Presume he had just ate a power pellet, of course.
Followup matchups for your consideration:
- Slimer, from “Ghostbusters”
- Sadako, from “The Ring”
- Freddy Krueger, from “Nightmare on Elm Street”
- The clown from “It”
- A ring wraith from “Lord of the Rings”
Consider how eating the power pellets turns the ghosts blue, and how the ghosts regain their original colour when they respawn, even within the power pellet timer. The natural conclusion is that the pellets don’t change pacman, but change the ghosts.
As such, unless the power pellets affect ALL ghosts the same way they affect the pacman ghosts, pacman could not eat any ghost other than the pacman ghosts.
The power pellets only affect ghosts after said pellets are eaten by Pac-Man, as the ghosts can float over pellets without issue. Thus I think its a safe assumption that making the ghosts material form edible one time, temporarily is a result of Pac-Man’s magnified power rather then the pellet itself.
Hence the question.
While the ghosts don’t activate the pellets, they also don’t eat the regular pellets. They interact with nothing but Pacman, the only living thing to be found. Even if they could, the only effect is to weaken the ghosts, so they have no reason to.
If the pellet changed Pacman, it makes no sense that he could eat one ghost and not another. And yet, when a ghost respawns, Pacman is unable to eat that one, even as he manages to eat the others. The change has to be within the ghosts, reverting with time or with resurrection.
As such, we have no reason to believe Pacman can eat any ghost unless that ghost reacts to the power pellet. Whether those ghosts react to a power pellet? Insufficient data for meaningful answer.
But, this establishes that the pellets have to be acted upon by an outside force to affect the ghosts. It might also be reasonable to assume that this action may be exclusive to the Pac family.
It makes sense if the usage of the power pellet allows Pac-Man to affect the ghosts material form temporarily.
I like to imagine a situation where Pac-Man set off a paint bomb in a room covering everyones clothes with blue paint that makes those clothes edible. He eats a dudes now blue shirt, dude freaks out, goes home, changes his shirt and comes back. Everyone else still has edible shirts but not dude. Maybe someone else goes to the bathroom and washes off the paint on their shirt after a bit under the faucet. Their shirt is also no longer edible.
Good thing you’re not submitting this to a journal for peer review then. ;)
I love this conversation so much.
That is a big assumption. Are there any Pacman games with different types of ghosts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pac-Man_video_games
There are apparently 63 Pac-Man games, not counting compilations of games, non-game Pac-Man software, non-Pac-Man games where Pac-Man merely is present as a character (like Street Fighter X Tekken), and never-completed Pac-Man games.
That’s a pretty expansive amount of software to dig through.