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What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2016 (Season 9)


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It was a fairly small week for my household in terms of play time and variety of games played, but we did log quite a bit more tracker eligible time this week than we have the last few! :)

 

wQctASB.jpg

 

 

Ineligible

Dead Space: Extraction (Nintendo Wii) - 744 minutes

The House of the Dead: Overkill (Nintendo Wii) - 52 minutes

Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil Zero (Nintendo Wii) - 131 minutes

Arcade

New Rally X - 28 minutes

Game Boy

Boggle Plus - 29 minutes

Bram Stoker's Dracula - 47 minutes

Street Fighter II - 13 minutes

Game Boy Color

Dance Dance Revolution GB - 41 minutes

Monopoly - 59 minutes

PC-DOS

Final Doom - 132 minutes

Sega Master System

Alex Kidd in Miracle World - 5 minutes

Psycho Fox - 17 minutes

Total Play Time This Week

1,298 minutes (21 hours 32 minutes) [371 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week

Nintendo Wii: 927 minutes

PC-DOS: 132 minutes

Game Boy Color: 100 minutes

Game Boy: 89 minutes

Arcade: 28 minutes

Sega Master System: 22 minutes

To cut right to the chase, the big highlight of the week for me this week actually wasn't the game that saw the most play. I did log a ton of time in my newly acquired copy of the phenomonal Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii, playing through it once on Normal and then again on Hard (though I haven't quite finished the Hard difficulty play through yet), but the game that I was the happiest and most excited to have played this week was Bram Stoker's Dracula for the Game Boy. It may not be one of the most well known titles for the iconic green and black screened handheld, but I remember seeing this game on store shelves so many times as a kid, wanting it soooo badly, and begging my parents to buy it; but alas they never did. Back then I already had a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula for the Genesis and adored it, but since I already had a home console version of the game my parents didn't want to shell out the money for the handheld port.

Fast forward about 25 years later and Bram Stoker's Dracula for the Game Boy has become a strangely rare and hard to find game, most likely due to the fact that it didn't sell too many copies when it first came out. Sales numbers aside, it's actually a pretty darn good game and was well worth the $8.74 shipped that I paid for my cartridge on eBay. It did take me about 6 months of patiently watching and waiting for a copy to come up for sale at a reasonable price, but it was definitely worth the wait and I've already played through and beat it on Easy difficulty. I've yet to tackle a full play through on Normal difficulty (which adds several more levels) due to a nasty case of Game Boy Thumb the last few days, but I am really looking forward to giving it a go when my left thumb gets a little less sore. Maybe I should lay off the Maniac difficulty Dance Dance Revolution GB marathons for a couple days. :lol:

As far my wife's gaming time this week goes, she stayed pretty focused on the deviously difficult Resident Evil Zero (and died way more times than I've ever seen her die in any Resident Evil game in the process) but also managed to get in a little time in House of the Dead: Overkill and the arcade classic New Rally X on our 60-in-1 multicade. Due to some physical limitations I've never seen her play any game that she couldn't use an arcade stick for before, but with some careful balancing of the Wii remote she has been able to play some light gun games like HotD Overkill and HotD 2 on the Wii lately. Needless to say I've been thrilled to be able to share these games with her, since light gun games have always been one of my favorite game genres, and she's been having a really great time with them too. :)

I think that's about it for all the big gaming news from around here for the week! For next week I think it's safe to expect that I'll log some more Game Boy and Game Boy Color play time as I continue to find myself drawn back to my old favorite handheld, and the misses is definitely far from done with Resident Evil Zero. As far as what else the future may have in store, only Madame Zokar knows... and I'm not paying $6.75 a minute a find out. :P

Edited by Jin
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Here's the summary for Week 24, running from June 6 - 12. We logged 4965 minutes of eligible play, playing 61 games on a total of 19 systems.


