What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2018 (Season 11)

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Enduro - 22 minutes

Frostbite - 100 minutes

Space Invaders - 16 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Robotron: 2084 - 38 minutes

T:me Salvo - 99 minutes

 

EVIDENCES OF THE WEEK:

 

1) T:me Salvo gameplay footage presented for 7800 HSC Season 2017-2018, Round 12, on ProSystem emulated

 

2) My final score on Frostbite for 2600 NEW HSC Season 7 / Week 5, on ProSystem console

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 7, running from February 12 - 18. We logged 4991 minutes of eligible play, playing 73 games on a total of 18 systems.

Top 10:

1. Werewolves & Wanderers (TI-99/4A) - 610

2. Sonic 3 & Knuckles (Genesis) - 492

3. Tails Adventure (Game Gear) - 285

4. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 283

5. Toyshop Trouble (Atari 2600) - 245

6. Doom (PlayStation) - 211

7. Sonic Triple Trouble (Game Gear) - 206

8. Dragon Warrior IV (NES/Famicom) - 204

9. Sonic the Hedgehog: Pocket Adventure (Neo Geo Pocket Color) - 175

10. Frostbite (Atari 2600) - 171

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Werewolves & Wanderers (TI-99/4A) - 610

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 283

3. Toyshop Trouble (Atari 2600) - 245

4. Frostbite (Atari 2600) - 171

5. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 162

6. Olympic Skier (Atari 8-bit) - 108

7. Red Clash (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 105

8. T:me Salvo (Atari 7800) - 99

9. Space Jockey (Atari 2600) - 91

10. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 90

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1090)

2. TI-99/4A (938)

3. Game Gear (578)

4. Genesis (549)

5. Emerson Arcadia 2001 (365)

6. Atari 8-bit (310)

7. Neo Geo Pocket Color (235)

8. NES/Famicom (229)

9. PlayStation (211)

10. Atari 7800 (137)

Werewolves & Wanderers on the TI-99/4A made the 1000-minute club last week and earns the top spot this week on both individual charts, but the VCS holds it off on the system charts to take #1 there.

In other news the 1000-minute club reaches 323 members, as it enrolls Dragon Warrior IV on the NES (1027 min.), Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the Genesis (1007 min.), and TI Trek on the TI-99/4A (1005 min.).

[Opry99er]

Thanks for the update, thegoldenband!!! And thanks again for tracking the games!

[dj_convoy]

Sat down on my lunch break today and 1cc'd Gun*Nac (the Famicom version; can't afford the NES one) which took right around an hour. I had promised myself earlier in the week that I was going to spend a little more time with it, got to area 7 yesterday before just cracking up and dying... sat down again with it today and surprised myself. Frankly, I actually had a ton of lives left, so the game didn't really come close to beating me. There's still life in these old bones yet!

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

River Raid II: 15 min

Smurf: 10 min

Spacechase: 12 min

Space Jockey: 5 min

 

PC (DOS)

Historyline: 185 min

 

High Score Club, one nostalgic round of Smurf (had it as a kid and return to it regularly), plus two fun maps in Historyline.

[PFG 9000]

I haven't played much retro stuff lately, as the time I have had has gone to the latest Shadow of the Colossus remake. So for retro stuff:

 

Atari Jaguar - Breakout 2000 - 30 min.

Atari Lynx - Xybots - 20 min.

Atari Lynx - Robotron - 10 min. (But it was a glorious 10 min.)

 

I also played about 20 min. of Yoshi's Story on the N64 with my 3yr old, but that was mostly spent with him staring at the controller and pushing random buttons, and with me staring at the screen wondering whether the N64 garnered a sharp rise in eyeglasses prescriptions in the late 90s.

[BurritoBeans]

Sega Saturn:

Deep Fear - 300 minutes

SimCity 2000 - 112 minutes

 

After multiple weeks of no games at all, well at least I got something in. After working on a few projects which I thought would be fun (Built some guitar amplifiers, speaker cabinets for those amplifiers, and circuits to drive random old vacuum tubes that I got from some guy in Russia) I sat down with the Saturn and played for the first time in a good while.

