Hangly-Man (ハングリーマン), also known as Scandel or Puck-Man, is a maze arcade game developed by Nittoh and released in 1981. It is a hack of Pac-Man that changes the overall layout of the maze. The game's title is likely a mistranslation of "Hungry Man" from Japanese.
Character names[]
Hangly-Man used the original Japanese Pac-Man's ghost names:
- The red ghost was Oikake, nicknamed Akabei
- The pink ghost was Machibuse, nicknamed Pinky
- The light blue ghost was Kimagure, nicknamed Aosuke
- The orange ghost was Otoboke, nicknamed Guzuta
Game description[]
The major difference from the original Pac-Man game is that the first two boards and every even-numbered board after that are slightly altered versions of the original maze. The third board and every odd-numbered board after that are not mazes at all, but contain only the ghost house, the board's boundary outline, and the pills, arranged in straight vertical and horizontal lines. To access these levels, the player must eat four ghosts after eating a power pellet on level one. After that, every power pellet eaten turns the maze black until the power pellet wears off. And then the odd maze appears at level three. On these levels, in addition to the horizontal sideways left–right escape passage, there is also a vertical one connecting the top of the screen and the bottom, which the ghosts cannot enter. If the player moves Pac-Man to anywhere in this passage, and then pushes the joystick to the left or right and holds it; the Pac-Man will become stuck in that position, and the monsters cannot catch him, even if he is far enough out that they can touch him. But as releasing the joystick frees him, one cannot leave the game running with this method. Also, there are no walls anywhere in the maze, so Pac-Man can go anywhere, but the monsters are restricted by the walls depicted in the other levels.
Otherwise, the game-play, sound and graphics are exactly like Pac-Man, except that the original patterns are not possible because the mazes are different. In many copies of the game, an added feature on the even numbered boards was that when an energizer was eaten, the entire maze turned invisible until the energizer wore off. In some, it would remain invisible until the player lost a life.
In addition to this game, there was an older hack version with a different altered maze, sometimes called Scandal, and sometimes called simply Puck-Man, the Japanese name for the original game.
Variations[]
Several variations of this game would be released by other developers shortly after the release. One title, Caterpillar Pac-Man, was released in the same year by a company known as "Phi", which colored the maze from blue into red, and Pac-Man and the ghosts being changed into a caterpillar and spiders respectively. A game title Popeye Pac-Man was also released, simply changing Pac-Man to the the character of Popeye the Sailor. A number of homebrew ports of the original would be released years afterwards for systems such as the Atari 2600, Atari 5200 and Atari 7800, all of which are hacks of other Pac-Man video games.
Gallery[]
.jpg "Hangly-Man (Homebrew).jpg (20 KB)")
| This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors). |