Hello--Long-time lurker deciding to make a significant post for the first time.
I recently gained a bit of interest in doing a real-time run of this game, as I grew up with it and enjoyed all the interactions available. For those unfamiliar with the game, it is kind of a point-and-click adventure game. The player has to guide Pac-Man through areas to complete objectives, either by shooting objects with a slingshot or by telling Pac-Man to look in a direction.
On the surface, it seems like a really simple "point A to point B" game that is unsuitable for any significant entertainment in terms of a speedrun, but as I found while playing around yesterday, routing ends up being quite a fun puzzle, due to the myriad of ways things change as a result of Pac-Man's mood, the ability to skip certain triggers by interacting with the world, the Super Pac-Man power-up (which has a long animation but skips long stretches of obstacles), death warps...I've had this game since I was a small child and I've played it to death, but even now I'm finding new animations and situations I'd never seen before.
Anyway, I decided to try experimenting to find a good route. I couldn't find any info on these forums or the SDA forums, and the only speedrun I could find was a real-time run from 2007 that seems to be quite unoptimized:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6HQtmkcdX8
This run doesn't really mess with Pac-Man's mood or see if the environment can get him around faster. After about an hour of messing with the world, I was able to shave about ten seconds off the time of the first stage, in what I feel is pretty entertaining in comparison (turn on annotations for the best effect):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njkY9CqNgJg
Within that, various button optimizations would be for stops via the "Look" command could be made better in a TAS (the previous video was done in real-time for fun), getting the crow to knock down the bottle as far left as possible, faster cow interactions, and knocking on the door when you're directly below it. As far as I can tell, there's no good way to shorten the animation after running from the fan.
I played around with Stages 2 and 3, as well; might make videos there soon. I found a handful of ways to speed those up. It's worth noting that there are only four stages, so the game is quite short. Just thought I'd post here to see if anyone wanted to help me route it and/or if someone was looking for a fun diversion to work with.
In working up to the end of Stage 3, outside of when it is mandatory (to get the ghosts' ID cards), Super Pac-Man only appears to be faster for movement at the top of the mountain, and only barely (stupid balloon).
