Arm Spirit, which is distributed by Atlus, is to be removed from 150 game emporiums as "a precaution".

"We think that maybe some players get over-excited and twist their arms in an unnatural way," a spokesman said.

An investigation has been launched into the incidents and the machines are being checked for any malfunctions.

"The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it," company spokesman Ayano Sakiyama told AP news agency.

The occasion was the Xbox Live Arcade re-release of the venerable game on its 25th anniversary. Pac-Man has been retrofitted for Microsoft's spanking new techno marvel, the Xbox 360. Bill Gates and co. have spent an immense amount of sweat and equity on a system designed for games like Gears of War, which has something to do with saving earth from a race of evil locust people rising from the bowels of hell to enslave humanity. So why is a simple game like Pac-Man - in which the titular hero runs around a maze gobbling small pills and eluding ghosts - being reintroduced with such hoopla? And in an industry obsessed with progress, why is something a quarter of a century old coming to an Xbox near you with absolutely no enhancements?

In the early 1980s, Pac-Man was a phenomenon without parallel. There was the Pac-Man TV show, a Pac-Man song; Pac-Man even appeared on the front cover of Time magazine as a metaphor for crooked politicians and their tendency to gobble cash and resources. He was a pop-culture sensation that could only have occurred at the dawn of the blockbuster era, a time when the George Lucasian sheen of hype and marketing started to eclipse content. The rise of movie sequels like Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and MTV-ready bands like Duran Duran proved that pop culture events were increasingly the result of strategic planning rather than genuine, spontaneous public interest. Pac-Man, on the other hand, just happened. He munched his way into this new universe with shocking voracity. He became the icon of a brand new age. There will never be another videogame with such sweeping influence.

Pac-Man was the brainchild of designer Toru Iwatani at Japanese gaming company Namco. Legend tells us that the primary inspiration for the glabrous yellow hero was a slice of pizza sitting on Iwatani's desk. (There are numerous theories as to Pac-Man's inception; the common theme appears to be gorging.) The game’s Japanese launch in 1979 met with middling response. This was, after all, the era of Space Invaders, a halcyon time when 30 pixels suitably arranged on a monitor comprised a videogame; nascent gamers insisted on killing aliens, even if the aliens didn't look like much of anything. Then, something strange and inexplicable occurred: Pac-Man caught on. Repackaged and released in North America in 1980 by Bally/Midway Games, Pac-Man represented a Gladwellesque tipping point: the moment that brought videogames into the collective consciousness.

THQ launched a lawsuit against the company last year, alleging breach of contract which prevented the publisher from releasing a Nintendo DS version of the classic puzzler. According to THQ, all requirements of the deal had been met, and the licensing agreement should have been renewed until 2007.

Now the company's financial filings have revealed that a settlement was reached at the end of 2005 - and that as part of the deal, THQ will publish Tetris for the Xbox 360 in territories outside of Japan, where a next-gen version was launched alongside the console last December.

At E3 the stars come out, and such was the case at the Sprint games press conference which featured Pac-Man and his big-time crush, sweet, thin Nicole Richie. The whole thing was staged to introduce "Super Pac-Man" for Sprint Mobile Games. Said Richie, "I used to have a Pac-Man machine in my house, and I loved it. But now I can take Pac-Man everywhere."

As in a traditional video game, players navigate a virtual world in a bid to stay alive. The twist? Computerized movements in Mice Arena are mapped to and from the real world, where an actual predator (your hamster) gives chase to a digital avatar (you) by pursuing a real piece of bait. The avatar's movements in the virtual environment direct the bait around a small tank fitted with actuators that mold and twist an elastic latex floor into the changing terrain of the game map. The hamster's pursuit in the tank is monitored by infra-red sensors that relay its position to the computer screen.

Researchers at Emerging Art and Architecture Research Group, or RASTER, and Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab have so far developed a game engine for Mice Arena, and they're currently syncing it to actuators that manipulate the shape of the arena floor. They are also in the process of building a remote-control bait mechanism for the hamsters to chase. They expect to demonstrate a fully functional prototype by November.

"We want to enable pets to play games in a way very similar to the way human players' play," said RASTER's Vladimir Todorović, a collaborator working on the Metazoa Ludens project. "To play a computer game with your hamster would definitely make us think about where we have come with digital tradition now."