 

So I always heard that Deep Fear was a good game but never actually tried it until now. I ended up finding a NTSC-J copy for cheap so I picked it up. Pretty much the impression I get is that someone took a bunch of inspiration from Resident Evil and then set it underwater and added some neat new mechanics - it's got the similar cheesy dialog, use of guns, tank controls, etc. but with stuff like short oxygen supplies and being able to move and shoot. I pretty much ended up running around for a while not exactly sure where to go but it came after a while and I think I made a decent amount of progress.

 

SimCity is SimCity, can't really say much more than that. I always enjoyed the Saturn port since it's quite similar to the plain PC version with some little expansions, but I always disliked it too since it usually saves to the console and that battery dies quite fast.

 

So yeah, maybe for next week I'll get some more time in on Deep Fear - I've been wanting to commit to another speedrun of sorts, maybe go for a world record, so I guess I could start on that.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Mogul Maniac - 85 min.

Olympic Skiier - 84 min.

More HSC... we shifted which games should be included one week into the round.

[Eltigro]

Atari 2600

Smurf: 10 min

 

 

Is this the Rescue in Gargamel's Castle? I actually have that one! lol

 

Atari Lynx - Xybots - 20 min.

 

 

Xybots was one of the arcade machines that always got plenty of quarters from me. Always liked that game... maybe it was the controls...

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week on classic games (February 19th through 25th)...

 

Arcade:

Q*bert's Qubes - 188 min. in 3 sessions

 

Atari 2600:

Q*bert's Qubes - 9 min.

 

I continued to play the original version of Q*bert's Qubes, and finally managed to beat Level 8, where you have to do 3 Tic-Tac-Toes with non-fixed qubes. After that comes Level 9 which requires 4 Tic-Tac-Toes with fixed qubes, after which those same two combinations repeat over and over. I didn't beat Level 9 in that session, but in another one where I started at Level 5. Oddly, it took me a lot of failed attempts until I finally got into the "zone" where the game seemed to play itself, and I managed to beat Levels 9-11 several times.

 

After that I briefly played the Atari 2600 port of Q*Bert's Qubes, mostly to look how they solved the problem of the limited colors per scanline there. Well, the grid has been reduced from 5x5 to 4x4, and on the scanlines where the front and right side of the qubes are shown, they actually display the correct color of those sides on alternating scanlines... on one scanline, the front is shown and the right side is black, on the next scanline it's the other way round. That way, they only need to show at most 4 foreground colors per scanline, in addition to two players.

 

Other than that, I only played modern games. apart from programming a bot which should be able to play Toyshop Trouble by itself. Right now it's able to solve the first level. The next step is to teach it to differentiate different types of toys from each other for the next levels.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 180 minutes

Hunchy 2 - 41 minutes

Space Jockey - 73 minutes

Spacechase - 167 minutes

 

 

Kaboom! : 55,495

 

Hunchy 2 : I was having Hunchy 2 withdrawals so I played a few rounds.

[Eltigro]

Another very "Sega-centric" week for me...

 

Sega Saturn

Albert Odyssey (emulated) - 65 min (Grinded some more, but started nodding off, so I advanced the story a bit. There are three towers that you have to go through and beat bosses before you can go to a central tower and defeat the game... I think... anyway, I completed the first of the three towers.)

Daytona USA - 11 min (I've never been a big fan of Daytona USA. But I do love that song. DAYTONAAAA!!!)

PGA Tour 97 - 55 min (I pop this in every once in a while and play a round. It's a slow game. Lots of load times. Started this round off with an eagle on the first hole, but then it went in the crapper. I mean, I ended with a reasonable score of 3 over par, but it really should have been lower. I feel I got screwed on one of those double bogies that should have been a par.)

 

Sega Dreamcast

Sega Rally 2 - 68 min (I finally got past the second stage! I got to where I was consistently getting between 1:02 and 1:05 on the desert stage, which gave me enough starting time to get to the end of the mountain stage. I never even got to the first checkpoint in the third stage, though. Definitely a game that rewards practice.)