Top 10:


1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 808

2. Color A Dinosaur (NES/Famicom) - 800

3. Pac-Attack (SNES) - 589

4. Pac-Man (Atari 5200) - 435

5. Frontier: Elite II (Amiga) - 210

6. Shamus Case II (C64) - 164

7. Jumpman Jr. (ColecoVision) - 160

8. Final Doom (PC (DOS)) - 132

9. Puzzle (NES/Famicom) - 112

10. Shamus Case II (Atari 8-bit) - 107


Pre-NES top 10:


1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 808

2. Pac-Man (Atari 5200) - 435

3. Shamus Case II (C64) - 164

4. Jumpman Jr. (ColecoVision) - 160

5. Shamus Case II (Atari 8-bit) - 107

6. Elite (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) - 62

7. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 55

8. Donkey Kong Jr. (Atari 7800) - 50

9. Mario Bros. (Atari 7800) - 35

10. Peek-a-boo (ColecoVision) - 30


Top 10 systems:


1. NES/Famicom (1007)

2. Atari 2600 (963)

3. SNES (723)

4. Atari 5200 (435)

5. PC (DOS) (317)

6. Amiga (210)

7. ColecoVision (210)

8. Arcade (202)

9. Sega Master System (168)

10. C64 (164)


This week it's Atari 2600 vs. NES. While the NES gets the edge on the system charts, Kaboom beats out unlikely contender Color A Dinosaur to barely eke out the #1 ranking on both individual charts, by a margin of only 8 minutes!


Meanwhile the 1000-minute club gains two more constituents this week, as Pac-Man on the Atari 5200 and Final Doom on DOS get spots #211 and #212, with 1418 and 1030 minutes logged respectively.

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Atari 2600

Double Dunk: 7 min

Freeway: 21 min

Frostbite: 12 min

My Golf: 31 min

Pitfall: 8 min

River Raid: 7 min

Skiing: 10 min

Sky Jinks: 5 min

 

Atari 2600 only for me this week. Reason: HSC, of course. And the Activision Patches Summer Quest, which has just started:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/253779-the-2016-activision-patches-summer-quest/

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I did a lot of 2600 gaming this week due to the fact that me and Toiletunes started the Activision Summer Patch Quest 2016. Please feel free to chime in and show your skills on some of the best 2600 games. :) Anyways this is what I logged in this past week.

 

Atari 2600:

 

Crackpots: 40 Minutes

Skiing: 30 Minutes

Sky Jinks: 5 Minutes

Dragster: 30 Minutes

Laser Blast: 50 Minutes

Pitfall: 25 Minutes

Ice Hockey: 10 Minutes

Seaquest: 15 Minutes

Freeway: 7 Minutes

Stampede: 45 Minutes

Frostbite: 35 Minutes

River Raid: 10 Minutes

Chopper Command: 10 Minutes

Decathlon: 10 Minutes

Enduro: 20 Minutes

H.E.R.O.: 35 Minutes

Plaque Attack: 15 Minutes

Megamania: 15 Minutes

Keystone Kapers: 25 Minutes

Spider Fighter: 20 Minutes

Pressure Cooker: 25 Minutes

Oink: 15 Minutes

 

Colecovision:

 

Venture: 45 Minutes

 

NES:

 

Duck Hunt: 10 Minutes

Castlevania: 25 Minutes

 

Arcade/Mame:

 

1942: 70 Minutes

Joust: 10 Minutes

Mario Bros: 30 Minutes

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: 30 Minutes

Speed Buggy: 10 Minutes

Lunar Rescue: 10 Minutes

Star Wars: 10 Minutes

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2600:

Chopper Command - 32 minutes

Ice Hockey - 20 minutes

Laser Blast - 40 minutes

Pitfall - 52 minutes

 

Dreamcast:

Crazy Taxi - 20 minutes

 

Game.com:

Wheel of Fortune - 40 minutes

Wheel of Fortune 2 - 40 minutes

 

Jaguar:

Alien Vs. Predator - 12 minutes

DOOM - 20 minutes

Cybermorph - 20 minutes

Tempest 2000 - 78 minutes

 

First of all - shoutout to the Activision Summer Patch Quest thread, I did a bit of this last year and quit for some random reason but it's a good bit of fun, and even if you have to emulate, go right ahead.

