Pattern Play Secrets

Pattern Play Secrets

So you want to beat the machine, or at east rack up a score that will leave the next player shaking his head in disbelief...don’t ve all? But whether there’s some secret vay to achieve that goal...well, that’s another barrel of pickles, isn’t it?

As long as there have been games, there have been systems for beating them. Along rith buried treasure and the Brooklyn Iridge, systems that can’t miss must be yed with suspicion.

Recently the concept of playing a pattern” has made the rounds of the rcades. The idea is that there’s some alution, some ultimate, mystical combinaon that lets the player beat the machine.

All systems or patterns have a reasonble chance of being partially successful if ley are the result of experience with the ame involved and logical observation of le options available to the player. But one of these kind of systems is going to lutthe computer down in defeat.

The problem with all patterns is that the layer only has limited contact with the omputer through one or two controllers— joystick and a fire button. So the odds are ot exactly in the player’s favor, sort of like iking on the entire Space Invaders fleet 'ith a baseball bat. Good luck.

The home personal computers like the 1C-20, Atari 400, and Radio Shack RS-80 play games that you might ventually be able to conquer—because ou as well as the game program have a omputer keyboard.

This doesn’t stop players from dreaming bout patterns that will ensure they play lore and spend less, playing for hours on ne quarter once they get their pattern own.

In a sense, the pattern is part of the maze f Pac-Man and other maze games. We re psychologically being led along the corridors of the maze as we relate to Pac-Man, and being thinking humans, we begin to believe we see a way out of the maze, a pattern that could be followed. We play the game again and again, certain moves roll into each other, the bits and pieces of the pattern occur at one time or another—if we can retain them and add them together as we play we find the beginnings of a pattern.

One trap related directly to patterns is that player eye/hand co-ordination affects the pattern’s success. If the player reaches a certain point sooner or later than he should, the timing—and therefore the pattern—will be thrown off.

This means a good pattern for one player wouldn’t work with another player. This simple fact is somehow twisted into the romantic notion that not only are there patterns out there that are 100%, people are playing them, and winning with them.

The human brain against the computer brain. Computer fear? More like our human attempt to include the computer in the family. The game computer may always ultimately beat us, but by thinking it has a quirk, a series of small human-like failings, we warm to the computer, dream about what pattern we’ll use, and hope to win someday.

Because the concept of patterns and “winning” are more human than computer brains, there are a bevy of new books that let you in on all the arcade secrets. Some reproduce patterns that may be just right for you.

Among the titles you might want to take home from your bookshop, check Scoring BIG at Pac-Man from Warner Books for five quarters, or How To Win at Pac-Man from Pocket Books for nine quarters, or Mastering Pac-Man from NAL/Signet for just under two bits. More expensive video game texts are also in print. For $5.95 there’s The Winners’ Book of Video Games (Warner Books) or The Complete Guide To Conquering Video Games (MacMillan).

Since we wouldn’t be publishing this magazine if we didn’t think there is something to be said, we applaud the publishing efforts to date, although some of the volumes are less exploitational than others. And if you check at Radio Shack or your local computer store, you’ll discover there’s a wall-full of literature for those of you who are really serious about computer programs, language, and technology.

Computer games can be seen as an addiction, and anyone who’s put in a tough day at the arcades knows a little of what a mouse feels like in a maze. But if we are addicted as players, it isn’t to the machine or game so much as our unconquerable belief that we can beat the machine at its own game.

This is where the fantasy and reality of pattern play comes in. In a sense, whenever we play a new machine and learn the game for the first time, we are learning a play pattern. Without that basic pattern we don’t last more than 30 seconds before the machine lights up with “The End” in big letters. So in a sense, it is necessary to understand the basic pattern of the game before attempting to play, or get a super score.

But that this pattern extends to the entire game cycle is open to question. The game computer does things at random, perhaps not an infinite number of random situations but random enough. And even if such random options were identified and planned for, the human eye/hand element is constantly a factor which is not to be considered particularly reliable in building an anti-program pattern.

We certainly aren’t going to go out on a limb and say there are no ghost, alien invaders, or perfect play patterns, but we’re willing to bet that the perfect pattern is probably inscribed on a gold tablet and hidden away in a cave on some other planet.