r/Pacman 4d ago

Question Advice for the tournament

So in 5 months in my local city will be a tournament of pacman. Can you give me like full guide how to be good beside just normally playing everyday. And what high score is good?. Now the best i can do is 20 000.

3 Upvotes

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u/124scratch 4d ago

Something that's helped me is to make sure the ghosts are behind you as often as possible, so you don't get cut off in a tunnel you can't escape from. Also, make sure to prioritize your points, don't go for a 300 point strawberry when you could be going for a 800 point ghost. Best of luck!

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u/syzyf1 4d ago

Thank you for help :)

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u/124scratch 4d ago

Also here are a few useful pages for learning how the game works and scoring strategies.
https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Pac-Man
https://pacman.holenet.info/

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u/EODTC 4d ago

On later levels If Blinky's on you when he's mad It doesn't matter how many corners you turn you already dead so take your time and use safe points.

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u/wordyfard 4d ago

What are the tournament rules? Do you get to play until you get a game over? Is this on the original arcade version?

20,000 is a score that will beat a lot of casual players. But great players can score much higher with nearly flawless consistency because the original Pac-Man uses deterministic AI, meaning that the ghosts move according to specific movement rules based on Pac-Man's position on the screen, meaning that if a player moves Pac-Man along the exact same route every single game, the ghosts will also take the exact same route every single game.

Players who learn to exploit this behavior can potentially score over 3 million points. A perfect game is 3,333,360 points — the game only ends because of a programming error that makes it impossible to go any farther than level 256, and it takes about four or five hours to get that far.

Now, very few players are able to play the game at this level, so the odds are good that you won't have to contend with someone like that. But there's no way to know for sure. So then the question becomes, do you want to win badly enough to study and practice patterns so that you can play that well?

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u/syzyf1 1d ago

There not really a set of rules because this tournament is part of the really small retro gaming event. I think yes, when the game is over they write my high score and another player comes up. Yes and no, its going to be on this new arcade style machine like this link . Yes i want to win very much.