YouTube Is Hiding An Excellent, Official High-Speed Pac-Man Mod In Plain Sight

YouTube is quietly hosting Pac-Man Superfast within its 'Playables' section. 'You'd be forgiven for not knowing about YouTube Playables,' writes Ars Technica's Kyle Orland. 'Few seemed to note its official announcement last year as a collection of free-to-play web games built for the web using standard rendering APIs.'

'The seeming competitor to Netflix's mobile gaming offerings is still described in an official FAQ as 'an experimental feature rolled out to select users in eligible countries/regions,' which doesn't make this post-Stadia gaming effort seem like a huge priority for Google.' From the report:
Weird origins aside, Pac-Man Superfast pretty much delivers what its name promises. While gameplay starts at an 'Easy' speed that roughly matches the arcade original, the speed of both Pac-Man and the ghosts is slightly increased every few seconds (dying temporarily reduces the speed to a lower level). After a few minutes, you're advancing past the titular 'Super Fast' speed to extreme reflex-testing speeds like Crazy, Insane, Maniac, and a final test that's ominously named 'Doom.'

Those who've played the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition series will be familiar with the high-speed vibe here, but Pac-Man Superfast remains focused on the game's original maze and selection of just four ghosts. That means old-school strategies for grouping ghosts together and running successful patterns through the narrow corridors work in similar ways here. Successfully executing those patterns becomes a tense battle of nerves here, though, requiring multiple direction changes every second at the highest speeds. While the game will technically work with swipe controls on a smartphone or tablet, high-level play really requires the precision of a keyboard via a desktop/laptop web browser (we couldn't get the game to recognize a USB controller, unfortunately).

As exciting as the high-speed maze gameplay gets, though, Pac-Man Superfast is hampered by a few odd design decisions. The game ends abruptly after just 13 levels, for instance, making it impossible to even attempt the high-endurance 256-level runs that Pac-Man is known for. The game also throws an extra life at you every 5,000 points, making it relatively easy to brute force your way to the end as long as you focus on the three increasingly high-point-value items that appear periodically on each stage. Despite this, the game doesn't give any point reward for unused extra lives or long-term survival at high speeds, limiting the rewards for high-level play. And the lack of a built-in leaderboard makes it hard to directly compare your performance to friends and/or strangers anyway.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.