Pac Man Arrangement Arcade

[Leontina Heidgerken]

Designedand released in conjunction with Namco Museum Vol. 1, Namco Classic Collection Vol. 1 represented the company's push to garner interest in re-releases of classic video games for newer hardware, with the Arrangement games being made to attract younger players to them. The development team had difficulties with porting the originals to the hardware, and as such made development last longer than anticipated. The soundtrack was to "immerse" players into the game's atmosphere, with sounds and musical cues that hearkened back to their childhood nostalgia.

Vol. 1 reportedly sold very well, and was commonplace in Japanese arcade centers. The collection and its games have been praised for their presentation and gameplay, with one critic saying that it could help open up a new market for re-releases of older arcade games. The Arrangement games have since been re-released several times as part of various Namco compilation disks for other platforms. It was followed by a sequel, Namco Classic Collection Vol. 2, in 1996.

The three Arrangement games feature updated visuals, gameplay, and sound, alongside the addition of two-player co-operative play. Galaga Arrangement replaces the dual fighter mechanic from the original with a more traditional power-up system, where shooting down specifically colored Boss Galaga aliens with a capture fighter will instead transform the player into a new ship with different attacks, with their color indicating their ability; blue is a wide shot, yellow is a rapid-fire, and red fires three projectiles that can reflect off of other enemies and collide with others. The bonus stages, or "Challenging Stages", feature sporadic enemy formations that will circle around as the backgrounds warp and rotate in accordance with the enemy flight patterns. There are 30 stages in Galaga Arrangement, with the last stage being a boss battle against King Galaspark. Xevious Arrangement is close to the original game, featuring new enemies, different bosses, and a wide-shot power-up that can be found by bombing specific pyramid structures on the ground. Several different stage types have been added, such as ones that take place over mechanical fortresses and South American temples. There are also three extra stages that can be played after completing the game. Mappy Arrangement focuses primarily on its two-player co-op, featuring a split-screen stage design. It adds several new mechanics to the original Mappy gameplay, including trapdoors, springboards that propel either player to the floor above them, and a boss fight with a giant mechanical Nyamco robot.

Namco Classic Collection Vol. 1 was released worldwide by Namco in November 1995.[3] Produced for the Namco ND-1 arcade system,[2] the game was created out of the company's desire to increase interest in re-releases of older video games for newer audiences and more modern platforms, with the Arrangement games made to help attract in newer fans with improved visuals, gameplay, and music.[4] It was released in conjunction with Namco Museum Vol. 1, a similar compilation published for the PlayStation.[4] The development staff had difficulties with porting the original arcade games to a then-modern arcade system, which made development itself take longer than anticipated and more stressful for the designers.[4] The soundtrack was to "immerse" players into the game's atmosphere, with sounds and musical cues that hearkened back to their childhood nostalgia.[4]

The Arrangement games included have been re-released in other compilation disks. Xevious Arrangement, alongside the original Xevious, Super Xevious and Xevious 3D/G, was ported to the PlayStation in 1997 as part of Xevious 3D/G+,[1] being a near arcade-perfect rendition.[5] Galaga Arrangement was compiled into the 2001 Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube game Namco Museum, as well as several other Namco video games.[6] This version of the game is a recreation from the original arcade hardware, and features music at a slightly altered pitch because of this. The Galaga Arrangement included in Namco Museum Battle Collection (2005) and Namco Museum Virtual Arcade (2009) is not the same as the one in Vol. 1, instead being an entirely new game with mechanics and ideas borrowed from the original.[7] Mappy Arrangement has never seen a re-release outside of arcades.[8] In 1998, Pony Canyon released the soundtrack for Namco Classic Collection Vol. 1 under their Wonder Spirits album label, which included linear notes from the development staff and "battle cards", small cardstock cards that featured designs based on the game.[4]

Edge magazine viewed Namco Classic Collection Vol. 1 as being Namco's way of garnering interest in classic game re-releases through the usage of remakes of the included games, and praised the company for their efforts in doing so.[9] They also called the included games "superb", and felt that both it and its home counterpart, Namco Museum Vol. 1, could potentially open up a new market for both re-releases and remakes of older games.[9] Game Machine showed interest in the collection for compiling Namco's older catalog into a modern-day machine, alongside the addition of new, "exciting" remakes of each game.[10]

As with the other Namco "arrangement" titles, the game plays very similarly to its original counterpart. The objective is to collect all stolen items on the stage, while avoiding cats and other obstacles. It is 25 levels long.

