Posted 1 year ago by

First off, a follow-up to the previous post: it turns out that loads are much worse on Pac-Man Museum+ than I initially thought they were. It's unconfirmed what the exact time difference is, but it's estimated to be somewhere around 50 seconds across all 25 levels, This means it would certainly lose time in All Ghosts, All Pac-Dots, and 100%, but what about Any%?

Well, between 2-3 skip, the new skip in 4-4, and full 5-1 skip, that's roughly 1m40s worth of timesave. The loads and lag eliminate almost all of that gain, along with the fact that matching Wii times in 4-5 just doesn't seem realistic. If you discount 4-1 skip on Wii (since it's way easier on Museum+), then that does give Museum+ a bigger advantage, but for now let's assume we're including it.

Now, whenever these issues arise in version differences for the same game, there are usually two options: using in-game time instead of real time, or using real time but subtract loads. Neither of these are currently viable options for the following reasons:

  • Using in-game time would work, except that boss stages don't have IGT displayed during them. The game does keep track of how many frames have elapsed in each stage (including bosses) behind the scenes, but without modding the game to make this visible (which is a sketchy idea in it of itself), there's no way to know for sure without retiming each stage individually. Doing that would require way too much effort to do for every submitted run, and is made even harder when you consider that it's not always immediately obvious when the exact frame the timer stops would be.
  • Subtracting loads isn't really an option either. The only platform that could manually remove load times would be PC; for all other consoles a bot would have to be created. In fact, two bots would have to be made since Wii and Museum+ have different load times, and neither currently exist.

Because neither platform has a major advantage over the other, they play significantly different from each other, and the above alternatives aren't currently feasible, the only other choice is to split the leaderboards for the two versions. This keeps the Wii version from being completely obsolete while also allowing the Museum+ version to become competitive if it ever does.

Note that, again, this mostly applies to Any%. Museum+ has an obvious disadvantage over Wii in the other categories due to the loads and lag, so splitting them actually makes more sense since Museum+ runs could never compare to Wii runs.

One final note: All versions of Pac-Man Museum+ do have online leaderboards for total in-game time. These will NOT be used for the following reasons:

  1. It adds up your BEST IGT in each stage, not your best single-segment.
  2. It does NOT include boss stages.
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Posted 1 year ago by

This post will receive updates over time if/when anything new is discovered. There are some cosmetic changes as well but for the sake of this post, only changes relevant to speedrunning will be discussed.

This is all based on the PS4 release of the game, but it's safe to assume that these apply to all releases of Pac-Man Museum+.

  • Loading times are increased compared to Wii/Wii U. It takes about 3 seconds for levels to load both when selecting them and after dying. It's hard to measure exactly since not every level takes the same amount of time to load on Wii/Wii U, but a good estimate is somewhere in the ballpark of 10-15 seconds over the course of an entire run.
  • The first section of 4-5 and the second phase of 5-Boss have lag issues, both areas running at about 75% speed almost the entire time.
  • Most moving platforms move in slightly different ways. The moving ghost platforms in 3-3 accelerate to higher speeds over the course of their cycles instead of maintaining a constant speed throughout, and the platforms after 4-3's first gate don't stop before turning around.
  • When Pac-Man becomes airborne after a slope boost or when using a bounce pad, he takes way less time to accelerate in mid-air and can also vector to increase overall distance gained. So far, this has three significant uses:
  1. 2-3 skip is now possible.
  2. A new shortcut that skips most of the first section of 4-4, which has been confirmed possible on Namco Museum Megamix but is way harder, is doable.
  3. 5-1 triple gate skip is now humanly viable.
  • Bounce/lava boosting is still possible, but much harder because a frame perfect button press is required.

All in all, with everything taken into consideration, it's safe to assume that the port on Pac-Man Museum+ could save at least a minute over Namco Museum Megamix in Any%. The other categories likely won't have anywhere near as much timesave, and thus those likely won't be affected. It is still being discussed how to handle comparing Museum+ runs to NMM runs.

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Updates made to leaderboards: why?

First off, a follow-up to the previous post: it turns out that loads are much worse on Pac-Man Museum+ than I initially thought they were. It's unconfirmed what the exact time difference is, but it's estimated to be somewhere around 50 seconds across all 25 levels, This means it would certainly lose

1 year ago
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