Twinkle

Twinkle is an arcade game which was released by SemiCom (in 1997), and stars Namco's signature character, Pac-Man; it runs on the same hardware as their own Hyper Pac-Man (which was released two years earlier), but much like that game, it is not officially part of the Pac-Man series. Although the depiction of Pac-Man in his anthropomorphic form on the title screen, shown in the image to the right is now closer to Namco's official one, the gameplay is much the same as that of that aforementioned Hyper Pac-Man - as the players (Namco had now also released one official two-player Pac-Man title, Pac-Man Arrangement back in 1996) must utilize two 4-way joysticks to direct two Pac-Mans around ghost-regenerator-free mazes, and eat all the pellets while avoiding unnamed, identikit ghosts, along with two buttons to make them jump over the ghosts (and fire shots from their laser helmets at them) after collecting the appropriate powerups. Every tenth stage is also, as with the earlier unofficial Pac-Man sequel, a boss battle (for which both of the Pac-Mans will automatically have laser helmets with unlimited ammunition); however, this unofficial "Pac-game" has forty stages as opposed to just thirty.