Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

PAC-MAN Championship Edition™

Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

island mario 12-12-2007, 7:39 PM
preamble: when i made this post, i had lots of spaces between paragraphs, but in my post, it has made this whole thing one big unreadable mess. How do I get my spaces betweem paragraphs to show up??? I read Stepehen El's post about the extreme lag he has with HD. I dont have anything nearly as bad as what he describes, but I do have a general question about lag in the game in general. Ive always played on an HDTV, so I have no SD frame of reference (by the way, how does the wide aspect of the game appear in standard tv's... black bars at top and bottom of screen?). I have never really noticed too much of a lag per se.... generally my Pac turns when I tell him to turn. But I do sometimes note a lack of responsiveness, but I wonder whether it is just the way the game plays, or whether it is an issue of HDTV lag. The most common irritation I have, will happen when I become sandwiched between two ghosts. Lets say a ghost is in front of me, and I am just on his ***... catching up to him and about to die because of it. And lets say a ghost is behind me, by a solid 4 to 6 pac lengths. If I throw the control stick immediately in the opposite direction, then immediately back in the direction I was going (this move literally takes me less than a fraction of a second)... I generally always get caught by the ghost behind me. Obviously I am trying to put just a little more space between me and the ghost in front, but when I do this move, the pac seems way laggier than my control stick motion (fraction of a second) and the ghost behind me will get me. I suppose it is also possible that I have some lag when turning corners, but it does not manifest often because generally I am sparking, and therefore already have my controller in the "new direction" before i reach the actual corner (in other words if there is a lag for turning the corner, it is negated by my "pre-turning"). There are time when it gets frenetic, and sometimes I just wont make a corner... I used to chalk it up to my innacuracy with the controller... but it happens enough (and I do have some skillz at Pac) that I am starting to wonder. So do you think this is lag I am getting, or just the general responsiveness inherent in the game design? When youre stuck between two ghosts, are you able to do a really quick move to change the gap, or do you get eaten?

Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

island mario 01-11-2008, 5:03 PM


apologies... Im using Opera, and it made my first post a big mess with no paragraph breaks. I have re-typed it here... and then my follow up reply in the next post, as I did a test last night...

I read Stepehen El's post about the extreme lag he has with HD. I dont have anything nearly as bad as what he describes, but I do have a general question about lag in the game in general. Ive always played on an HDTV, so I have no SD frame of reference.

I have never really noticed too much of a lag per se.... generally my Pac turns when I tell him to turn. But I do sometimes note a lack of responsiveness, but I wonder whether it is just the way the game plays, or whether it is an issue of HDTV lag.

The most common irritation I have, will happen when I become sandwiched between two ghosts. Lets say a ghost is in front of me, and I am just on his ***... catching up to him and about to die because of it. And lets say a ghost is behind me, by a solid 4 to 6 pac lengths. If I throw the control stick immediately in the opposite direction, then immediately back in the direction I was going (this move literally takes me less than a fraction of a second)... I generally always get caught by the ghost behind me. Obviously I am trying to put just a little more space between me and the ghost in front, but when I do this move, the pac seems way laggier than my control stick motion (fraction of a second) and the ghost behind me will get me.

I suppose it is also possible that I have some lag when turning corners, but it does not manifest often because generally I am sparking, and therefore already have my controller in the "new direction" before i reach the actual corner (in other words if there is a lag for turning the corner, it is negated by my "pre-turning").

There are time when it gets frenetic, and sometimes I just wont make a corner... I used to chalk it up to my innacuracy with the controller... but it happens enough (and I do have some skillz at Pac) that I am starting to wonder.

So do you think this is lag I am getting, or just the general responsiveness inherent in the game design? When youre stuck between two ghosts, are you able to do a really quick move to change the gap, or do you get eaten?

Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

island mario 01-11-2008, 5:16 PM
Now that I have been playing Championship Mode , I do notice similar problems to what StephenEl mentioned.

When I get towards the end of the game, the Pac becomes very hard to control at high speeds. I had not noticed this in Challenege Mode 1, since you dont generally go quite as fast.

Once you start really speeding though, it becomes very tough to control the PAC, and it does seem to be laggy.

Home sick yesterday, and curious, I plugged the xbox into a 13" SDTV (from 52" Sony).

My conclusion is that there is a lag, but the severity it questionable.

The proof of lag comes from a couple observations. First of all, when doing the Championship Mode standard patterns for eating, I would often find myself missing the last dot iin a chain.

