Skippy B. Coyote

I wish I could tell you how well it worked, but the Blinking Light Win kit I ordered and paid for more than two months ago was never shipped out, even though the site said it would ship within 10 days when I ordered it. The company never responded to any of my emails and I ended up having to file a PayPal claim against them to get my money back. It's a darn shame too, since their hardware seemed really promising but their customer service skills were non-existent.

This was by far the smallest week for gaming since my household started participating in the tracker half a year or so back. The misses ended up getting to the final mission in Command & Conquer on the PS1 before getting stuck and (for the time being) giving up on it, and I found myself returning to my old hobby of Magic: The Gathering that I took a break from a year or so ago. I spent most of my free time this week building and play testing new MtG decks, so I didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to video games. Nevertheless, my wife and I still took the time to sit down in front of the multicade and play some arcade games together the last few nights so we do have some play time to contribute. Here's our times for the week: Arcade Arkanoid - 15 minutes Centipede - 5 minutes Donkey Kong - 38 minutes Donkey Kong Junior - 5 minutes Frogger - 15 minutes Millipede - 11 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 20 minutes Pac-Man - 10 minutes Space Invaders - 9 minutes Super Breakout - 20 minutes 1942 - 9 minutes PlayStation Command & Conquer - 83 minutes Total Play Time This Week 240 minutes (4 hours even) Individual System Play Times This Week Arcade: 157 minutes PlayStation: 83 minutes

I've had quite a few local retro gaming friends over the years, but the NES was as far back as any of them ever went in terms of systems they were interested in. Every time I asked any of them why they weren't interested in the Atari 2600, the result was always the same: "The graphics are too primitive." While any seasoned gamer knows that graphics aren't everything, I think there's just this general consensus among a large portion of retro gamers that anything produced earlier than the NES doesn't have enough graphical power to make recognizable characters and interesting games. People around this forum definitely know that not to be true, but it does seem to be the popular opinion among most retro gaming enthusiasts these days.

Ineligible The Pinball Arcade (Android) - 29 minutes Arcade Arkanoid - 16 minutes Centipede - 18 minutes Donkey Kong - 6 minutes Donkey Kong Junior - 11 minutes Frogger - 6 minutes Millipede - 25 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 8 minutes Pac-Man - 10 minutes Space Invaders - 3 minutes Atari 2600 Ms. Pac-Man - 12 minutes Game Boy Boggle Plus - 116 minutes Solar Striker - 28 minutes Game Boy Color Battleship - 95 minutes Duke Nukem - 31 minutes Star Wars: Yoda Stories - 309 minutes Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - 38 minutes Warlocked - 98 minutes 720° - 34 minutes PlayStation Command & Conquer - 1,137 minutes Total Play Time This Week 2,030 minutes (33 hours 50 minutes) Individual System Play Times This Week PlayStation: 1,137 minutes Game Boy Color: 605 minutes Game Boy: 144 minutes Arcade: 103 minutes Android: 29 minutes Atari 2600: 12 minutes It was another pretty standard week for gaming around here this week. I played quite a few handheld games on the Game Boy Color, did a few rounds of pinball on the Android tablet, and the misses completely blew away all my play times by logging nearly 19 hours in Command & Conquer on the PS1! I was joking with her last night that she really should have indulged her recent RTS addiction for another 200 minutes, then she could have had a truly "Elite" time for the week. Watching my better half get bit by the strategy gaming bug made me decide to pick up a copy of Warlocked for the Game Boy Color (which is very similar to WarCraft) and give it a try, and I gotta say I'm extremely impressed with the game. I had no idea that the Game Boy Color could even run something like this, and in spite of the fact that I'm generally pretty terrible at strategy games I have been having a lot of fun with it. The game that really consumed the bulk of my free time this week though was Star Wars: Yoda Stories, which was also published on my handheld of choice. I played the PC version of Yoda Stories a lot as a kid and have some really fond memories of it, so when I found out that it was also released for the GBC I just had to pick up a copy and try it out; and I'm pleased to say that I was not the least bit disappointed! Much like the PC version it is a pretty repetitive game (find items, solve simple puzzles, do some basic combat, read some humorous dialog, complete your mission, then do it all again for the next mission while listening to the same Star Wars theme play over and over and over) but unlike the PC version the missions in the GBC aren't randomized so there is a some semblance of a story and a password save system in the GBC port. That made me like the game even more, even if it is still a bad game. I think we all have some bad games that we enjoy now and then though. As far as what next week has in store, I think it's safe to expect that I'll continue playing Yoda Stories and the misses doesn't seem like she'll be losing interest in Command & Conquer anytime soon. If I can manage to pry the PS1 away from her at some point I have been wanting to give Tomb Raider II another play through, but I'm not counting my chickens. lol That's all for this week!

