Why Spacey whyyy 
So I've decided to go for a million points on the original Pac-man. Factory speed and 3+1. A game I (and planty of others here) have bitched about before.
It's boring. It's slow. The maze never changes. Grouping the ghosts is a thankless, ball-achingly tedious, time-consuming undertaking.
And it is.
But reading Erstaz Cats's utterly compelling Pac investigation:
https://perfectpacman.com/fraud/ and his account of his attempts to get perfect:
https://perfectpacman.com/2022/11/13/quest-for-perfect-score-1/ got me firing it up and thinking about trying to learn a pattern or 2. It feels very
naughty to me to be beating the game with all this pre-planning.
Then I went to a couple of events at Base Arcade Belfast:
https://linktr.ee/basearcadeThey have an original Pac-man cabaret with both the controls and a glowing CRT in tip-top condition (though cruelly with no extra life at 10000). It was just magical playing the real thing. And executing a couple of patterns successfully on the original hardware felt
even more naughty 
Patterns ftw Watching the real masters do it with beautiful, elegant, risky-looking patterns convinced me it's really the only way to go.
Two examples (both courtesy of David Race's YouTube channel):
David himself:
And Rick Fothergill:
The play is just gorgeous to watch - total domination of the monsters, suicidal-looking moves, the triumphant bloops od 200, 400, 800, 1600 - magnificent.
David's 9th key pattern where he gets the 2nd key while booeying Inky is just tremendous.
But I've never had the memory or motor skills to keep more than 1 pattern in my head at once, never mind more than 20.
Easy patterns from heaven So a youtube recommendation popped up out of the blue a couple of months ago:
The absolute genius of this is you can get to the end with just 3 patterns (ignoring most of the ghosts).
Pattern 1 takes you from the Cherry to the 2nd Peach.
Pattern 2 (incredibly) from the 1st Apple to the 8th key.
Pattern 3 9th key and beyond
I think it's Pac-legend Neil Chapman responsible for this but I can't find a name on the channel.
So for the moment I'm basically stealing these first 2 amazing Pac Strats patterns and then using my own 9th key pattern until I die 4 times because I'm not that good at this.
Going backwards I wanted to at least make my own 9th key pattern so I'm not completely using someone else's hard work.
It took 2 - 3 weeks of relentless trial and mostly error, but finally woooooooo:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1932646326I'm currently about halfway to perfect Cherry and 1st Peach patterns; I'll post them here and any others when they're done.
Call in and abuse me The next Base Arcade event is on October 21st, so up until then I'll be streaming my high score attempts and pattern failures on my Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/qaop_spacemanMy goal is to turn up at the arcade and hopefully get a least a quarter of a million.
I got a c-hair away
this afternoon on the sofa in my underpants, wasn't recording but I sent the ROM files to Namco and they said it was legit
Fingers crossed a million won;t be far away, but we've heard that before
I'd love it if some of y'all could pop into the streamz, even for a couple of minutes, to heckle, abuse, insult, cajole, castigate, mock, or encourage me on my pointless, draining mission!
