What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2019 (Season 12)

[+chue]

For the AA TI HSC

 

TI99/4A - Borzork - 120 minutes

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (May 20th through 26th)...

 

Arcade:

Bagman - 6 min.

Funky Fish - 19 min. in 2 sessions

Galaxian - 4 min.

Gyruss - 92 min. in 6 sessions

Pengo - 12 min.

Rod-Land - 6 min.

Time Pilot - 7 min.

Track & Field - 9 min.

 

This week I played an assortment of classic arcade games, but most only for short sessions. Inspired by the release of "Galaga" for the Atari 2600, I played the original versions of its predecessor, Galaxian, and its successor, Gyruss. (I think that Galaxian actually evolved out of Space Invaders and then evolved on into Galaga and finally Gyruss, even though that one was by a different company - I think among those games, you can see the influence of one game on the next). In Galaxian, I didn't come far, but in Gyruss, I nearly reached 150,000 poiints, making it to the way to Mars. However, by then the enemies drop their bombs at you in rapid succession, so it gets really difficult to survive.

 

In Track & Field, sadly, my age shows. I'm 47 now, and I think I was a better button masher when I was younger. Now I can't seem to qualify for the later events anymore... I already failed at the third event (spear) and didn't reach the 4th.

 

I only played a single game of Time Pilot in which I nearly made it to the end of the last wave (before the cycle restarts), but got killed by the last boss (the big UFO).

 

Nothing special needs to be said about Pengo and Rod-Land which I played for a few minutes each. I played Funky Fish a bit longer, and I think I reached Level 4 as the farthest there. Bagman was another try to play a game which is a bit like Pac-Man, but I didn't get very far there... I only managed to clear the 1st screen out of the 3 a level consists of.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Fort Apocalpyse - 8 min.

Fortress Underground - 7 min.

M.U.L.E. - 204 min.

Night Mission Pinball - 26 min.

Some regular HSC, a new M.U.L.E. tournament + playing some pinball on my NTSC Atari 800 for fun.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 375 minutes

Hunchy 2 - 10 minutes

 

 

[Opry99er]

TI-99/4A:

 

Alpiner (50 minutes)

Borzork (90 minutes)

Facemaker (45 minutes)

Story Machine (30 minutes)

Legends 2 (40 minutes)

 

 

 

Classic Mac:

 

Age of Empires 2 (90 minutes)

Barbie Beauty Styler (120 minutes)

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat (360 minutes)

 

 

 

N64:

 

Mario Kart 64 (30 minutes)

[Iwantgames:)]

Continuing to put my windows 98 machine to work this week.

 

Enclave - 320min

Nox - 250min

Revenant - 30min

Ultima IX - 20min

Warcraft II - 60min

Warcraft Adventures - 960min

 

Finished Nox and then played through the leaked unreleased Warcraft Adventures until it glitched and I couldn't win, then I found a better leaked version and a mod to fix the cutscenes so played through and completed the game. For a cancelled game this is really polished and I actually enjoyed playing through it

 

After that I started a few games before settling on trying to beat Enclave.

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

NES/Famicom:

Bonk’s Adventure - 76 min.

Contra - 28 min.

Heavy Barrel - 215 min.

Jackal - 93 min.

Rackets & Rivals - 3 min.

Urusei Yatsura: Lum no Wedding Bell (JPN) - 184 min.

Wit’s (JPN) - 30 min.

Beat all these games except Rackets & Rivals -- obviously -- and Urusei Yatsura, though not for want of trying. The game keeps crashing, so maybe I'd have beaten it by now if it didn't freeze on me so often.

My wins over Bonk's Adventure and Heavy Barrel were 1CC. Thoughts on those, Contra, and Wit's, here.

[Eltigro]

Played, like, nothing this whole week, and then just a little this evening.

 

Game Gear

Sonic the Hedgehog - 45 min (Actually a pretty good looking game. The levels look nice. A little zoomed in to deal with the Game Gear's screen resolution. It's expected, but it also makes it difficult to react to enemies in time. It's a game where level and enemy placement memorization really help. Sonic on the Genesis is just about the only game my girlfriend will play. She kinda laughed at some of the music on this version as she recognized it as being different than the Genesis game. My Game Gear could use a McWill mod... what Game Gear couldn't use one... and I really noticed that the red LED next to the screen kinda messed with my eyes some. But still, I had fun.)

 

Master System

Shinobi - 28 min (It's Shinobi. Everyone knows this game. Anyway, did relatively okay... I've never been good at this game, but I haven't spent a lot of time on it. I did end up getting past a bonus stage without failing for the first time ever.)

