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

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 8, running from February 19 - 25. We logged 4355 minutes of eligible play, playing 70 games on a total of 23 systems.

Top 10:

1. Deep Fear (Sega Saturn) - 300

2. Chack'n Pop (NES/Famicom) - 290

3. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 237

4. JagDoom 32X (Sega 32X) - 233

5. Spacechase (Atari 2600) - 199

6. Q*Bert's Qubes (Arcade) - 188

7. Historyline 1914-1918 (PC (DOS)) - 185

8. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 180

9. Knuckles' Chaotix (Sega 32X) - 149

10. Space Jockey (Atari 2600) - 133

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 237

2. Spacechase (Atari 2600) - 199

3. Q*Bert's Qubes (Arcade) - 188

4. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 180

5. Space Jockey (Atari 2600) - 133

6. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 104

7. Silpheed (CoCo 1 & 2) - 95

8. Moon Patrol (TI-99/4A) - 90

9. Mogul Maniac (Atari 8-bit) - 85

10. Olympic Skier (Atari 8-bit) - 84

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1105)

2. NES/Famicom (584)

3. Sega Saturn (543)

4. Sega 32X (382)

5. Arcade (244)

6. Genesis (211)

7. PC (DOS) (185)

8. TI-99/4A (180)

9. Atari 8-bit (169)

10. CoCo 1 & 2 (135)

Deep Fear edges out Chack'n Pop for the #1 spot, while the pre-NES chart is led by Solar Fox, the standard-bearer in this week's win for the Atari.

[Opry99er]

73 hours of play time.... and we dont even scratch the top 20 list.

[carlsson]

I ponder digging up the minutes per week and season and present those as a diagram to see the seasonal variation and if each season is similar.

[karokoenig]

I ponder digging up the minutes per week and season and present those as a diagram to see the seasonal variation and if each season is similar.

 

Sure!

[carlsson]

Obviously the tracker is in low season during the summer weeks 19-26. Apart from that, I don't see any obvious patterns. Weeks 1 and 53 are of varying length each year.

 

I'm adding the raw data as well for those who want to experiment: calculate averages, standard deviation, put together a continuous line across the last 5 years etc. This is an Excel 2003+ document inside a zip archive, due to the forum wouldn't let me attach Excel directly.

minutes-per-week.zip

[Opry99er]

Cool!!!

[carlsson]

For those who are both curious and lazy, here are some more numbers:

 

2014: average 2978 mins, standard deviation 908 mins

2015: average 5043 mins, standard deviation 2631 mins

2016: average 4634 mins, standard deviation 1498 mins

2017: average 5345 mins, standard deviation 2380 mins

2018: average 5153 mins, standard deviation 1073 mins

 

The least active weeks on average

Week 25: 3033 mins

Week 21: 3225 mins

Week 24: 3228 mins

Week 23: 3300 mins

 

In June, we're busy with other things than playing games. Note that once July and possibly vacations take place, the numbers rise again. Week 53 doesn't count as we didn't have a such week in 2017.

 

The most active weeks on average

Week 52: 6212 mins

Week 31: 5902 mins

Week 03: 5868 mins

Week 35: 5745 mins

 

Generally August is a gaming intensive month, plus that many of us have a lot of spare time for playing games around Christmas and a few weeks into January.

[Opry99er]

Good to see that there are at least moderately discernible patterns there... late Summer and holidays, which I would have guessed even without the data.

 

Neat!

[agb]

My video game playing time spikes during Christmas time, high score club and in between football and baseball seasons.

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Dark Cavern - 35 minutes

Missile Command - 196 minutes

River Raid II - 336 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Xevious - 11 minutes

 

EVIDENCES OF THE WEEK:

 

1) More scores and more fun with Missile Command on my 7800 ProSystem. In these sessions of this week I played Games 13-B, 13-A and 14-B, using my Sega Master System controller.