 

Most of my Saturn gaming this week was inspired by David who runs/ran the youtube channel Saturnology. He had a lot of good videos reviewing Sega Saturn games. He's going to stop updating the channel he's run for five years and will still be putting videos up on another youtube channel, kinda partnering up with youtuber Saturn Memories. As a farewell, he did a 24 hour stream on both YouTube and Twitch, starting at 6pm Eastern Saturday until 6pm Sunday and played a lot of great (and some not so great) Saturn games.

 

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

NES:

Chack'n Pop - 290 min.

Penguin-kun Wars - 119 min.

Game Boy:

Double Dragon III - 2 min.

SNES:

Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade's Revenge - 7 min.

Beat the two Famicom games I played -- or at least reached their loop points (which is good enough for me), since neither has a proper ending. Thoughts here.

[zylon]

Genesis-

Wheel Of Fortune- 25min

Mortal Kombat 6- 10min

 

NES-

1942- 35min

Tiger Heli- 5min

Mario Bros- 40min

Gyrodine- 10min

Galaxian- 5min

Othello- 20min

 

NES played on one of those NES-Mini clones. The thing's made well and works great, but I still don't like NES much anyway. Some things never change, lol.

[Iwantgames:)]

Atari 2600

 

Pac-Man - 40min

 

Atari 7800

 

Pole Position 2 - 10min

 

Arcadia 2001

 

Ocean Battle - 2min

Unfortunately this is a 2player game so only "played" long enough to test

R2D Tank - 20min

Robot Killer - 10min

 

CoCo 1/2

 

Arkanoid - 25min

Mindroll - 15min

Silpheed - 95min

 

CoCo 3

 

Rad Warrior - 10min

Robocop - 15min

Super Pitfall - 10min

Thexder - 20min

 

Neo Geo Pocket Color

 

Dark Arms: Beast Busters 1999 - 30min

 

 

[karokoenig]

Is this the Rescue in Gargamel's Castle?

 

Yeah. I keep forgetting that's the full name of the game, hehe... In Germany, it was just "Smurf".

[Skippy B. Coyote]

It was a bit of a slow week for gaming around here the past week, but that's alright because the time I would usually spend playing video games got spent pursuing a somewhat gaming related hobby project instead. The project that took up the bulk of my free time over the past week was doing some major restoration work on a life-sized plush of my all time favorite video game character, a two-tailed fox who may be familiar to the Sega fans here.

 

 

Ineligible
StreetPass Mii Plaza (Nintendo 3DS) - 7 minutes

Sega 32X
JagDoom 32X - 233 minutes
Knuckles' Chaotix - 149 minutes

Sega Game Gear
Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble (played on 3DS Virtual Console) - 119 minutes

Sega Genesis
Arcade Classics - 6 minutes
Tanglewood Demo - 118 minutes
Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits - 12 minutes

Sony PlayStation
Doom - 108 minutes


Total Play Time This Week
752 minutes (12 hours 32 minutes) [745 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Sega 32X: 382 minutes
Sega Genesis: 136 minutes
Sega Game Gear: 119 minutes
Sony PlayStation: 108 minutes
Nintendo 3DS: 7 minutes

 

 

 

Last Sunday was my birthday and the two presents I got this year both arrived in the mail early this past week, and can be seen in the picture above. One was the Mega EverDrive X5 for the Genesis / Sega CD / 32X setup and the other was a very rare and expensive life-sized plush of my favorite video game character, Miles "Tails" Prower from the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The Tails plush is 23" tall, was produced in 2003 by a company called Toy Network, and I acquired him from a collector who had kept him in brand new condition for the past 15 years with all the tags and the clear plastic covering over his eyes that he originally shipped from the factory with still attached.

 

I was beyond thrilled to get him but even though he was still in new condition there was some restoration work that needed to be done to make him the nicest that he could be. I took the picture above right after receiving him in the mail, de-tagging him, and removing the plastic eye coverings (I know I'll never sell him so reducing collector's value by removing the tags and eye coverings was of no concern to me) and you might notice that his hands and the white parts of his feet look a little yellowed. That was because he was originally stuffed with polystyrene foam that yellowed a lot over the past 15 years, and it also became really brittle and crunchy so he wasn't exactly soft and snuggly feeling when I picked him up.

