This thread is making me laugh a bunch. Have had my BPM for a bit over a month and it is the most challenging machine, frustratingly so. I had hardly any pacman experience before I got it. Maybe 5 games of mrs pacman over the last decade and very few before that. I always thought it was a bit lame. I jumped on this machine because it was so unique and had never played it before. This was the one that got the wife a bit bummed on my renewed gaming obsession. I got a good deal on it, and it just intrigued me so much. Got it home and it started making me mad right away. I love it.
I have the 5 guys and all other settings as easy as possible. I have it on free play, but I never seem to be able to get the extra guys with the blue drop target. Maybe that is messing with it.
I have been honing my maze skills a bunch lately. Skipping the pin part to concentrate on getting better. I had a party last week and two folks who are really god at pacman rocked the machine. I saw some of their tricks and it has helped a bunch. I have made it back to the 1st maze once (4th screen) and now know you can hide from the ghosts and to challenge them every now and then to get them to follow you.
I finally got to play one of my friends mrs pac and holy cow it is so much different. I made it through 3 screens on one guy. Those ghosts play so much nicer.
The game continues to challenge me and I love it for that. I had a huge long game on Bride of Pinbot a couple days ago and hit 56 million. It was getting kind of boring though. Baby pac keeps me interested every time I play it. Most times I die I know exactly what I did wrong and learn from it. Can't wait to see an invisible wall.
That is interesting. Might be my problem.
I'm not sure his statement was worded as well as it could be. You can win one extra baby pac-man. It is like a "replay" for the one guy that your playing with when you win it. So say you have 5 guys, you advance the center arrows and win a free baby. You will have six babies at that point. However, once your man dies, you get to use the one you earned first. It is more obvious what is happening when you play two player. When you earn the extra baby, you will play with that extra baby before the other player gets a turn. So if you keep earning an extra baby, then dying, you can keep going and make the other player wait indefinitely. So if you get down to having one baby pac-man, you can earn the spare to get you back to two temporarily, but you will never have three again.
Advancing the arrows and getting the baby pac-man awarded requires the vidiot setup to be run (game test mode) and you need to set some options in there. I posted what I think are the options in this thread. If you do not set those options, you will not get the extra babies. It isn't clear in the manual, but you must do that for it to work.
If you can't find it and get the setting to work, just post back and I will go verify the settings on my machine. Have fun!
-VJ
Edit: Also, it isn't just the blue drop target that lights the arrows. Completing the fruits or tunnel sequence will light an arrow. Also, with the right settings, clearing a maze will also light an arrow. So if you need one arrow to get the extra baby, you will get it when you clear the maze if you miss earning it via pinball.