What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2011 (Season 4)

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-799 minutes

 

 

 

High score of the week: 192,720

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (October 24th through 30th):

 

Online (non-eligible):

On the run Vegas - 164 mins in 2 sessions

On the run - 98 mins in 4 sessions

On the run 2 - 45 mins

Missile Command - 6 mins

Centipede - 2 mins

Battlezone - 7 mins

Crystal Castles - 3 mins

Asteroids Deluxe - 1 min

 

Facebook (non-eligible):

Asteroids Online - 20 mins

 

PC (non-eligible):

Need for Speed World - 197 mins

 

The "On the run" series is a series of racing games where you have to quickly reach a goal while being chased by opponents who try to ram your car into the ground. However, if you're quick enough, you can outrun them and catch some additional fuel as well as some bubbles which partially repair your car, reducing the accrued damage which leads to destruction of your car if it gets too much. Typically there are 2 levels to each of the games, and they are shown in pretty beautiful 3D graphics. The game is very fast and also very fast to play through, but still challenging. Often you find yourself in a helpless situation where you're just rammed over and over by multiple enemy cars without a big chance of getting out.

 

"Missile Command", "Centipede", "Battlezone", "Crystal Castles" and "Asteroids Deluxe" are all to be found at the Atari.com homepage for free play and are more or less emulations of the arcade originals with some minor quirks. In "Missile Command" the cities aren't multicolored as they used to be in the arcade, and both "Missile Command" and "Centipede" use a scheme where the player follows your mouse, but not always as quickly as you move it, instead an additional cursor shows your mouse position while the player tries to follow it, but sometimes falls behind if you move to fast because the trackball that was in the original arcade game didn't support such quick movements. This is far more obvious in "Centipede" than it is in "Missile Command". Although these games are actually emulations of the arcade originals, I still didn't list them as arcade because the differences, in my opinion, are big enough for it not to be "true" emulation. "Battlezone" actually was embedded in a contest sponsored by Pepsi. I made the last position of the hi-score list on this game with, I think, 21000 points, but my score still wasn't shown in the hi-score list.

 

"Asteroids Online" is a different beast however. Here they try to turn "Asteroids" into a social game in the veins of Cityville, Farmville or similar. You get missions where you have to clear up to 4 stages of asteroids and other enemies, and each mission costs you 21 energy. The energy is refilling at, I think, 1 point per minute up to a maximum of 100 points.

 

Finally, "Need for Speed World" is a free part of the "Need for Speed" series. In the "World" part, you can play multiplayer games against other people over the Internet. All races are set in a huge contiguous world map. Principally the game is free, but there are the usual upgrades you can buy for real money. In addition to the races, there's a mode where you have to escape from the police. This is a downloadable game, but you still need an open Internet connection to play it.

[TheGameCollector]

Dreamcast

Sonic Adventure - 550 minutes

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater - 74 minutes

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - 126 minutes

 

Playstation

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - 114 minutes

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 - 30 minutes

 

and the rest of my gaming was on PS2. I had to re-play THPS2 for PS1 after I beat the Dreamcast one because last week when I moved the video to my hard drive, the power to it went off and corrupted the file. So I replayed it for the sake of having video footage. Having been the 3rd time playing a version of THPS2 this month, I had a much easier time and beat it quickly. from now on I think I better COPY and PASTE rather than CUT and PASTE.

 

Sonic Adventure felt like a chore this time for some reason. And THPS4 is a lot harder for me than the first three because the goals are different; more advanced. So with that one I'm just going to be plugging away at random times to see if I can ever figure some of them out. Kinda like giving up but not entirely.

[+thegoldenband]

My times from Friday - Sunday:

 

Atari 2600:

Mangia - 12 min.

 

Genesis:

Shining in the Darkness - 184 min.

 

Sega CD:

Dracula Unleashed - 135 min.

 

3DO:

Return Fire - 61 min.

Stellar 7: Draxon's Revenge - 10 min.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo - 50 min.

 

Beat the third Trial in Shining in the Darkness. The box says that the game offers a nine-level Labyrinth...if it's not counting the four Trials in that total, this is going to be a looooong one.