Best wishes to you and your family in your time of loss Atarian. I know how heartbreaking losing a family member can be, especially when you think they're on the upswing. I went through a somewhat similar situation with my dad half a dozen years back, though he ended up making it through chemo before his heart gave out on him a month after he had finished cancer treatment and was in remission. As others have said though, at least she got to live a full life and didn't suffer at the end. I hope you and your family are able to stick together and pull through the ordeal, as tough as it might be.

As problematic as my two Xbox 360s have been, it's gotta be the Atari 2600 for me. I've been through four different Atari 2600s in the last two years and I've yet to find one that works properly for more than a month or so. It's the only system I've had to buy over and over and over again trying to find one that works properly and will continue working properly after I get it, and I'm starting to get so fed up with the 2600 that I'm actually considering liquidating my 2600 collection because I'm just tired of the consoles breaking down every time I turn around.

What an awesome thread idea! I've often pondered over my favorite consoles and enjoy reading about what makes certain consoles special to others, but I've never really considered it in terms of generations. As someone who has done the majority of my gaming over the course of my life on handheld systems I might have a slightly different perspective on the issue than many gamers here, and with that in mind here's my Top 3 favorite console generations. #3. Fourth Generation (Game Boy & Sega Genesis) Growing up in the early 90's I did most of my childhood gaming on an original gray brick model Game Boy, which would lead to a lifelong fascination with handheld games. As a kid I had what most of my friends considered a pretty enormous Game Boy library, around thirty or so games, and these days I have about twice that many. Some of my fondest childhood gaming memories were on that little green and black screen, and now as an adult I think I spend even more time playing the Game Boy than I did when I was a kid. I did eventually get a Sega Genesis during my youth too, which led to innumerable hours of playing Mortal Kombat and every Sonic game published for the system. I still dig the Genesis a lot and try to go back and play it at least a few times a month, but the original Game Boy and it's humongous library of excellent games is really my bread and butter of this generation. #2. Fifth Generation (Game Boy Color & PlayStation) Wouldn't you know it, my second favorite generation is the very next one! This generation had two major highlights for me: The first was finally being able to enjoy all my old favorite Game Boy games in color (in many cases it was just a splash of color, but it still excited me) and without motion blur. The Game Boy Color's screen was just leaps and bounds ahead of the original Game Boy's, with the pixels all clearly visible and never becoming blurry when objects moved on the screen; and the Worm Light that Nyko released for the GBC meant that I could finally play Game Boy without the need to sit under a bright light source or attach some enormously bulky screen magnifying contraption to my handheld. And on top of all that there were tons of great new games for it that were in full, vibrant color! The second highlight of this generation (for me that is) was the original Sony PlayStation. This console marked what may have been the biggest leap forward in graphics, game variety, and a game's ability to tell a story that the world of console video games has ever seen. Up until the PlayStation came out I had never experienced any games with 3D polygonal graphics, and when I got my first couple games for the system—the original Tomb Raider and Resident Evil games—I was completely blown away. It's been a good two decades since then, and even after all this time the PlayStation has never stopped impressing me. It's huge library of exciting and compelling 3D action/adventure/horror games, awesome light gun shooters, conversions classic PC games in all sorts of genres, and perfect ports of most of my favorite 80's arcade games (and a trackball controller to play Centipede with no less) definitely make the PlayStation one of my all time favorite home gaming consoles. #1. Sixth Generation (Game Boy Advance SP, Game Boy Micro, & GameCube) This was a really hard choice for me, because I was darn tempted to call the previous generation my favorite, but if I'm being really honest with myself there's just way too much I love about Nintendo's offerings from this generation to give it second place. For my tastes this was the absolute best generation for handheld gaming, with the powerhouse that was the Game Boy Advance SP finally bringing one of my all time favorite game genres—sci-fi first person shooters—to a handheld. I can't even begin to describe how utterly amazed I was the first time I played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom for the Game Boy Advance, and those were just the tip of the iceberg for the system's game selection. I honestly can't think of any game genre that the GBA doesn't have a plethora of quality game titles in, and I love the system's lightweight and ergonomically comfortable clamshell design just as much as the games that can be played on it. The fact that Nintendo also gave the AGS-101 model of the GBA SP a backlight screen (finally!) and made it backwards compatible with all previous Game Boy and Game Boy Color games was just icing on the cake for an already outstanding handheld. The only complaint I could really make about it is that these days it can be hard to find new current production replacement rechargeable battery packs for it, but at the time of it's release it was really cool not having to stock up on AA batteries anymore. Next up in this generation is the ill-fated yet ever so beautiful Game Boy Micro, which—in my very subjective opinion—is hands down the most beautiful and elegant handheld game console ever produced. Sure the screen is only a little larger than a postage stamp, and sure it dropped the backwards compatibility of the SP and only plays Game Boy Advance games, but man is it ever one classy looking system! I also love the total portability of the system. It's so small that even when kept inside a padded carrying case it still fits comfortably in any pants pocket, and what the screen lacks in size it makes up for in extreme levels of sharpness and wide array of backlight brightness options. It's too bad that so many of these little units were plagued with dead or stuck pixels on the screen, because it's an absolute joy to behold in all other respects. Lastly we have the GameCube, which is by no small margin my absolute favorite home console that Nintendo has ever produced; and possibly my favorite home console period. It drew me in with it's Game Boy Player add-on that let me play all my favorite handheld games on the big screen, and it kept me glued to the couch with it's abundance of high quality exclusive titles that featured some of the most jaw droppingly beautiful graphics and engaging gameplay of the generation. The Resident Evil REmake, Metroid Prime, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Star Fox Adventures, Mario Party 4, and dozens and dozens more. On top of that were all the amazing compilations of great games from previous generations such as Sonic Mega Collection, The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition, Mega Man: Anniversary Collection, and so on. Back when it came out I felt like the GameCube was really a showcase of nearly everything that I ever loved about Nintendo, and I still feel that way about it today. Add in some really cool aesthetic design choices like the console's cube shape, the ever charming mini disc game format, and what is in my opinion the single most comfortable and ergonomically perfect controller ever made for a home console and it's not hard to see why the GameCube pushed the Sixth Generation up to #1 for me. The Cube is dead, long live the Cube!