 

Alright, now that that's out of the way, it's been a neat week for me. I went into work and a guy brought in a box with three Jaguars and a few games, so I got to finally play a Jaguar for the first time in my life - it was pretty neat, and depending on price and if they don't get bought up real fast, I may have to pick one up for myself after they get out on the shelves for a bit for other people to take a shot at. Pretty much, AvP was a pretty OK shooter but I don't know what to think, DOOM is DOOM and I'd be happy to own a Jag copy so I can finish off getting all the console ports of DOOM, Cybermorph is pretty OK but that's it, and Tempest 2000 is a ton of fun, definitely a game I'd buy if I could have a jaguar. Dreamcast got playtime with Crazy Taxi, it's always a fun game transporting people around and all that stuff. Game.com was boring - Wheel of Fortune is OK at best to me, and on a Game.com with silly sound effects, it's not that good... so yeah, next week is the last week with that thing and I'm glad. Finally 2600 got played, I have to post three more patches over there sometime when I have a break in Elite: Dangerous, so all that will be in that thread.

 

So yeah, it was a fun week. I may get more time in tomorrow, but I have a party to host and all that stuff.

Edited by BurritoBeans
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Here are my times this week (June 13th through 19th)...

 

Arcade:

Donkey Kong 3 - 40 min.

 

Online (non-eligible):

Pac-Man - 2 min.

Pacman Breakout Invaders - 5 min.

Zaxxon (playable level) - 3 min.

Super Mario Land - 2 min.

Space Invaders - 2 min.

Rampart - 45 min. in 2 sessions

Duck life - 19 min.

Duck life 1.3 - 6 min.

 

The only classic game I played this week was Donkey Kong 3, in which I played 4 games and got to Level 13.

 

The online games I listed are all from this cool site: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming

If you click on "Browse Projects" there, you'll get a lot of Javascript games. The nifty thing about them is that you have a code editor on the left, and the result is immediately displayed / played out on the right. This somehow brings back the spirit of programming your old home computer without having to install an IDE first (which can be tedious nowadays), seeing your program run immediately after typing it in. You can spin-off existing projects and make your own versions of them.

 

As for the games I played, Pac-Man is... well, Pac-Man. Pacman Breakout Invaders is a cross of the three games where you shoot at monsters only to have them drop to the bottom, hoping for Pac-Man to eat them while you do your best deflecting Pac-Man so he doesn't go off-screen.

"Zaxxon", "Super Mario Land" and "Space Invaders" are attempts at the respective games which are quite good. Rampart actually is a tower defense game. Duck life and Duck life 1.3 are strategy games where you collect coins playing several minigames with your duck in order to be able to buy upgrades for it. You have to upgrade your duck to a level which enables it to win in several races against other ducks. In Version 1.3, there are different minigames, but this version seems to be somehow flawed because clicking on a menu item typically gets you a different item, and the descriptions are often wrong and say the opposite of what actually happens.

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ATARI 2600:

1) Frostbite (from Stella) - 45 minutes

2) Missile Command (from Stella and 7800 Prosystem Console) - 65 minutes

3) Pac-Man (from 7800 Prosystem Console) - 20 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Donkey Kong Junior (from MESS) - 90 minutes

 

COLECOVISION:

Pac-Man (from ColEm) - 20 minutes

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PHOTOS AND VIDEOS OF THE WEEK:

 

1) 2600 Missile Command from Atari 7800 Prosystem Console - Score 155,485 points on Game 1-AA (Difficulty Switches on right position)

post-24681-0-30165200-1466381813_thumb.jpg post-24681-0-39323800-1466381828_thumb.jpg

post-24681-0-82491600-1466381853_thumb.jpg post-24681-0-08831600-1466381841_thumb.jpg

 

2) 2600 Missile Command from Stella - Scores: 127,140 points (Game 16B) and 15,720 points (Game 16A)

 

3) 2600 Frostbite from Stella - Score 479,000 points on Game 3, for the 2016 Activision Patches Summer Quest Contest (with statistical table)

post-24681-0-78726000-1466382032_thumb.png

 

4) 7800 Donkey Kong Junior from MESS - Score 268,700 on Standard, for 7800 High Score Club Season 8, Game 15 (new record)

 

5) Colecovision Pac-Man from ColEm - Score 89,180 points on Skill 1

Edited by oyamafamily
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Arcade

 

Paperboy (1985). 10 min. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to get the analog controls working properly in MAME. Very impressed by the detailed graphics though, pretty amazing for 1985. In fact, I'd say the graphics are still better than the SNES and Genesis versions which came out in the 90s. Apparently the game runs on a system not entirely dissimilar to a DEC PDP-11. The voice samples are lousy though. Better than nothing though. Extremely difficult.