 

With that in mind I ended up taking on the rather enormous 17 hour long restoration project of opening up the seam on his back, removing all the nasty old polystyrene foam and dust inside him, turning him completely inside out to brush out every last bit of the polystyrene, cleaning up his hands and feet, then restuffing him with high quality Poly-Fil to make him soft and cuddly feeling before sewing him back up. It was a ton of work and I think I'll probably be vacuuming polystyrene dust out of the carpet for the next 3 seasons (that stuff is absolutely insidious and gets everywhere, to the point that you need to wear a mask over your nose and mouth when working with it to keep it out of your lungs) but the project went well and my giant Tails plush is now fully restored and looks awesome. He'll have a permanent spot on the retro gaming couch and you can see a couple pictures of how the restoration project turned out in the spoiler tag below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That project was what took up the bulk of the time I'd usually spend playing video games this past week, but I still made some time to try out the new Mega EverDrive X5 with a couple games. The one I spent the most time on was JagDoom 32X, which as the name suggests is a hack of Doom for the 32X that adds in all 8 of the missing levels from the Jaguar version a well as the BFG 9000 weapon that was originally absent in the 32X port. It was absolutely awesome and definitely provided the full Doom experience that 32X owners should have gotten back in the day.

 

The other games that I spent a good bit of time playing through were Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble for the Game Gear (which you can read my thoughts on here in the Games Beaten in 2018 thread) and the demo of the upcoming homebrew game Tanglewood for the Genesis, the latter of which the misses also joined in on and played through too. We both thought it was a marvelous game with a lot of charm, solid platforming, and some pretty challenging puzzles to solve; though the $88 price of admission for a copy of the full game on a cartridge is pretty steep so we probably won't be buying it any time soon. In addition to Tanglewood the misses also tried out out Knuckles' Chaotix for the 32X with the new EverDrive, and made some more progress in her old favorite Doom on the PlayStation as well.

 

Well, I think that about wraps it up for this week! I've got no idea what I'll be playing next week, what with all the options on the EverDrives, but I think I might give Ristar or Mick & Mack: Global Gladiators for the Genesis a go. They're both games that I remember fondly from my childhood but haven't played in decades, so it could be fun to go back and revisit them. I think it's pretty safe to say that the spousal unit will continue playing through Doom on the PlayStation, but who knows, maybe she'll try out some new games on the EverDrive as well.

 

Until next week, and as always, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours.

Edited February 26, 2018 by Jin

[+wongojack]

Arcade

Moon Patrol 56

Astrocade

Gunfight 3

Solar Conqueror 43

Atari 2600

HERO 35

Megamania 17

Seaquest 24

[agb]

Atari 2600.

 

Beamrider 16 mins

Solar Fox 237 mins

 

I have to mix it up more.

[oyamafamily]

ONLY ATARI 2600:

Missile Command - 104 minutes

Spacechase - 20 minutes

Space Jockey - 55 minutes

 

EVIDENCES OF THE WEEK:

 

1) More scores on Missile Command. The game variations which I chose for this session were 10, 11 and 12, all with Difficulty B.

GUESS WHAT IS MY OBJECTIVE in 2018? Became this VCS game as a new member of 10,000-minute club until December.

 

 

2) Space Jockey gameplay footage, presented for 2600 NEW HSC Season 7, Week 6.

 

 

[Opry99er]

Not much this week:

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Moon Patrol (90 minutes)

Star Trek SOS (70 minutes)

TI Trek (20 minutes)

[Galactus]

2600:

 

Jawbreaker 15

Alien Attack 30

 

Genesis:

 

Eternal Champions 40

 

SNES:

 

NBA Jam T.E. 60

[Opry99er]

If its not too late:

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Moon Patrol (additional 60 minutes)

 

 

 

[+thegoldenband]

If its not too late:

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Moon Patrol (additional 60 minutes)

 

But I assume that was played on Monday or Tuesday, right? If so it'll count with this week (not the one just past).

 

Times coming tomorrow afternoon. Busy week at work -- overtime every day so far.

[Opry99er]

Monday night. So we can count it for this week, not last.