which was then promptly locked. Before he could succeed in turning all the ghosts back into ghost ink, the ghosts counterattack Pac-Man with a curse, which captures him in a sheet of paper. Pac-Man enlists the help of the player to use the Magic Pen to rid the books of the Ghosts. The player uses the Magic Pen to rid the pages from the ghosts by drawing Pac-Men. Eventually, the player gets towards battling the Ink Master, the source of the Ghost Ink. The Ink Master is eventually defeated, and is sealed inside a bottle. With the ink ghosts gone, the curse induced on Pac-Man is undone and is freed from the paper sheet. Pac-Man seals the bottle in a chest and hides it in the unknown sea, freeing the people of Pac-Man's world from the ink ghosts. Development Pac-Pix was developed and published by Namco. The game was debuted at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 2004 as a technology demonstration for the newly unveiled Nintendo DS hardware. According to producer Hideo Yoshizawa, Pac-Pix was conceived as an arcade game by director Tetsuya Shinoda four years prior. Using Apple personal digital assistants (PDAs), Shinoda noticed how corrected text would disappear with a tiny puff of smoke when crossed out by the user; he found this type of control intuitive and wanted to implement it into a game. Two years later, the creators pitched the idea as a tablet computer and PDA game, but found the game and the target audience for such hardware did not match. When the DS was announced, Yoshizawa stated that "the time was right". The E3 demo Pac-Pix was met with praise from people within the video game industry, many of which requested it be made into a full game. Namco obliged by putting together a development team, which implemented more effective use of the hardware's two screens. According to Yoshizawa, the most difficult aspect of production on Pac-Pix was allowing the player to determine size, shape, and place of their own sketches within the gameplay environment. Reception See also Pac 'n Roll - Another Pac-Man game developed by Namco for the Nintendo DS that was released on the same year. References External links Pac-Pix on GameSpot. Pac-Pix on IGN. 2005 video games Action video games Drawing video games Nintendo DS games Nintendo DS-only games Pac-Man Video games developed in Japan Single-player video games Video