We have developed a tabletop game to help students get comfortable with symmetry adapted linear combinations of orbitals (SALCs), a conceptual model used to understand bonding in molecular orbital theory. We have found that students often get anxious about SALCs and miss not only the visual connections to symmetry, but also the fun! This LO includes information about the game, files you can use to print your own copy as well as a link in case you want to purchase a copy, and an example of how it might be incorporated into the classroom.

Information about the game: SALC is an orbital arrangement game aimed at helping inorganic chemistry students visualize and depict SALCs. During a turn, one student positions ligand orbitals around a metal center orbital and their classmates place blind bets for correct or incorrect SALC arrangement. At the end of the game, the winner is the student whose bets have won them the most points. 3 to 6 students can play with a single set. In this version of the game, s, p, and d orbitals on the central (metal) atom are considered while only s orbitals are considered for the surrounding ligands. Thus, the students are specifically representing sigma SALCs. The cards specify the point group, the orbital, and the Mulliken symbol, as well as whether the student should build a bonding or antibonding SALC. There are cards in the deck in the C2v, C3v, C4v, D3h, D4h, and Oh point groups.

In their reflections and my end of course survey students generally indicated that they found the game helped with their visualization of SALCs and made the topic more approachable. That said, they all knew that I helped design the game, so this was not unbiased. Still, I was very glad to hear the students say that their confidence was boosted and that they had fun!

I made the pieces of the game available to students throughout the rest of the semester in case they wanted to play again or just use it for at-home practice. Though only a couple of students took me up on this offer, they said it was helpful.

Some of the most common points of confusion were as follows. Students needed to be reminded that the cards included different point groups and that the maximum number of ligand orbitals involved in the SALC was equal to the number of ligands around the metal in that point group. Students also had to practice considering where the central (metal) orbital and the ligand orbitals would be in 3 dimensional space even though the card could only show it in 2 dimensions. Since these are common questions that arise when teaching SALCs in a more traditional setting, I was glad to see that the game also brought these questions to the forefront. The game only covers sigma SALCs, which could be considered a limitation, but I think it would have been overly complicated if pi SALCs were added to the mix.

Rally-X Arrangement is, as the naming suggests, a remake of Namco's first driving game, Rally-X; it was released in 1996 as a part of the compilation arcade game Namco Classics Collection Vol. 2 and unlike the other five "Namco Arrangement" games is for one player only. The original type of red cars have also been christened "Formula" and there are also three new types ("Touring", "Drag" and "Neo Formula", the last of which can release their own black smoke screen to temporarily stun the player's car) - and there is also a new kind of blue, square ("powerup") flag which, when collected, allows you to attack the red cars (something every Rally-X player must have wanted to do, for sixteen years!) as well as slow them down (and cause them to run away!), refuel, drop bombs, make "Drag" cars visible on the radar, crush the rocks, speed up your car, and collect the six letters of the word "EXTEND" (in order to earn an extra life) depending on what the next item box at the bottom of the screen displays.

The format for the bonus rounds has also been changed; the player must now guide the car to collect ten of a second new kind of baseless, yellow, triangular flag while avoiding the walls (which are made up of rocks) and passing through a goal gate before a timer at the bottom of the screen runs out, and the final round also involves having to pass through a goal gate (marked FINISH), after collecting the flags to finish the game (while still avoiding the red cars, as they try to stop the player from doing so).

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