[karokoenig]

Nothing worth mentioning for me last week.

 

If you want to count it: I tested an online version of the original arcade game Lunar Lander by Atari for 3 minutes or so. Visuals were authentic, but of course the cabinet's control panel could not be emulated :-). Up to you if you want to include it or not, Carlsson.

[+wongojack]

Warcraft Adventures - 960min

 

Finished Nox and then played through the leaked unreleased Warcraft Adventures until it glitched and I couldn't win, then I found a better leaked version and a mod to fix the cutscenes so played through and completed the game. For a cancelled game this is really polished and I actually enjoyed playing through it

 

 

 

I JUST read about this game in Game Informer. I did not know about this until just this week.

 

Do you have a link and some instructions on how to get it running? I'd love to try it out. PM me the files if they are easy to share.

[+wongojack]

All right folks, I took the week off work and ended up with tons of time to focus on playing games. My main push was to try and finish Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for the original XBox. I broke a personal record for playtime on a single game this week, but that time will show up in the other tracker. For the classic tracker, I got a chance to visit two more local arcades and also played some Dragon's Lair on DVD.

 

Arcade

Asteroids 8

Black Widow 4

Discs of Tron 10

Donkey Kong 18

Donkey Kong II 11

Dragon's Lair 42

Dragon's Lair II 23

Journey 6

Spy Hunter 9

Super Don Quix-Ote 10

 

 

This week's arcades were Bishop Cidercade and the Texas Pinball Museum. Both of these places were awesome. These were maybe the best arcades I've been two for completely different reasons. Cidercade was super hip and had an awesome selection of games and pins. I got to see a limited edition Primus pinball, and now I can finally say that I've played a physical Discs of Tron machine!

 

The museum is run by the family that is behind the annual Texas Pinball Festival. They have so much overflow in storage, that they basically got a storage location with some show space (and a bathroom) so they could open on Saturdays and let people come play year round. It was almost all pinball at this place and there were some great machines. Highlights were The Big Lebowski and Sorcerer.

 

[carlsson]

online version of the original arcade game Lunar Lander by Atari for 3 minutes

 

It goes somewhere, either here or the modern tracker. I'm willing to include it here, assuming it emulates using the original code.

[Iwantgames:)]

I JUST read about this game in Game Informer. I did not know about this until just this week.

 

Do you have a link and some instructions on how to get it running? I'd love to try it out. PM me the files if they are easy to share.

It was just in the current issue? If so ain't that interesting it would be in there at the same time I decide to finally give it a go!

[digdugnate]

just a small bit of Classic time for the tracker- I've spent most of my gameplay time on the Switch.

 

I *finally* got my wife to play couch co-op with me for one of the Capcom beat-em-up games; it started getting late, though, so on the last stage i took over her controller, had her die, and finished the game.

 

Arcade:

 

Knights of the Round -- 67 minutes

[agb]

Atari 2600:

Eggomania 15 mins

Galaxian 32 mins

Phoenix 6 mins

Solar Fox 114 mins.

Edited May 27, 2019 by agb

[karokoenig]

 

It goes somewhere, either here or the modern tracker. I'm willing to include it here, assuming it emulates using the original code.

I really can't tell you, and I don't really want to bother with research for 3 minutes of gameplay on the tracker. I suggest you just put it in here for convenience. It played authentically enough and it's not going to significantly warp the statistics for this week.

[+cvga]

We replaced our water heaters (with a tankless system) this week. Since our water heaters were in an area we use for storage, I had to clear it out for the installation. As a result, I decided to hook up a couple of spare intellivisions to test them and play some games. My youngest son and I are strongly considering ranking the released 125 this summer. It would give me an opportunity to play games that I may have overlooked. Anyhow, here's what I played this week...

 

Intellivision:

 

Space Battle - 15 minutes - One of my favorite Intellivision games. It's also great on the 2600.

Locomotion - 18 minutes

Ice Trek - 17 minutes - I wanted to like this game but didn't get to that point last night. The first screen seems dull and building the ice bridge was monotonous. I made it to the third "fortress" screen but died pretty quickly. Is this a favorite of anyone?

River Raid - 14 minutes

NASL Soccer - 4 minutes - takes two players and it was just me

LV Poker & Blackjack - 20 minutes - My best friend and I used to play a lot of this growing up. I forgot how fun it was, even without another human player

Major League Baseball - 3 minutes - takes two players and it was just me. I still threw the ball around for awhile and marveled at how much control of the field we had way back then.

