels to represent each of the ghosts.

(But with shuffle play, you'll have to play each maze twice in order to advance to next layout.)

High scores are supported separately for each individual set of levels. (You have to have cookies enabled in order to store high scores permanently.).

Reset high scores on this machine

How to Play

Anyone who doesn't know Ms. Pac-Man or Pac-Man? Really? O.K. – That's how to play:

Guide Pac-Gal, the munching yellow ball, through the maze and eat all the food, the little white dots laid out all around the passages. But be aware of the ghosts: they will give their best to pursue and catch you.
There are also some bigger pellets: the power pills. Swallow one of these to become invincible for a few seconds. Now – while the ghosts are turned blue – you my haunt those nasty runners for some extra points.

A propos scoring: You will collect an extra live for every 10000 points (but you may not have more than five lives in stock).

Moving / Controls

Use the cursor keys or the numeric keypad to navigate Pac-Gal.

You may also use the following keys:

		W	(up)
(left)	A	S	D	(right)
	(down)

		I	(up)
(left)	J	K	L	(right)
	(down)

Other controls:

	N	....	New game
	P or ESC	....	Pause / resume

Touch Screens / Mouse Control

Control Pac-Gal by strokes (mouse gestures) at the maze:

Click (tap) anywhere in the maze and drag the pointer in the desired direction.
(You may steer in advance, not only when you are just encountering a crossing.)
Double-click (tap rapidly twice) to pause/resume the game.
Use the "New Game" button to start a new game.
Special Moves:
You may even use compound gestures (e.g.: left and up in a single movement): Steer in the first direction, keep the mouse down and steer in the next direction just after the turn.
This may be especially useful to navigate through winding passages as you haven't to click again for every turn.

Ghost and Personalities (A.I.)

"Monsters" from left to right: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Sue.
(Pac-Man's "Clyde" became "Sue" in Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Gal.)

"JavasSript-Pac-Gal 3D" provides a true reconstruction of the original game's A.I..Each ghost features its individual "personality" and style of movement:

Blinky, the red one, will follow in your tracks.
Pinky isn't really pink in Pac-Gal, but more of a whitish grey. Still he is the second to leave the ghosts' pen and will try to get in front of you in order to "sandwich" you together with Blinky.
Inky, the turquoise one, is a bit unpredictable and will take different turns at different times.
(In fact his turns depend on Blinky's current position relative to Pac-Gal.)
Sue, the yellow one, is either a bit short-sighted or is not in it with her heart at all. However, Sue will often follow her own ways, seemingly unwilling to take part in the other's chase. — In fact Sue is governed by a threshold algorithm: If Sue is close to Pac-Gal, she will head for the lower left corner; if she's in some distance, she will close in again. (Sue used to be "Clyde" in Pac-Man, but was renamed for his/her sequel appearance in Ms. Pac-Man.)

From time to time all four of the ghosts will cease their pursuit and will head for the four corners of the maze, just to launch a new wave of attack. The game always starts in this so-called "scatter mode" for a short period of time.

Or so it was with Pac-Man. With Ms. Pac-Man things developed a bit different: Presumably the coders of Ms. Pac-Man made an attempt to re-assign the scatter-targets of the individual ghost for every new start of scatter mode. But things didn't work out like that: The scatter targets are re-assigned for every step, so that the ghosts happen to move more on random but on a target guided algorithm. For some reason, older bits of code seem to overwrite some of these newly assigned targets and so Inky and Sue will be heading for their usual targets in the lower right and lower left corners. (Since the logics of Pac-Gal are those of Ms. Pac-Man, the same applies for this game.)

Ghosts will reverse directions while entering frightened mode or when they enter or exit scatter mode. So any reversal of directions indicates a change of game modes.

Ghosts act with a one-step-look-ahead, meaning that all movements are evaluated one step in advance. So a ghost "decides" on its next turn, when it's just a single tile (or grid point) away from a junction or crossing. — This allows for some tacky, but also dangerous, bravura-in-the-face-of-the-enemy-style last second tricks ...