What I mean is that in some patterns, you eat a chain of dots, then turn 180 and go in the other direction. What I found was that I would miss the last dot in a chain... which means I am turning aroung with my 180 too early.

This to me proves the lag, because it shows that I have anticipated the lag in my use of the control... in other words if there was a slight lag, then I would not be missing that last dot. So its obvious I have built this lag into my gaming and compensated for it. I hope this explanation makes sense... its hard to describe.

The other evidence, was that after 30 min or so of playing, I set a new high score. More than that, I noted that when I got to the faster parts, I definitely had more control of the PAC.

One point of difference from StepehenEl's observations, is that I did not find re-training myself to be that difficult. After 30min or so of playing on the SD, my hands had readjusted for the different lag in this new gamin mode.

So I feel I have concluded that there is definitely a slight lag with *my* HDTV. I imagine the lag will vary by brand. It raises an interesting question about gaming on HDTV's though. This is just pac-man after all.. I wonder if people playing Halo 3 etc. ever have the same issue.

Whether the lag is enough to make me play on a 13" set instead of a 52" ... now that Im not sure about.

Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

V0LD3M0RT 01-24-2008, 5:02 AM

It depends on how good you got before making the change to HD I suppose.  I was up to 469k on a 52" Pioneer projection TV bought in 1995 from the day it was released until early September.  I considered myself pretty good at that point and I think I had the #2 or #3 top legit score in Championship Mode.  400k became a piece of cake.  Then I got rid of that TV and replaced it with a 50" plasma.  When I did that, I was never able to break 400k again.  The lag is probably very small and not enough to even visually detect it, but at the speed of this game from the key boards on up, it created a substantial control problem.  I became unable to capitalize on the key and candy levels (if I could even get there). 

It was really disappointing as this was my favorite game at the time.  Out of frustration, I simply stopped playing.  I guess I don't have the patience that StephenEl did.

Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

island mario 01-24-2008, 4:48 PM
i absolutely agree that the lag really only becomes an issue after the key level (and assuming you havent died).

Im 6th on challenge mode 1, and currently about 32nd on Championship mode (428K)... Ive still been playing on my 13" since two weeks ago (although this has more to do with the fact that I can play while the wife watches tv at the same time thqan game lag).

Something you can try (and I plan to when I hook my HD back up) is that a lot of HDTV's have a "game mode" setting which supposedly improves response time (at the expense of some digital processing), so you could try that.

i did score my 6th place score in challenge 1 on my HDTV, so it cant be that bad... though admitedly you dont spend quite as much time going super fast in that mode, as it usually makes more strategic sense to die before the pellet levels...

Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

DethBoxx 04-07-2008, 11:24 PM
Yeah if you play games like Rock Band or GH3 you will note that they both have lag calibration, something that IMO the xbox should offer at the system level to correct for all games.

Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

maxjive 04-18-2008, 5:32 PM
That's funny you mentioned Plasma, because I have a CRT at home and everytime I go to a friend's house to play on his 40"+ LCD, I can't break 300k...I see noticeable lag.  This has happened with all (4) LCD's I tried playing on.

I thought it had to do with the size of the set (mine is 30" and all the LCD's were 40"+), but then I found this online:

"My Samsung [LCD] has an amazing picture, but the downside is that there seems to be a little bit of gaming lag on mine, even in gaming mode. It doesn't really come into play 99% of the time, but when I play Pac-Man CE, it totally screws me on the fastest levels.
posted by MegoSteve at 4:55 AM on August 30"

I thought Plasma and CRT both bested LCD's in terms of image processing and response times?  But, you're saying you had a problem with Plasma, huh?

Interesting....
Joba Rules!

Re: Is this HDTV lag, or just the general responsiveness of the game??

Wild Bill NC 01-18-2009, 1:49 PM
I think it has to do with the components in the Plasma.  Plasma is natively caused less the 1 ms lag to populate the screen.  LCD was around 4 ms, but the more expensive 2 k units have around 2 ms.  I'd like to find a Plasma with good components inside that overcome this.  I bought the Sanyo 50" Plasma from Wal-Mart for 1 k two years ago.  My projection TV in the game room went out and I started playing on it.  Got called Newbie in all the first shooters I had been excelling at.  Question is, should I invest in another Plasma from another manufacturer for the game room?  Anyone with a plasma that just rules at low latency?  I noticed a Samsung 50" for around a thousand at Wal-Mart, does anyone have that TV and playing online?