[+wongojack]

It was just in the current issue? If so ain't that interesting it would be in there at the same time I decide to finally give it a go!

Maybe . . . It was in one of the last 3, but I just read them all in the last 10 days.

[+wongojack]

 

Ice Trek - 17 minutes - I wanted to like this game but didn't get to that point last night. The first screen seems dull and building the ice bridge was monotonous. I made it to the third "fortress" screen but died pretty quickly. Is this a favorite of anyone?

 

 

Ice Trek is a nice idea, but I don't actually enjoy playing it very much. Here's something I wrote about it in 2014 when there was a big ranking tournament going on for the 125.

 

The Verdict: I think this is a case where the whole is actually LESS than the sum of it's parts. . . So my feeling here is that the idea and creativity that went into this game is an A+. The unique gameplay and the variety of gaming scenarios is also very good, and I like the "quest" feeling where you are covering distance and actually finishing something. However, the actual gameplay is so tedious and uninteresting to me that I can't see myself actually wanting to experience this adventure again. If you put that all together it MIGHT be an average or even an above average game for some people, but in this case I think that the prospect of something that transcends the generation combined with gameplay that is just boring nets out to a point where I lose any kind of interest I had in the story after reading the manual. The game is actually worth less than the sum of its parts.

[+cvga]

 

Ice Trek is a nice idea, but I don't actually enjoy playing it very much. Here's something I wrote about it in 2014 when there was a big ranking tournament going on for the 125.

 

The Verdict: I think this is a case where the whole is actually LESS than the sum of it's parts. . . So my feeling here is that the idea and creativity that went into this game is an A+. The unique gameplay and the variety of gaming scenarios is also very good, and I like the "quest" feeling where you are covering distance and actually finishing something. However, the actual gameplay is so tedious and uninteresting to me that I can't see myself actually wanting to experience this adventure again. If you put that all together it MIGHT be an average or even an above average game for some people, but in this case I think that the prospect of something that transcends the generation combined with gameplay that is just boring nets out to a point where I lose any kind of interest I had in the story after reading the manual. The game is actually worth less than the sum of its parts.

 

I went back and read your full review. I agree with everything you said. We both used the word monotonous to describe the ice bridge level

 

I need to go back and read that whole thread. Somehow I missed (or don't remember) it the first time. Thanks for linking it!

[+wongojack]

 

I went back and read your full review. I agree with everything you said. We both used the word monotonous to describe the ice bridge level

 

I need to go back and read that whole thread. Somehow I missed (or don't remember) it the first time. Thanks for linking it!

 

BTW - I compiled the results of that tournament into a top ranking which you can find here.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Our gaming routine has started to get back to normal around here this past week, with quite a bit of time logged on both myself and the misses' parts.


Ineligible
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (Game Boy Advance) - 202 minutes
Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance) - 282 minutes
Sonic Advance 2 (Game Boy Advance) - 90 minutes
Sonic Pinball Party (Game Boy Advance) - 122 minutes

NES
Castlevania (Played on Classic NES Series: Castlevania for Game Boy Advance) - 50 minutes

Sega Game Gear
Sonic the Hedgehog (Emulated on EverDrive GBA X5) - 226 minutes

Sega Genesis
Panorama Cotton (English Fan Translation, Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 166 minutes


Total Video Game Play Time This Week
1,138 minutes (18 hours 58 minutes) [442 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Game Boy Advance: 696 minutes
Sega Game Gear: 226 minutes
Sega Genesis: 166 minutes
NES: 50 minutes

 

 

 

It was a really fun week for gaming, but the unusual thing is that this was the first week in quite a long while that every game we played was either emulated or on a EverDrive; no physical copies involved! For my gaming time this past week the first game I played was Sonic the Hedgehog for the Game Gear, which looked and played just beautifully on the EverDrive GBA X5 and the Game Boy Advance that I installed a backlit screen in last month. I think the screen size for Game Gear games emulated on the GBA is a touch smaller than the original Game Gear screen, but getting to play them on a really sharp looking backlit screen with no motion blur and not having to change the batteries every few hours feels like a fair trade off.

 

The first Sonic for the Game Gear ended up being a great game, and I was pretty pleased that I was able to beat it and collect all the chaos emeralds on my second try. It's basically just the Sega Master System version of Sonic the Hedgehog with a zoomed in view and a slightly more vibrant color palette, but that's not a bad thing at all since Sonic on the Master System is a great game! After beating Sonic for the Game Gear I spent some time checking out Sonic Pinball Party and Sonic Advance 2 on the EverDrive GBA as well, both of which were a ton of fun, then finally got around to finishing the game of Metroid: Zero Mission that I had been working on for quite a while.

