To begin our coverage of the 1st Amusement Expo which took place in Las Vegas, NV, I’ll start out with the Namco booth and work my way from there. Namco had a sizable booth that was near the entrance of the show (as usual) and dominating the booth was . We first reported the news that Namco would be celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man with a new arcade release called Pac-Man Battle Royale. They had two cabinets at the show, cocktail style. While the game has intention of showing up in bars, it will work anywhere and it is not actually like Pac-Man CE at all, except for the graphics and changing mazes. You can see it below, the game has the player focus on eating the other Pac players. Eating dots and ghosts are sort of pointless not the primary focus of the game as in other Pac games and there is no scoring system aside from how many rounds each player wins but keep in mind that this is a prototype and there will be changes made to the game by it’s release in September. The cabinet will change too for the final release; they told me the hardware that it’s using which is a custom board and I can’t remember the name at the moment
I don’t have time to upload my other videos at the moment but I will be getting around to that later today Please check out there other videos I have from the show, I’ll have 12 of them up when finished which you can view on my Youtube channel. Pac-Man Battle Royale wasn’t the only new coin-op amusement product at the show so check out what else was there here. Also in anticipation of the release, if you need help finding an arcade/FEC/bar/etc near you (who you can pester into getting this or other games) check Aurcade.com or ArcadeFly.com
UPDATE: I have updated the release date info for this and several other games on our Arcade Release list for 2010.
Looks great. Is there a one player mode?
Yes it can be played 1p, then it will load up AI pac-men although I’m not sure if that was implemented yet as I never saw it played in 1p as people kept joining anytime a match started.
So, important question: how is it??
In a nutshell? A lot of fun with two or more players. As I said above, I can’t say how it plays in 1p yet as I didn’t get that chance but they mentioned that it will be tweaked by the release, especially the 1p aspect.
I did ask about what hardware is being used but I unfortunately forgot the name, info overload for my brain that day I guess. Also, the joysticks are the four way sticks like you have with the original, which is nice. The cup holders is a cool aspect for certain venues too.