After taking your suggestion and doing some sleuthing around (largely on http://www.intellivisionrevolution.com/homebrew-releases-currently-available) I am completely at loss for words. $75 does seem to be the average price for an Intellivision homebrew game, and the only explanation I can come up with for it is that a large percentage of collectors must overvalue homebrew titles for their system of choice and be wealthy enough to not care. Also, crack cocaine. When all else fails to explain human behavior, crack cocaine is always a legitimately plausible explanation.

Which would be fine if the sub-par offerings were $5 or $10 each, but at $25 to $50 a pop that is going to create some market sustainability issues sooner or later. I do think there are couple homebrew titles out there from the last few years that might be worth the high price tag due to their quality and innovative gameplay, but there have been quite a few that I've tried the demos for and had a hard time imagining anyone being willing to pay money for it. They can't all be winners I suppose.

I know exactly how you feel, because this week I've been playing a ton of Star Wars: Yoda Stories on the Game Boy Color. I know it's not a good game, it controls poorly, and it's completely repetitive on pretty much every level from the gameplay to the music. And yet... I just can't stop playing it! For some bizzare reason beyond all logic or comprehension I just love this game and can't seem to put it down. lol I've played a few other games this week too, but Yoda Stories has made up the bulk of my gaming time.

Warlocked (Game Boy Color) Boggle Plus (Game Boy) Star Wars: Yoda Stories (Game Boy Color)

Millipede (Arcade) Battleship (Game Boy Color) Boggle Plus (Game Boy)

It sounds like they must have reworked the computer AI for the Game Boy Color version, because I'm currently on Mission 16 and I haven't experienced anything that would give me the impression that the computer truly knew where my ships were. The computer is starting to make smarter use of sonar and spreading out their shots more with the multishot weapons at this point, but it still feels like the computer is making educated guesses rather than actually knowing where my ships are. There are some games where I completely steamroll the computer with some lucky guesses, or they completely steamroll me, but I've yet to encounter a situation where the AI got "conveniently lucky" when I was ahead by a significant margin. I can't say for certain, but based on your experiences it does sound like the computer AI was reworked for the Game Boy Color version of Battleship.

It's pretty darn similar! The gameplay mechanics are exactly the same, including the same weapon selection and campaign style gameplay that lets you "level up" to acquire more multi-shot weaponry and useful items like sonar scanners as you progress. The biggest difference is that the game is now in color and some of the graphics have been given an overhaul to make them more visually appealing. I'm not sure whether or not the computer AI was changed in the transition from the Game Boy to the Game Boy Color, but I do think the GBC version has a nice slow and steady difficulty curve. When I bought this game I didn't know anything about it and was expecting a digital version of the classic board game, so at first I was a little disappointed that it had all these new kinds of weaponry and items, but after spending a week playing it on my smoke breaks I gotta say that the new weapon and item additions really add a lot of strategic depth to the game and I've come to enjoy the Game Boy Color version of Battleship a lot more than the original board game. It's a definite keeper.

Great week everyone! The Top 10 lists were really diverse in every category this week, with all kinds of different systems and game genres being represented. I am curious though, thegoldenband, is there any record for a single person or household occupying multiple slots on the Top 10 most played games list for the week? I ask because I just realized that the bottom 6 games on this week's Top 10 games list all came from my household!

