News Summary

• Your six-pixel tall dot-muncher (the graphics are 2D, even as the gameplay uses only one dimension) is forced to forever travel either left or right along this line, trying to eat all the dots while avoiding a single red ghost (who moves just a bit faster than the player)..
• It also makes me wish I had been quicker to discover more of the work of extremely prolific and clever game designer Kenta Cho, who made the game.In Paku Paku, Pac-Man's 2D maze of 240 dots has been replaced with 16 dots arranged in a single line..
• Kyle Orland - Jan 4, 2024 11:11 pm UTC When looking back at the short history of video game design, the '90s and '00s transition from primarily 2D games to primarily 3D games is rightly seen as one of the biggest revolutions in the industry..
• Hacker News users are even hard at work coding basic AI that you can paste into a browser's command window for easy high scores.Paku Paku stands out from this limited crowd largely thanks to tight single-button controls and perfectly tuned risk-versus-reward gameplay that encourages that compulsive loop..
• But my discovery this week of the one-dimensional, Pac-Man-inspired Paku Paku makes me wish that the game industry had some sort of pre-history where clever 1D games like this were the norm..
• This gets exponentially harder as the game speeds up with each new set of replacement dots, increasing the score multiplier as it does..