Bandai Namco will celebrate Pac-Man's 45th birthday with museum displays, live experiences, and an official cookbook featuring 'a maze of imaginative recipes' - Related to spring, coming, birthday, are, 'a

Bandai Namco will celebrate Pac-Man's 45th birthday with museum displays, live experiences, and an official cookbook featuring 'a maze of imaginative recipes'

PAC-MAN: 45 Years of ImPACt - YouTube Watch On.

Pac-Man is 45 years old in 2025, and series owner Bandai Namco has a big old shindig planned to distract the ravenous yellow circle from the slowly encroaching spectre of death. The publisher has outlined a 'year-long celebration' to commemorate Pac-Man's anniversary, hosting numerous events around the world and, er, releasing a cookbook.

, the celebrations are planned to run through 2025 and into early next year, running along the theme of 'imPACt', whatever that means. This will include live events occurring across the next few months, such as a "special display" showcased at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, which runs from April 30 through June 4 this year. Moreover, the Great Park Gallery in Irvine, California will host a "Pac-Man retrospective exhibition" starting in May and concluding in late September.

While I'm always up for a videogame exhibition, I'm more intrigued by the "Pac-Man live experience". This is partly because it's happening more locally to me, hosted in the UK at Manchester's Arcade Arena. But it also sounds like it's basically giant Pac-Man, with participants able to "step into a life-sized interactive maze for a fun, multi-sensory adventure." In my head, I imagine this as gobbling up sugar cubes while being occasionally chased by men dressed as ghosts, but presumably there will be more to it than that.

The celebrations aren't limited to live events. Bandai Namco is partnering with Club América to offer a "limited number" of Pac-Man branded football shirts, and is also working with Insight Editions to publish an official Pac-Man cookbook. Yes, you read that correctly.

The press release is light on information on the cookbook front, simply asking, "Ever wonder what a Ghost or Power Pellet tastes like?" (See the previous paragraph for my answer to the latter.) However, the book has a store page over on [website], which provides a few extra details. The cookbook will apparently feature "a maze of imaginative recipes" for "energy-filled snacks" and "super-filling dinners". I'm mildly intrigued to see how they stretch this concept beyond two hundred pages of yellow pizzas, which Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani has intermittently claimed to be the inspiration for Pac-Man's design. Bizarrely, the cover art capabilities no pizzas whatsoever, but does represents Pac-Man's ghosts, cherries, and, er, a random burger. If you're desperate to discover the recipe for Pac-Man's iconic quarter pounder, the book launches May 13.

Naturally, Bandai's upcoming game Shadow Labyrinth also ties into the festivities. The bizarre Pac-Man action platformer was originally unveiled at last year's Game Awards, and sees players exploring a destroyed world with the aid of a yellow orb named Puck who can "consume darkness." Bandai Namco hasn't shared any new info on Shadow Labyrinth as yet, but promises more details on this weird spin on the arcade classic "in the coming months".

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Planet Coaster 2's spring roadmap splashes down, with 'round-bottomed flumes' coming in March and buildable restaurants arriving in April

Planet Coaster 2 | Roadmap and enhancement 3 | Frontier Unlocked - YouTube Watch On.

Planet Coaster 2 may have endured some ups and downs when it launched back in October, but Frontier Developments' post-release support for its theme-park building sequel has been as steady as a lazy river. January brought improved flume simulation to the sequel's all-new waterslides, while February added video billboards players can create their own custom adverts for. Now, Frontier has unveiled its roadmap for the next few updates landing over the spring, and there are some substantial new elements being added to the management sim in the coming months.

The most imminent modification, which lands later this month, adds even more flexibility to flume construction. modification 3 increases the variety of movement of guests and rafts on special flume pieces, improves the appearance of guests jettisoning off flumes, and adds "inflatable deformation", so rafts will bend and squash in a believable manner as they whizz around a slide. On top of this, it also adds "round-bottomed flumes", a phrase which instantly caused a certain, similarly-named Queen song to start playing in my head, like activating a sleeper agent obsessed with seventies glam rock.

April's modification 4, meanwhile, brings a whole new feature to Planet Coaster 2­—in-park restaurants. Players will be able to build restaurants in their park to sit alongside the smaller food stalls, which will "satisfy multiple guests' needs and tolerances". The description is somewhat vague, but since visitors buy food and drink separately from stalls, it's possible eating in a restaurant means they can get both at the same time, which would provide the mechanical impetus to construct a more complex eating establishment.

This isn't everything the updates will add. Both patches will bring new rides to Planet Coaster 2. Alongside a bevy of stock coasters, improvement 3 will let players build the Vector inverting suspended rollercoaster, while improvement 4 will add an as-yet unrevealed ride alongside its restaurants. improvement 3 also heralds the return of the 'Western' park theme from the dusty plains of obscurity, letting you build a rootin', tootin', coaster shootin' park just as you could in the original Planet Coaster. Both updates will also make "ongoing" enhancements to performance, stability, economy management, alongside more specific parts of the simulation like ride attendants.

There's a video featuring Frontier devs talking through the roadmap and improvement 3 that you can view above. April doesn't represent the end of support for Planet Coaster 2, with further, unspecified changes and additions coming in May. For now, though, you can expect improvement 3 to land on March 20.

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Microsoft's Civilization 7 competitor escalates tensions with Firaxis' embattled 4X, announcing that nukes are coming with its impending diplomacy update

Ara: History Untold was a decent attempt by Microsoft to snatch some strategic territory from Firaxis' Civilization series, but all its sabre-rattling didn't seem to come to much when it launched last September. Perhaps this is due to the fact its pleasingly modular city construction was undermined by hefty micromanagement. Or maybe it's because it launched without some key elements, like a diplomacy system deeper than a puddle, and more specifically, the ability to annihilate rival cultures in a flash of nuclear fire.

Both will be addressed by Ara's impending Diplomacy modification, which Oxide Games not long ago unveiled is "coming soon". Patch [website] adds a bunch of capabilities to Ara, including new diplomatic options, new diplomatic events, and, of course, the ability to build and launch nuclear weapons.

Naturally, weapons of mass destruction are the headline feature of the upgrade, although Oxide Games doesn't provide many specifics of how these will be implemented. The upgrade's Steam announcement brusquely states, "players can unlock technologies to build nuclear weapons and defenses", which isn't especially informative. That stated, Oxide does provide some images of the game's "Nuclear ICBM technology" in action, and fair enough, that is one fine-looking explosion.

In conjunction with nukes, the revision also aims to enhance the game's array of diplomatic tools to help you avoid pushing the big red button. As of [website], players will be able to engage in bribery, demand tributes, provide military aid, and gain improved tools to understand the views of other nations. Further, the revision will add "diplomatic history tracking" that provides a detailed rundown of your long-term relationship with other nations, as well as new diplomatic events that "influence AI behaviour", with specific regard to war preparations.

Oxide says the full patch notes will be unveiled next week, along with more details about how the new diplomacy systems work. While diplomacy was undoubtedly one of the weaker elements of Ara, Oxide's game had a pretty good core. Indeed, while it has a 'Mixed' rating on Steam overall, the handful of more recent reviews have been much warmer, with some reviewers appreciating the game's management depth after Civilization 7's controversial lighter take on the 4X formula. It makes me wonder if Ara might have fared more effective launching after Civ 7 rather than before, pitching itself as the fuller alternative to a questionable entry in an illustrious series, much like Cities: Skylines did ten years ago. It'll be much harder for Oxide to do that now, but adding nukes and negotiations is a step in the right direction.

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