Arcade Arkanoid - 30 minutes Centipede - 9 minutes Donkey Kong - 14 minutes Donkey Kong Junior - 11 minutes Frogger - 8 minutes Galaga - 7 minutes Millipede - 31 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 10 minutes Ms. Pac-Man (played on Namco Museum for Game Boy Advance) - 14 minutes Pac-Man - 10 minutes Qix - 9 minutes Shao-Lin's Road - 26 minutes Space Invaders - 4 minutes Super Breakout - 22 minutes Game Boy Aerostar - 21 minutes Boggle Plus - 234 minutes Double Dribble: 5 on 5 - 28 minutes Kirby's Block Ball - 46 minutes NBA Jam: Tournament Edition - 19 minutes Space Invaders - 12 minutes Game Boy Color Battleship - 236 minutes Bionic Commando: Elite Forces - 42 minutes Duke Nukem - 332 minutes Mario Golf - 10 minutes Shanghai Pocket - 21 minutes PlayStation Command & Conquer - 282 minutes Final Doom - 375 minutes Silent Hill - 209 minutes Total Play Time This Week 2,072 minutes (34 hours 32 minutes) Individual System Play Times This Week PlayStation: 866 minutes Game Boy Color: 641 minutes Game Boy: 360 minutes Arcade: 205 minutes This turned out to be the second biggest week ever in terms of my household's time logged for the tracker, and it's pretty obvious which games made up the vast majority of our time logged. I spent most of my free time this week playing a couple original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games whenever I had a few spare minutes, which included my old favorite Boggle Plus along with the newly acquired Duke Nukem and Battleship. I had read some pretty poor reviews of Duke Nukem for the GBC before I picked it up, but remembering how much I loved the original Duke Nukem DOS game from Apogee Software and seeing how similar this game looked to that one made me just have to pick it up. Luckily I can safely say that I don't agree with the negative reviews that I had read of this game and have been having a great time playing through it; and I've still got three levels left to go! Battleship was one of several new GBC games this week that I ended up picking up from $1 games bin at a local game store, and I've definitely been getting way more than $1's worth of fun out of it. What impressed me the most this week though was just how long the rechargeable AA batteries in my Game Boy Color have lasted! Every Game Boy and GBC game that I played this week was played on the Game Boy Color, and even though I haven't changed the batteries in over a week they're still going strong after more than 16 hours of play time; and most of that time was spent with a Nyko Worm Light connected to the GBC to boot. It really is amazing the kind of battery life some of Nintendo's older handhelds have. As far as the misses's gaming time this past week goes, she dedicated almost all of it to a few games on the PlayStation. She ended up finishing her Halloween play through of Silent Hill—getting the secret UFO ending to unlock the bonus Hyper Blaster weapon on her next play through—then moved on to beating all the Master Levels in Final Doom on Ultra Violence difficulty, which was the last of the three game chapters that she had yet to beat. It never ceases to astound me how proficient she is playing games like Doom with an arcade stick controller, so I had a lot of fun too just watching her play. After that she decided to try out a real-time strategy game, since she had never played one before and was curious how they played, so she dug Command & Conquer out of the PS1 game drawer and started in on it. She's been having a real blast with it and is enjoying the GDI missions immensely, so there may be a few more RTS genre games coming her way this holiday season. Well, I think that about wraps it up for this week! Now if you'll excuse me, I think I have a game of Battleship to get back to.