 

C64

 

Paperboy (1986). 20 min. Not the best port. Also too freakin' hard, but in that sense it's faithful to the arcade. The music is too loud and distracting.

 

Genesis

 

Paperboy (1991). 1 hour. So somebody recommended the Genesis port to me as it had the easiest controls. It also has an easy mode which is much easier which is great for people who totally and completely suck at Paperboy, like me. The graphics are pretty and faithful to the original arcade, even if slightly less detailed, if you can believe that. Voice samples are lame though. So far I like this version a lot and I'm going to keep playing it to try and see how far I can get.

 

2vs1a3n.jpg

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I got a bit more time in on the 2600 with friends, so yeah.

 

2600:

Frogs 'n Flies - 12 minutes

Tennis - 42 minutes

 

So yeah, I had a bit of a party today, but after a bit some friends and I ended up picking up the 2600, and played some stuff. I had Tennis in already so we played a bunch of that, taking turns - I never thought people would end up being so happy with such a simple game being that we took a bunch of time on Rock Band/Broforce/more modern stuff in general, but that was neat. I also got some time in with Frogs 'n Flies, for how simple it is everyone seems to love it, so that was fun stuff.

Edited by BurritoBeans
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My times for the week:

 

NES:
Dudes with Attitude - 493 min.
Flight of the Intruder - 7 min.
Tiles of Fate - 377 min.
Trolls on Treasure Island - 512 min.
SNES:
The Brainies - 9 min.
Went a little overboard with the unlicensed NES puzzle games this week, but hey, I beat all three of them. Dudes with Attitude offers some interesting challenges despite its terrible name, while Trolls on Treasure Island is basically Dudes 2, culminating in two truly nasty levels -- beating the second-to-last one was among the harder gaming challenges I've ever completed.
Otherwise I tinkered with Flight of the Intruder, which doesn't seem like my kind of game, and The Brainies, which exemplifies why time limits in puzzle games are often a misguided idea.
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My times for the week:

 

NES:
Dudes with Attitude - 493 min.
Flight of the Intruder - 7 min.
Tiles of Fate - 377 min.
Trolls on Treasure Island - 512 min.
SNES:
The Brainies - 9 min.
Went a little overboard with the unlicensed NES puzzle games this week, but hey, I beat all three of them. Dudes with Attitude offers some interesting challenges despite its terrible name, while Trolls on Treasure Island is basically Dudes 2, culminating in two truly nasty levels -- beating the second-to-last one was among the harder gaming challenges I've ever completed.
Otherwise I tinkered with Flight of the Intruder, which doesn't seem like my kind of game, and The Brainies, which exemplifies why time limits in puzzle games are often a misguided idea.

 

 

Gosh, I've never heard of any of these games.

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Gosh, I've never heard of any of these games.

 

Heh, neither had I until the ROM era, and I certainly never played them until I started helping NintendoAge try to beat all the NES (and SNES) games in a year. Actually, I might've heard of Dudes with Attitude, simply because the name is so bizarre, but for whatever reason the American Video Entertainment games never showed up in my area.

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After being distracted by several other systems over the last month or so, all it took was picking up a new Game Boy game last week to rekindle my enthusiasm for my favorite system to play and collect for; and it definitely shows in my household's statistics for the week! :D

 

At173xB.jpg

 

 

Ineligible

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo Wii) - 230 minutes

Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil Zero (Nintendo Wii) - 211 minutes

Arcade

Centipede - 15 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man - 6 minutes

Game Boy

All-Star Baseball 99 - 126 minutes

Bases Loaded - 16 minutes

Boggle Plus - 25 minutes

Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition - 46 minutes

Bust-A-Move 3 DX - 4 minutes

Bram Stoker's Dracula - 49 minutes

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball - 79 minutes

Metroid II: Return of Samus - 452 minutes

Mortal Kombat II - 50 minutes

Yoshi - 44 minutes

Game Boy Color

All-Star Baseball 2001- 9 minutes

Bust-A-Move 4 - 13 minutes

Bust-A-Move Millennium - 10 minutes

Dance Dance Revolution GB - 12 minutes

Monopoly - 252 minutes

NES

Baseball Stars - 55 minutes

Total Play Time This Week

1,704 minutes (28 hours 24 minutes) [1,263 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week

