I'm Dreaming of a Big Christmas

So yeah... I'm just about over my flu from last week, but now I've got another problem. Some neighbors of ours wondered if they could give us their old television set, and I said yes, because who's going to say no to an offer like that? But it turns out that my mother doesn't want it in her room, and there is no other room for this thing in the house. It's fifty inches diagonally, and I'm already quite happy with the 42" set in the living room... you know, the one I resuscitated earlier this year.

So now I've got to make practical use of this massive plasma television set. In any other situation I'd be thrilled to have it, but with space at a premium, I'll have to get creative to keep it from going to waste. (Sure, I could give this television away, but I get the feeling that I should keep a spare set handy in case the other one croaks on me.)

image from Bandai-Namco

Here's what I've come up with so far. You've heard about the "World's Largest Pac-Man" arcade game, right? These machines pop up from time to time in mall movie theaters, and they're exactly what it says on the tin... an unreasonably large version of Pac-Man, displayed on a six foot long screen and played from a nearby podium. Some tweaks have been made to the gameplay to add surprises to the thirty-seven year old formula and accommodate two players, but past that, it's Pac-Man... just bigger. Big enough that Pac-Man could probably eat your hand in three bites.

I can't literally put the world's largest Pac-Man in my house, but through the magic of tate, I could come pretty close! I could hang the television from a wall using a VESA mount, connect a Playstation TV or an Android TV to the back, then flip the whole thing sideways, giving me a gargantuan vertical display for not only Pac-Man, but Donkey Kong, Dodonpachi, and everything else which uses a portrait orientation. Better yet, being stuck on a wall should save a lot of space that would otherwise be gobbled up by a stand. It's ostentatious, hedonistic, and completely unnecessary, but hey, first world problems deserve first world solutions. 

EDIT: Well, it works! Here are a few images of Ms. Pac-Man running sideways on this television set, using a Playstation TV and pFBA. I don't have the set hanging from a wall yet, but this is a promising start.

I've taken the liberty of flipping the second picture, to give you an idea of how it would look in a vertical orientation. It's big, all right, but having to lay down on the floor with a tilted controller to play it is... less than ideal. Stay tuned for more news as it happens.