Pac-Man: Adventures in Time w/ 3D spatial sound 🎧 (OpenAL Soft HRTF audio) 250,000 views special!

1 day ago
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Use headphones only with any virtual surround features turned off. Best HRTF effect at 0:55.

Aww shit, here comes Pac-Man! This is Pac-Man: Adventures in Time with OpenAL Soft's HRTF (IRC_1037 tables) through DSOAL. I'd say that this was one of the most obscure Pac-Man games ever made, but I'd be lying if I said I was a Pac-Man historian. Not only was it not made by Namco in any way, shape, or form, but it was published by Hasbro Interactive entirely. Development duties were pushed onto Mind's Eye Studios and Creative Asylum. Never heard of them? Don't worry, they made literally nothing of note except a Starsky & Hutch game that the legendary Tim Follin did music for. I remember seeing magazine ads for this game around the time Pac-Man World came out on PS1 and I wondered why it was PC-only. Now I know why: it's basically just the maze mode from Pac-Man World sold as a separate game, only the A.I. is infinitely worse.

In other words, it's a budget game with the Pac-Man license.

It should be noted that Adventures in Time has no music slider, so I actually had to replace the music .WAVs with blank files in order to mute them. I must admit, the prescence of binaural audio in this game is a bit jarring. How do you do 3D positional audio in an overhead-view maze game? The answer is you don't. The only real 3D sounds are the random ambient water sounds that seem to pan wherever they want to and the horribly annoying sirens that the ghosts make. You can kind of hear sounds move around better than with plain stereo, but the only noteworthy spatialization is the stereo SFX when you eat a ghost. Also, for some reason the EAX option is grayed-out when you use DSOAL, but there doesn't seem to be any reverb in the demo anyway.
Use headphones only with any virtual surround features turned off. Best HRTF effect at 0:55.

Aww shit, here comes Pac-Man! This is Pac-Man: Adventures in Time with OpenAL Soft's HRTF (IRC_1037 tables) through DSOAL. I'd say that this was one of the most obscure Pac-Man games ever made, but I'd be lying if I said I was a Pac-Man historian. Not only was it not made by Namco in any way, shape, or form, but it was published by Hasbro Interactive entirely. Development duties were pushed onto Mind's Eye Studios and Creative Asylum. Never heard of them? Don't worry, they made literally nothing of note except a Starsky & Hutch game that the legendary Tim Follin did music for. I remember seeing magazine ads for this game around the time Pac-Man World came out on PS1 and I wondered why it was PC-only. Now I know why: it's basically just the maze mode from Pac-Man World sold as a separate game, only the A.I. is infinitely worse.

In other words, it's a budget game with the Pac-Man license.

It should be noted that Adventures in Time has no music slider, so I actually had to replace the music .WAVs with blank files in order to mute them. I must admit, the prescence of binaural audio in this game is a bit jarring. How do you do 3D positional audio in an overhead-view maze game? The answer is you don't. The only real 3D sounds are the random ambient water sounds that seem to pan wherever they want to and the horribly annoying sirens that the ghosts make. You can kind of hear sounds move around better than with plain stereo, but the only noteworthy spatialization is the stereo SFX when you eat a ghost. Also, for some reason the EAX option is grayed-out when you use DSOAL, but there doesn't seem to be any reverb in the demo anyway.

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