Gemma 4 31B Just Demolished Qwen 3.6 27B in a Pac-Man Game Dev Showdown

Here's something wild: when both AI models tried to code a Pac-Man game on a MacBook Pro M5 Max, Gemma 4 31B absolutely crushed Qwen 3.6 27B—but not in the way you'd expect. Qwen was faster (32 tokens/sec vs 27), pumped out way more tokens (33,946 vs 6,209), and even showed more creative flair with fancy visual styling. But here's the thing: Gemma finished in under 4 minutes with a clean, logical, actually-playable solution, while Qwen took 18 minutes and basically over-engineered the whole thing. This raises a real question for anyone using local LLMs (large language models): is raw speed and verbosity actually better, or does getting a solid answer fast matter more? Spoiler alert—in the real world, Gemma's approach won this round. Read the full breakdown to see which model you should actually be running on your machine.