 

2) River Raid II - 517,300 points on Game 1-A, presented for 2600 NEW HSC Season 7, Week 7 (Silver Medal Pick)

 

3) Dark Cavern - 259,000 points on Game 1-A, presented for 2600 NEW HSC Season 7, Week 8 (Bronze Medal Pick)

[digdugnate]

Atari 2600

 

Asteroids - 120 minutes

Lady Bug - 120 minutes

Pacman 4k - 30 minutes

Space Invaders - 15 minutes

 

TI 99 4A

 

Jungle Hunt - 30 minutes

[Opry99er]

Another down week for me

 

Atari 2600:

 

Asteroids (20 minutes)

 

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Jungle Hunt (20 minutes)

Old Dark Caves (45 minutes)

Star Trek SOS (20 minutes)

Story Machine (240 minutes) *my son accounted for this

Tunnels of Doom (180 minutes) *and most of this

[oyamafamily]

Add 15 minutes of Dark Cavern (Atari 2600)

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for classic games this week (February 26th through March 4th)...

 

Atari 2600:

Alien Attack - 1 min.

Carrot Kingdom - 6 min.

Toyshop Trouble: 375 min. in 7 sessions

 

I continued to write an agent playing Toyshop Trouble, but despite teaching it all the rules of the game, I didn't manage to get it to play the game as well as I play it. One problem is the only way I found to get it working was to simulate keypresses on the online Atari 2600 emulator at Virtualatari.org running in Chrome, but even then sometimes the keys get stuck and some keyboard messages sent by the program don't come through or get mangled. Also there's a problem if a toy and the player collide, in which case the program needs a bit of time to go on, because it doesn't "see" the incomplete toy and because it only targets one toy at a time before continuing while myself I often plan ahead, plotting a path through the toys, and overall my own playing is faster and smoother than the one of my agent. While doing that, I also played the game myself for several hours, and after giving up on my agent, I tried to play it in Stella with the frame rate set to 10 (1/5 or 1/6 of normal speed) which got me much farther in the game because I had more time to plan ahead.

 

Other than that, I tried two new homebrew games, Alien Attack (which reminds me a lot of games for the Interton VC-4000 console) and Carrot Kingdom, which is a jump'n'run game in the veins of Super Mario Bros, Wonder Boy and Thundercats.

Edited March 4, 2018 by Kurt_Woloch

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Olympic Skier - 138 min.

White Circus - 57 min.

Winter Olympics - 34 min.

The Olympic themed HSC is going towards the end..

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 264 minutes

Hunchy 2 - 18 minutes

River Raid II - 36 minutes

 

Kaboom! : 92,554

[Eltigro]

My times this week...

 

TurboGrafx 16

Legendary Axe - 30 min (I just played straight, no extra man trickery... got through to level 5 I think it was? Honestly, up until this level, the thing that kills me the most is trying to swing on vines and catch the next vine. Tarzan I ain't.)

 

Dreamcast

Sega Rally 2 - 127 min (I'm making progress. I can get to twelfth place on the Desert Stage, then barely finish the Mountain Stage, and have made it past the first checkpoint on the third stage a couple of times. It's nice to feel the satisfaction of progress in a hard game.)

 

That was it this week for me. Played a little modern gaming this week, but that'll be on the other thread. Also seem to be getting sucked back into Everquest... at least for a bit... Having fun with a game I was pretty serious about for four years or so. No idea how much time I've spent on it since downloading it again, but it has certainly been most of today. I am not nearly as consumed by it as I was 17 years ago, though.

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

NES:

Friday the 13th - 24 min.

SNES:

Date Kimiko no Virtual Tennis - 7 min.

Final Set Tennis - 39 min.

Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill - 3 min.

Toys - 55 min.

 

Beat Toys for the umpteenth time. Not too much else of note, though Final Set Tennis is better than I expected.

