Pro Tip of the Day - namco http://protipoftheday.com/taxonomy/term/407/0 en Pro tip: Why some things are worth 7650 points in Pac-Man games http://protipoftheday.com/node/457 <p>While playing through Pac-Mania, I noticed that the point values while eating the ghosts seemed to take a fairly normal progression: 200, 400, 800, 1600, etc. Getting a little further, though, and they took a strange turn</p> <div align="center"><img src="http://protipoftheday.com/sites/default/files/pacmania_7650.png" /></div> <p>They started to be worth 7650 points. Which was odd, I thought. This score popped up in a couple of other Pac-Man games, too, and it made me think that there had to be something to it.</p> <p>And I was right.</p> <p>I was able to determine that this is a form of Japanese wordplay called 'Goroawase' in which you use the phonetic pronunciations of a string of numbers (which can apparently have multiple pronunciations in Japanese) to make them sound kind of like other words. So breaking down our 7650 could yield:</p> <p>7 = NA<br /> 6 = MU<br /> 5 = KO<br /> 0 = O</p> <p>Or "NA-MU-KO-O", which sounds a whole lot like the company that put out the game: Namco.</p> <p>And it's totally lost on 99.9% of the non-Japanese video game world... until now.</p> <p>You can learn more about Goroawase <a href="http://koikoi11.blogspot.com/2009/01/things-japanese-goroawase.html">here</a>.</p> inside jokes namco pac-man pro tip Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:15:23 +0000 Will 457 at http://protipoftheday.com