 

Also played a little ways into Dracula Unleashed with my girlfriend, for obvious holiday-related reasons. We enjoy these kinds of early '90s PC-style FMV adventure games, and this title seems fun so far. However we've been plagued by disc read errors that slow things down whenever we load a saved game...and since the game is basically trial and error, this happens often. That's what I get for using the real (and mildly scratched) thing instead of a burned copy!

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 44, running from October 24 - 30. We logged 2710 minutes of eligible play, playing 20 games on a total of zz systems.

 

Top 10:

 

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 799

2. Sonic Adventure (Dreamcast) - 550

3. Candy Catcher (Atari 2600) - 220

4. Shining in the Darkness (Genesis) - 184

5. Computer Chess (Atari 2600) - 180

6. Dracula Unleashed (Sega CD) - 135

7. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (Dreamcast) - 126

8. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (PlayStation) - 114

9. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (Dreamcast) - 74

10. Return Fire (3DO) - 61

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 799

2. Candy Catcher (Atari 2600) - 220

3. Computer Chess (Atari 2600) - 180

4. Bugs (Atari 2600) - 55

5. Super Pro Decathlon (Intellivision) - 45

6. Vector Pilot (Vectrex) - 30

7. Astar (Atari 2600) - 17

8. Football (Atari 2600) - 14

9. Mangia (Atari 2600) - 12

10. Vectrexians (Vectrex) - 4

 

Top 10 systems:

 

Not enough entries to make a top 10. The Atari 2600 would be #1 with 1297 minutes, followed by the Dreamcast with 750 minutes.

 

Kaboom regains its crown, sweeping all categories for itself and/or the Atari VCS. Meanwhile, the Dreamcast doesn't fade away just yet, holding onto second place on the system charts and taking second on the individual charts as well.

 

BTW, I assume "Computer Chess" is Video Chess, yes? I'm also taking Kurt's word for it that his online arcade gameplay doesn't qualify, though it sounds like it's a fairly close call (at least the ones at Atari.com do).

[disjaukifa]

No actually Computer Chess is Computer Chess, I was playing the proto of Video Chess!

[+thegoldenband]

No actually Computer Chess is Computer Chess, I was playing the proto of Video Chess!

 

Edited accordingly! You learn something new every day, it seems -- I just read the Atariprotos.com article, which I don't think I'd seen before.

[Kurt_Woloch]

I'm also taking Kurt's word for it that his online arcade gameplay doesn't qualify, though it sounds like it's a fairly close call (at least the ones at Atari.com do).

 

Well, if you think the ones at Atari.com are close enough that they qualify as being the arcade version, you can gladly list them this way, and I'll post them as being "arcade" next time. I only know that probably all of them have been patched in some way... at least in the steering part with the mouse. The color difference in Missile Command may actually be a bug... I think I read somewhere that the original arcade game has a circuitry where a certain part of the screen uses a different color scheme than the rest, and this may not have been correctly emulated. Battlezone is patched in that on ending a game, your highscore gets posted to the Facebook hi-score list, and in Asteroids Deluxe, the points which are connected by the vectors look brighter than the vectors themselves, which I don't think was the case in the arcade. But this, again, may only be an emulation bug. Finally, Crystal Castles seems to have a slightly better sound quality... in the arcade the short bits of music on level change, game start and ending sounded a bit off-key, which they don't do at all in the online version. I wonder if the call is close enough or not. However, "Asteroids Online" is definitely a newly-programmed game using very high quality graphics, no vectors.

[+thegoldenband]

Well, if you think the ones at Atari.com are close enough that they qualify as being the arcade version, you can gladly list them this way, and I'll post them as being "arcade" next time. I only know that probably all of them have been patched in some way...

 

If the games are genuinely being emulated (as opposed to reprogrammed from scratch like Asteroids Online), and the apparent patches are just for the sake of control schemes or a "hook" that grabs data from the game's internals for high score posting, then I'd say it falls under the same category as MAME and things like Midway Arcade Treasures, even if the emulation is somewhat inaccurate.

 

Is there any way to look under the hood and see whether it's using original arcade ROMs?

[Kurt_Woloch]

Well, the Atari homepage says they're using "Focal emulation". A search for this term reveals this page: http://www.codemystics.com/technology.shtml

 

I think what they actually did is translating the code from the original ROM's, instruction by instruction, to another language, i.E. Flash. So this emulation doesn't run the original arcade ROM's, but a translated version of them which still acts exactly the same except that it's running on a different system. And then I think they did the changes already mentioned by slightly changing the translated code, inserting the hooks etc. It seems to be the same technology as used in Midway Arcade Treasures and also the JAKKS TV games.