Game Boy: 891 minutes

Nintendo Wii: 441 minutes

Game Boy Color: 296 minutes

NES: 55 minutes

Arcade: 21 minutes

The time I spent playing Bram Stoker's Dracula for last week's tracker post really got me interested in playing and collecting for the Game Boy again, so most of my gaming time this week (aside from my ongoing and seemingly endless quest to finish the enormously long The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii) was spent trying out new Game Boy games that I've been considering buying via emulation on the Wii and playing a couple old favorites on my Game Boy Color. For the new games this week I decided that my Game Boy collection and wants list were woefully lacking in sports titles, so even though I've never been a huge fan of sports games I decided to do some research to learn what all the best sports games for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color were. Being the height of summer right now, baseball seemed like the best place to start!

I ended up spending a bit of time playing all the Game Boy baseball games that I could find positive reviews of and one that just looked like it had the potential to be good, and (strangely enough) the one that I ultimately enjoyed the most and thought was hands down the best baseball game for the original Game Boy was the one that I couldn't find a single review of but thought it looked good: All-Star Baseball 99. The graphics blew the rest of the competition out of the water, the controls worked great, and the gameplay was fun and satisfying. I just played a couple simple exhibition games because I honestly don't know baseball well enough to understand all the customization options and statistics in the game, but it did seem like it had a lot of interesting stuff for those that do have a more thorough understanding of baseball.

I also had a lot of fun with Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, but the batting mechanics in that one never quite gave me enough time to determine where the ball was going before deciding to swing or not and fielding was nearly impossible to control well without turning on "auto fielding" in the options and letting the computer do most of the work. It was still a really fun game though, and definitely one I'd pick up if I stumbled across a copy in the wild; since it did have great visuals and the gameplay (the pitching especially) was more fast paced and arcade style than that of All-Star Baseball 99. Ken Griffey was a great game for playing in short bursts when I just wanted a quick gaming fix, whereas All-Star Baseball was more of a "sit down and play for an hour" sort of affair. On average I think it took about half the time to play a full game of Ken Griffey MLB that it took me to play a game of All-Star Baseball, largely due to the faster, simpler, and more personally enjoyable pitching mechanics in Ken Griffey. Overall I still think that All-Star Baseball 99 is the best playing and best looking baseball game on the original Game Boy, but Ken Griffey Presents Major League Baseball is a pretty close second!

When I wasn't playing various baseball games this week I spent the rest of my time revisiting and playing through some old favorites like Metroid II: Return of Samus and Mortal Kombat II, then spent a bit of time trying out all the different Bust-A-Move games for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color via emulation to figure out which ones I liked the best. Of the four options out there for GB/GBC I think Bust-A-Move Millennium for the GBC was definitely the best and had the most variety to offer, though Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition for the original Game Boy is still a very worthwhile pickup for any fan of the old gray brick. :)

As far as my wife's gaming time this week goes, she got in on the baseball craze this week a little too by joining me in a game of Baseball Stars on the NES; but the majority of her time for the week was spent once again wandering the hallowed halls of Resident Evil Zero. She did play a little Bust-A-Move 2 when she noticed me trying it out, since she's always had a soft spot for the Bust-A-Move series being that the original was the first arcade game she ever played, but for the most part she just stuck to RE: 0 and I get the impression that she's actually pretty close to beating it at this point.

That's all the gaming news that's fit to print from around here for this week!

Edited by Jin
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I was dissapointed by the C-64 version as well, mainly for the fact that they only used 4 colors for the background. The music was also not entirely faithful to the original, therefore I set out to create my own version of the Paperboy theme back in early 1987. I've attached an image of it (I think this is the first time this one gets released), out of the many C-64 disks in my collection I've saved in the last months (there are many more songs to come from there, but first I want to complete the backup).

 

zip.gif paperboy mus.zip 3.05KB 0 downloads

 

You have to unzip it and load the PRG file with a C-64 emulator such as VICE... or put it on a real C-64 disk if you can. You have to load the file with the ,8,1 option and then type "Sys 49152" to start the music.

 

C64

 

Paperboy (1986). 20 min. Not the best port. Also too freakin' hard, but in that sense it's faithful to the arcade. The music is too loud and distracting.


 

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