It may sound like a really complicated version of Ms. Pac-Man, but the goal of the game makers is ambitious: to merge human spaces with pet spaces through pervasive computing interfaces. By creating high-tech, pets-versus-owners computer games, researchers hope to gain new insights into animal behavior, and perhaps develop new technologies that could close the gap between the species.

This bag is loosely based on Deb Stoller's intarsia bag in the first book (second book?). But I didn't add enough to the sides, so had to knit a side/bottom piece to make it a little wider. And I did the straps on dp's instead of straights. And I added webbing to the underside of the straps to make the straps unstretchable. And I added a lining. So, really, I guess the only thing I got from Deb's pattern is the gauge and general dimensions. That's something.

In what looks to be the University of Michigan library (the video is hosted on a personal UM website), a guy dressed up as Pac-Man bellows and cries for help as he is pursued by Blinky the red ghost, all the while making the infamous "wocka wocka" sound effect as the chase progresses through the computer lab.

This was one of the funniest things I saw at the IREX: a PacMan Robot with which you could play through a PacMan Remote Control and a ghost robot. this was not an amateur project either, as Bandai and Namco are behind this project. The game might never hit the market though, but I'm sure it would be a load of fun in a game hall.

1. Tron
2. Bubble Bobble
3. Ms. Pac Man
4. Contra
5. Pac Man
6. Jungle Hunt
7. Frogger
8. Pole Position
9. Burger Time
10. Spy Position

Firstly, the players immerse in role-playing of the characters Pacmen and Ghosts by physically enacting the roles. Players physically move around in a wide-area setting, performing tasks to reach their goals. Utilizing the computing power of wearable computers and the underlying network support, Human Pacman takes mobile gaming to a new level of sophistication by incorporating virtual fantasy and imaginative play activity elements, factors which propelled the popularity of computer games [1] , with the implementation of Mixed Reality on the Head Mounted Displays (HMD). The players also experience seamless connections between real and virtual worlds as immersive first-person augmented reality view (with virtual cookies overlaying the real world) and full virtual reality view of our fantasy version of the game, Pacworld.

Combining both real and virtual elements, the game allows the human Pacman to 'see' virtual cookies with the aid of the special headset scattered on the street which the player can then 'eat' by walking through them.

Ghosts get to 'devour' the player by tapping them on the shoulder when they catch up to them within the game area.

In return, Pacman gets the ability to temporarily neutralise them and add to his virtual powers when he finds and picks up Bluetooth-embedded physical sugar jars scattered in the real world environment by a game coordinator.

The player's locations are also wirelessly updated to a virtual 3D Pac-world where online gamers can view their progress and participate by helping either Pacman or the Ghosts through text messaging.

Arguably the most influential game in the industry's history (with Pong the only other real contender), Pac Man has made more than $100 million dollars one quarter at a time. He's spawned his own line of trading cards, lunch boxes, board games, breakfast cereals and been the inspiration for a Top 40 hit (Buckner & Garcia's "Pac Man Fever" hit number 9 on Billboard's charts in 1982).

This year, Pac Man turns 25 -- but age isn't slowing the little guy down. 1999's "Pac Man World" and 2002's "Pac Man World 2" both sold over a million copies. And Namco has already announced four Pac Man themed games this year - and versions for Sony's PSP will be announced in the near future. TV Plug & Play game collections featuring Pac Man remain hot sellers. And the rise in cell phone gaming has opened up another opportunity for the original arcade game.

I just moved and was looking for things to put on my empty white walls and found blik wall graphics, stick-on decals that are much much easier than that whole stenciling business. The decals are fully removable so you don't leave any residue on the walls and you can easily switch from space invaders to flying birds.

GameTap provides subscribers an "all-you-can-play" gaming service accessible from up to two household computers. To access GameTap, players securely download and install Turner-developed client software from www.gametap.com that acts as a gateway to the GameTap library. Because games reside securely on the PC, not across a network, they act just as if they were still on the console or at the arcade. Fast response times, 3D effects, colors, and characters are all present and accounted for. GameTap supports navigation and game play using both keyboard and mouse, as well as most USB peripherals.