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THINGS TO DO

Play Pac-Man on the streets of Indy

Channing King
channing.king@indystar.com

Google is getting into the light-hearted spirit of April Fool's Day a day early by letting you play "Pac-Man" on the streets of the city of your choice on its Maps website.

To play, all you need to do is go to your city on Google Maps and click the "Pac-Man" icon in the bottom-left corner. The map will then fill with Pac-Man, the four ghosts, the dots and the power pellets.

A good map based on Downtown Indianapolis, including Monument Circle and Washington Streets can be seen at google.com/maps/@39.7685542,-86.1589368,18z/data=!1e3.

Let's get this out of the way quickly: this isn't a perfect conversion. Controlling with the arrow keys feels laggy and unresponsive. Pac will too often shoot past a turn even though you were holding down the appropriate key. Diagonal streets, such as Virginia and Massachusetts avenues, are a pain to navigate on to and off of, as are weird intersections that involve having to "jog" one way or another.

The way Maps handles wider roads is also questionable. You'll see two parallel rows/columns of dots running down the road, but you can't move from virtual lane to lane to clear them all. It's as if there is an invisible wall running between the rows. You instead have to make a series of turns and eventually turn into the proper lane.

That said, this is still a pretty nifty bit of coding. Not all roads that head off-screen have corresponding "warp" points on the opposite side, but the game does a pretty good job of putting you in the next-closest area.

Playing across the streets of Downtown Indianapolis, it's also shocking how well Pac-Man handles Monument Circle.

Plus, it's Pac-Man. The concept is as bulletproof as video game mechanics get.

This isn't the first time Google has saluted Pac-Man. To celebrate the video game icon's 30th anniversary on May 21, 2010, Google put a playable Doodle on top of its homepage. Hitting the "Insert Coin" button a second time restarted it with a second player simultaneously playing as Ms. Pac-Man. (You can still play it at google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac-man.)

It's shaping up to be a big year for the mascot from Namco (now Bandai Namco Games). This year will mark his 35th anniversary, and he is also heavily featured in the upcoming Adam Sandler movie "Pixels." He is also starring in the recent "Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures" cartoon series. But, really, who can resist "Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX +"?

Call Star online editor Channing King at (317) 444-8073. Follow him @ChanningKing