It's an issue of cost really. For the price of a single Everdrive I could buy 10 or 20 games I'd really like to own and play, and I know I'd appreciate and enjoy owning the real cartridges a lot more than a way to play bootleg ROM images. I might be willing to try a flash cart (even though I still think I'd pretty much never use it) if good ones weren't prohibitively expensive, but for the cost of a single high quality flash cart I could buy a lot of other things that I'd rather own instead.

A reasonable argument, but the case I carry my Game Boy Color around in holds 6 cartridges + 1 in the system and I don't travel (for medical reasons) so I can't see myself ever being in a situation where I'd really want to have more than 7 of the games in my library with me at a time. I generally only focus my attention on two or three games each week anyway, so the other 4 or 5 in the carrying case just sit there most of the time. It is a good argument in favor of flash carts, just not one that would have much value to me personally. The only reason I could ever see myself potentially getting a flash cart is to play Shantae, since I already own every other game I could want for a portable system I collect for that is truly expensive, but even then I'd rather just save up the money to buy the real cart if I ever decided that it was a game I really wanted to play.

A lot of people seem to be recommending the flash cart route, but I don't know... Flash carts are just totally unappealing to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad to hear that so many of you have found more enjoyment from your gaming and collecting by using flash carts, I just don't think they're for me. To explain my dislike for using flash carts a little more properly, allow me to make an analogy. Imagine you're a music collector who likes collecting CDs. You enjoy going to the used disc shop, searching around for new treasures, and bringing them home to pop in your CD player and listen to while you flip through the booklet, admire the album art, and so on. Now imagine someone suggesting that you should ditch your CD collection and just download all the music you like from torrents online for free. Sure, you'd save some money and shelf space that way, but you'd be missing out on the whole experience of collecting. No more hunting around dusty old bins looking for hidden treasures, no more holding the real disc in your hands and feeling the paper booklet under your fingers while you flip though it and read the little tidbits of information about the band and song lyrics, and so on. The music still sounds the same, but the entire experience of being a collector is lost in the process. That should give you a better idea of how I feel about flash carts and emulation. You do get to play the game, on the real console no less if you use a flash cart, but the more intangible experience of being a collector and the enjoyment that I personally get from it just isn't there. At this point I'm sticking with my plan of just working on one or two collections every season, and over the past week I've picked up half a dozen new Game Boy Color games for $1 to $4 each and have been really enjoying playing them all. I feel fortunate that the systems I like to collect for the most are all pretty cheap to collect for in general, so that's another reason I'm not too interested in getting any flash carts. Let's face it, good flash carts are really expensive and when the overwhelming majority of the games you like playing cost a dollar or two to pick up and don't take up much space in your home to store there's not much incentive to shell out a hundred bucks or more for a flash cart; especially if you're not too fond of flash carts to begin with. I hope that explained my reasoning a bit better. I'm still really glad to hear that so many of you have found greater enjoyment of your hobbies through flash carts and emulation, because the most important thing about any hobby is that it is something you find fun and satisfying to do, but I just don't think flash carts or emulation are for me.

Or good ones like Truxton and Ninja Gaiden. There are some good games out there that may one day make you curse the money you spent buying them.