 

To wrap up the week I did a quick play through of the original Castlevania on the GBA while I was riding on the bus to run some errands yesterday, and I gotta say that the EverDrive GBA X5 is probably one of the best portable gaming purchases I've ever made. Having every Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, original Game Boy, NES, Game Gear, and Master System game that I could ever want to play all on one cartridge has turned my Game Boy Advance from a system that I only picked up and played every now and then into an all-purpose retro gaming portable that rides with me everywhere I go. In fact, it was the only system I played games on all week this past week. The only tough part about having over a thousand great games in your pocket is picking a game to play and sticking with it, but I feel like I've been doing a pretty decent job of that so far.

 

As far as the misses' gaming time went, she spent a fair bit of time using the EverDrive GBA X5 in our GameCube's Game Boy Player to continue her play through of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and at this point only has one boss left to go before Dracula. She spent a couple hours yesterday just level grinding and searching for better armor though, so I don't think she's quite ready to take on the last couple bosses just yet. In addition to Circle of the Moon on the GBA she also fired up the Genesis emulator on the Wii and tried out the recently released English language fan translation of Panorama Cotton. She's always liked Space Harrier style games and after beating Panorama Cotton on her second try she declared it the best game of that genre that she's ever played, and insisted that we absolutely have to get a physical copy of the English translated version for our Genesis collection. I played it for a little bit and thought it was pretty darn amazing as well (I had no idea that the Genesis could do half the rotation and scaling effects this game makes it do), though I only made it to the third level since I've never been particularly skilled at these sort of games and my reflexes are still a bit off kilter.

 

All in all it was a great week for gaming around here, and next week looks to be shaping up to be just as much fun. Until then, and as always, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours!

Edited May 27, 2019 by Jin

[+cvga]

Continuing on with the Intellivision during a storm tonight...

 

Intellivision:

 

Lock & Chase - 12 minutes

Demon Attack - 5 minutes

Sub Hunt - 4 minutes (I need to read the instructions)

Space Armada - 10 minutes

Donkey Kong - 5 minutes (yuck)

Snafu - 15 minutes (I forgot how much I like this game)

Space Battle - 12 minutes (I like this one a bunch too)

[Eltigro]

I played a little Intellivision yesterday, but I'll wait and post it for this week's tracker. =)

 

 

Edit: And I don't mind Intellivsion's Donkey Kong. Except for the controller and the fact it won't play on the one I have hooked up... lol

Edited May 28, 2019 by Eltigro

[carlsson]

Here's the summary for Week 21, running from May 20 - 26. We logged 5403 minutes of eligible play, playing 72 games on a total of 13 systems.

 

Top 10:

 

1. Warcraft Adventures (PC (Windows 95/98)) - 960 min.

2. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 375 min.

3. Chuck Yeager's Air Combat (Mac OS Classic) - 360 min.

4. Enclave (PC (Windows 95/98)) - 320 min.

5. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 285 min.

6. Sonic the Hedgehog (Game Gear) - 271 min.

7. Nox (PC (Windows 95/98)) - 250 min.

8. Heavy Barrel (NES/Famicom) - 215 min.

9. Borzork (TI-99/4A) - 210 min.

10. M.U.L.E. (Atari 8-bit) - 204 min.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

1. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 375 min.

2. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 285 min.

3. Borzork (TI-99/4A) - 210 min.

4. M.U.L.E. (Atari 8-bit) - 204 min.

5. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 114 min.

6. Gyruss (Arcade) - 92 min.

7. Alpiner (TI-99/4A) - 50 min.

8. Facemaker (TI-99/4A) - 45 min.

9. Dragon's Lair (Arcade) - 42 min.

10. Legends II (TI-99/4A) - 40 min.

 

Top 10 systems:

 

1. PC (Windows 95/98) (1640)

2. NES/Famicom (679)

3. Atari 2600 (594)

4. Mac OS Classic (570)

5. TI-99/4A (375)

6. Arcade (366)

7. Atari 7800 (285)

8. Game Gear (271)

9. Atari 8-bit (245)

10. Genesis (166)

 

An unreleased (developed 1996-1998), leaked adventure in the Warcraft universe takes the tracker by storm this week. Kaboom! fends off Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, and dominates the pre-NES list. A strong presence of Windows 95/98 games makes it the most played system going by minutes, though in total the classic tracker just barely reaches half as much playtime as the modern tracker does this week.

 

No new entries to the 1000 Minute Club, better luck next week!