For detailed information on the logic of the original game of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man see Jamey Pittman's definite guide to the Pac-Man-A.I.: The Pac-Man Dossiers.

Bonus Fruits

You may collect an extra bonus by eating one of the fruits that appear twice a level:

There are seven different fruits: cherries, strawberry, peach, pretzel, apple, pear and banana – worth 100, 200, 500, 700, 1000, 2000, and 5000 points. Levels 7 and up will show a random choice of these bonus items.

Levels and Layouts

You may select any of these sets of maze-layouts from the "Mazes" pop-up menu:

Ms. Pac-Man: Sweet memories of the 4 original levels of Ms. Pac-Man.
Ms. Pac-Man Plus: Play the 4 levels of this classic Ms. Pac-Man hack.
Shuffle Play: Pick a random mix from all levels available.

But in shuffle mode all levels have to played twice in order to advance to the next layout.

Sound Integration

A tiny Adobe Flash movie (swf-file) is used as a simple sound player in case that Flash Player 9.0 or higher is detected. This provides a robust cross-browser sound integration in absence of any real world standard for sound integration and scripted sound control. Flash is not used for any other purpose – the game works just the same without the Flash plug-in. (Even the volume control is implemented in DHTML, just for the fun of it.)

Pac-Man Trivia

The original Pac-Man arcade game was first released by Namco (licensed and distributed in the U.S. by Midway) in May 1980. The game was originally named "Puck-Man" (from paku paku – Japanese slang describing the motion of an opening and closing mouth while eating), and was renamed to conform to the North American market.

Eventually Pac-Man became the most successful video game ever, causing even a coin shortage in Japan. It is listed as the all time number one at the "Top 100 Videogames" of the Killer List of Videogames.

One of the most important off-springs was Ms. Pac-Man (released 1981 by Midway / GCC – General Computer Corporation, later Namco). While the original Pac-Man featured a single maze and deterministic ghost movements, Ms. Pac-Man introduced changing mazes and some random to the ghosts resulting in a more varying game play.
(The game had been originally developed by GCC as an unofficial "enhancement" to Pac-Man named "Crazy Otto" and was eventually demoed to Midway, who bought the rights and released an overhauled version of the game. None of the original "Crazy Otto" games survived, but a picture in a 1982 Time magazine article. There where at least three machines at test locations in Boston and Chicago.)

Also in 1981 surfaced an "enhanced" — or rather hacked — version of Ms. Pac-Man named Ms. Pac-Man Plus (by Two-Bits Score). While exchanging the maze layouts of the original game by a set of 4 new level designs it also introduced some new features or — more correctly — bugs: Since only the information of the level layouts, but not the path information for the fruits' moves or the information on tunnel entrances were exchanged, fruits would move through the walls of the new mazes and ghosts would miraculously slow down as they passed the locations of the tunnels of the original levels. (These bugs/features are not emulated in "JavaScript-Pac-Gal 3D".) According to www.arcade-history.com Ms. Pac-Man Plus seems to be the original Ms. Pac-Man hack.

A later version called Ms. Pac-Attack changed the order of the first two levels of Ms. Pac-Man Plus.

Pac-Gal is another early modification of Ms. Pac-Man, which applies some new fancy colors while leaving the rest of the game intact. The date of this game is a bit unsure: www.coinop.org lists it with date 1981, while en.wikipedia.org ascribes it to Al J. Jiménez in May 1982. (I.m.h.o. the latter would rather apply to another prominent hack called Ms. Pacman Champion Edition, also known as Super Zola Pac Gal).

Pac-Gal is not to be confused with Pac-Girl, a DOS game also by Al J. Jiménez (Sept. 1982) featuring a black and white ASCII-graphics version of Ms. Pac-Man.