[zylon]

Genesis-

Double Dragon- 31min completed

Bio Hazard Battle- 20min

- played on my Gen3 clone. I'm really liking this clonesole as it seems to be decent quality, and maybe even legit as the board is TecToy mfg. Even the controls are good quality, plus, it already has played more for me than my AT purchases to this point. I buy these things for 2 reasons:

1- my work apartment is small, so I like getting as many choices into as small a footprint as I can. The clone has 130games and I've got a 112-in-1 cart as well. The rest I can run on my 360.

2- Shovelware. I actually like a bunch of those lesser games packed in to raise numbers. I usually find some good ones in every clone.

 

In my case, gaming goes down as other activities increase. Down here, the fence industry is stocking up for the coming season and demand is high. My rolls are made-to-order, so I've been working some weekends to ensure prompt delivery. We only have room to stock maybe 50 rolls of each standard size, so 300+ roll orders require a scramble.

 

My compact setup:

Edited March 5, 2018 by zylon

[agb]

All Atari 2600:

Dark Cavern. 15 minutes

River Raid 2. 39 mins

Solar Fox. 93 mins

[+wongojack]

A8

K-Razy Shoot-Out 21

Missile Command 5

SW ROTJ Death Star Battle 52

[Opry99er]

Last night late we got in another good session:

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Jungle Hunt (additional 30 minutes)

 

 

 

Classic Mac OS:

 

Lemmings (45 minutes)

[Skippy B. Coyote]

I've got a crazy busy day full of doctors appointments, housework, sales listings to take care of today so for now I'm just going to post my household's times and see if I can do the picture and writeup for the week within the next few days. I suppose worst case scenario I can always do it next monday and cover two weeks worth of gaming in the writeup like I sometimes do.


Ineligible

Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 59 minutes

StreetPass Mii Plaza (Nintendo 3DS) - 21 minutes

Tomb Raider: Anniversary (Nintendo Wii) - 751 minutes

Nintendo Game Boy
Stop That Roach! - 32 minutes

Sega Genesis
Dragon's Fury - 164 minutes
Mick & Mack as the Global Gladiators - 25 minutes
Ristar - 224 minutes
Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers - 21 minutes

Sony PlayStation
Doom - 428 minutes


Total Play Time This Week
1,725 minutes (28 hours 45 minutes) [894 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Nintendo Wii - 751 minutes
Sega Genesis - 434 minutes
PlayStation - 428 minutes
Nintendo DS - 59 minutes
Nintendo Game Boy - 32 minutes
Nintendo 3DS - 21 minutes

[karokoenig]

Silent Hunter (DOS): 60 min

 

Little time this week. Hope I'm not too late. Otherwise, count it for next week.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 9, running from February 26 - March 4. We logged 4012 minutes of eligible play, playing 43 games on a total of 13 systems.

Top 10:

1. Doom (PlayStation) - 428
2. River Raid II (Atari 2600) - 411
3. Toyshop Trouble (Atari 2600) - 375
4. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 264
5. Story Machine (TI-99/4A) - 240
6. Ristar (Genesis) - 224
7. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 196
8. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 180
9. Dragon's Fury (Genesis) - 164
10. Asteroids (Atari 2600) - 140

Pre-NES top 10:

1. River Raid II (Atari 2600) - 411
2. Toyshop Trouble (Atari 2600) - 375
3. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 264
4. Story Machine (TI-99/4A) - 240
5. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 196
6. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 180
7. Asteroids (Atari 2600) - 140
8. Olympic Skier (Atari 8-bit) - 138
9. LadyBug (Atari 2600) - 120
10. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 93

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1734)
2. TI-99/4A (625)
3. Genesis (485)
4. PlayStation (428)
5. Atari 8-bit (307)
6. Dreamcast (127)
7. SNES (104)
8. PC (DOS) (60)
9. Mac OS Classic (45)
10. Game Boy (32)

Doom pulls out the win on the individual charts, but minute for minute it's the Atari VCS that rules the roost. In fact, more than half this week's minutes were logged on an Atari system.