pacs

Woman calls tech support to disable Google Pac-Man

Updated 8.34 a.m. PDT Thursday with more information about the call.

Many of you, on listening to this conversation, will have sympathy with Brian from Tech Support. Some of you may, indeed, be Brian from Tech Support.

But this tech support phone call, one that feels all too real, is a fine description of the gap between the way the real world sometimes sees tech and how tech always sees tech. It came to me from Techland, who got it from Topless Robot who got it from Gorilla Mask. (Ultimately, who knows where it came from, so please … Read more

Is Pac-Man for iPad worth the price?

As more games are released for Apple's tablet device, some of the old stand-up classics are making the jump to the touch screen. The iPad version of Pac-Man is almost identical to the original in every way, with the same ghost paths, same fruit bonuses, and same intermission movies. But can Pac-Man still be anywhere near as popular as it once was, with today's smooth graphics and multilevel arcade game offerings?

Before you head to the App Store and spend your hard-earned money, there are a couple things you should know about the iPad version of Pac-Man. Though … Read more

Study: Pac-Man on Google wasted 4.8 million hours

It might not sound like a lot on first glance, but the 36 extra seconds that the average Google.com visitor spent there last Friday playing Pac-Man adds up to a massive 4.8 million of wasted hours.

According to a study by RescueTime, Pac-Man on Google--the playable version of the iconic game that the search giant replaced its home page logo with on Friday--cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 man-hours and a whopping $120,483,800 in lost productivity. As RescueTime put it, you could hire every single Google employee, including co-founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, … Read more

Pac-Man never dies

Yahoo and Nokia announced an extended partnership in New York today. The companies hosted a fancy press conference at the New York City NASDAQ for news that is relatively unfancy.

The news is that Yahoo will power mail, chat, and maps in Nokia devices. That's nice I suppose. It will have somewhat of an impact on developing countries and overseas where Nokia phones are popular.

The bigger news is what Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said as a non sequitur during the event: that Yahoo products will get more social features integrated in the next few weeks.

Yahoo has experimented … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1233: Synthetic life is oh so blue (podcast)

We have synthetic life! Craig Venter's new bacterium is alive and is blue... because that's what it's programmed to be. Also, Google says Happy 30th Birthday Pacman by putting a playable game into the Google banner. Tech support calls ensue.

Is playable Pac-Man getting Google's home page banned?

There's no question it's happening: All over the place today, you can be sure that people are heading on over to Google's home page and discovering that instead of the normal multicolored Google logo, there's a fully playable version of Pac-Man sitting there, beckoning them.

This, of course, is to commemorate tomorrow's 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. And no doubt, a lot of people are having a lot of fun with this. Google is so sure of that that it is planning on keeping the Pac-Man logo--known in company terms as a "doodle"--on … Read more

What Pac-Man means at 30

It's probably impossible to count the times someone has written that video games are a business as big as or bigger than Hollywood.

But long before the Halos and the Sims and the Call of Dutys and the Maddens began bringing in billions of dollars, the world was dominated by a simple yellow character munching his way through a maze of dots, trying to avoid getting eaten by ghosts.

On May 22, 1980, a Japanese company called Namco Bandai released a game in Japan called Puck-Man. The title was rejected in the United States because some worried that the &… Read more

Google gets Pac-Man fever

Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the release of Pac-Man, and to commemorate the occasion, Google is rolling out its first-ever truly interactive and playable home page logo, a fully-functional version of the iconic 1980s video game.

For years, Google has produced its so-called doodles for all kinds of holidays and special occasions, from Valentine's Day to the Fourth of July to Mother's Day and many others. In each case, the Google Doodle team works on a special logo that appears on the search engine's home page.

But a few months ago, when the team discovered that … Read more

Roomba Pac-Man: Classic game gets robot twist

Students at Colorado University have reprogrammed five Roomba vacuum-cleaning robots to recreate the classic 1980s arcade game Pac-Man.

The machines move around a virtual maze, indicated by red tape on the floor, as the four ghosts Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde chase the Pac-Man Roomba as it vacuums up paper dots.

The Pac-Man Roomba is joystick-controlled by a user, but the ghosts navigate autonomously. They will try to chase Pac-Man until it sucks up a power pellet, which puts them into evade mode.

The Roombas are wirelessly linked to a laptop that processes their locations through an overhead camera positioning … Read more

Military looks for better touch with PacBots

Advanced gamer hardware may soon allow PacBot operators to tell exactly how hard a robot's grip is, allowing soldiers to more safely pick up and handle fragile or dangerous objects, while also increasing their situational awareness.

Novint Technologies, a company that makes 3D touch controllers for video and computer games, announced last month that it has been awarded a subcontract to co-develop a remote touch kit (RTK) for the iRobot unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) PacBot.

The new RTK will allow soldiers to tactually sense the amount of force a robot is exerting from a safe operating distance--a first for … Read more