[zylon]

2600:

Millipede 35min

5200:

Millipede 1.25 hrs

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-511 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 127,951

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week... unfortunately, I didn't play any classic games at all, only online games... and this time, they are clearly no emulated classic games, but all games from the Miniclip website:

 

Online (non-eligible):

 

Apollo 69 - 2 min.

Monster Island - 3 min.

Moon Rush - 46 min.

On the run 2 - 278 min. in 4 sessions

Police Pursuit - 162 min. in 3 sessions

 

"On the run 2" is probably the game that captured me for the longest time of all the "On the run" series. In this part, there are two levels with big city maps, and I tried to map out both of them. The physics is as good as in "On the run Vegas", but there is usually only one "floor" per level, while "On the run Vegas" has multiple floors of track laid out on the same space stacked on top of each other, which makes the game difficult to map, especially in the 2nd level... not so in "On the run 2".

 

"Police Pursuit" is another Miniclip game where you have to bring criminals to jail by crashing into their car with your police car as hard as you can... the harder you make it, the more energy the enemy car loses, and the sooner it gives up. Part of the map is actually taken from a taxi game by Miniclip, but it's still not the same map since there have been San Francisco styled hills added which aren't present in the taxi game.

 

"Monster Island" is actually pretty much the same game as "Crush the castle" and "Angry birds", only with different levels and some game elements changed, but the ground concept is the same.

 

In "Apollo 69", you have to throw something as far as possible while steering how it hops up and down on the surface. There's a special game mode where you are throwing Kermit the Frog from the Muppets...

 

"Moon rush" is another racing game, but the goal is not getting to the end of the track first, but collecting 6 red, green and blue diamonds each. You play against 3 opponents, and only if you get the required diamonds first, you win the level. Unfortunately, already level 2 is pretty hard. Once you've prevented your oppenents from getting their diamonds together, you run into the problem that there are not enough diamonds for all, so even though you've prevented your opponents from winning, you can't win yourself either because there aren't enough diamonds left for you to complete your quota.

Edited November 6, 2011 by Kurt_Woloch

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

Arcade:

Dig Dug - 12 min.

 

TRS-80 Model I:

Quest For The Key Of Night Shade - 15 min.

 

NES:

Adventures of Lolo - 3 min.

Amagon - 5 min.

Bionic Commando - 3 min.

Karnov - 4 min.

Mega Man 3 - 6 min.

River City Ransom - 3 min.

 

Game Boy:

Double Dragon - 133 min.

 

Genesis:

Shining in the Darkness - 285 min.

 

Sega CD:

Dracula Unleashed - 118 min.

 

Neo Geo AES:

Blue's Journey - 42 min.

 

Dreamcast:

Worms World Party - 34 min.

 

Beat Double Dragon, which was challenging, and Blue's Journey, which wasn't. I have to say that the Neo Geo penchant for unlimited continues kind of puts me off -- it makes sense in the arcade, but at home?

 

Otherwise I made steady progress on Shining in the Darkness and (with my girlfriend) Dracula Unleashed, did some testing on the NES while trying to rid it of its perennial issues, and dug up an old and ridiculously hard TRS-80 RPG, Quest for the Key of Night Shade, for the first time in ages. It's really more of a simulation, really, with automatically generated maps and armies that can barely go anywhere without dying from fatigue or starvation.

[TheGameCollector]

Neo Geo AES

 

Blue's Journey - 40 minutes

Magician Lord - 72 minutes

NAM-1975 - 13 minutes

 

Neo Geo Pocket Color

 

Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure - 80 minutes

 

@thegoldenband what a coincidence we both played Blue's Journey for Neo Geo AES this week. I sold my Neo Geo AES and these 3 games to a digitpress member so I decided to take advantage of my last chance to play these on cartridge for a while. Next time I'll only have the option of playing them on Neo Geo CD or emulating them. I also played some PS2 games this week.

[disjaukifa]

Crap forgot to post my times:

 

Atari 2600

Berzerk <- 240 minutes

Candy Catcher <- 60 minutes

Computer Chess <- 15 minutes

krezreB <- 30 minutes

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 45, running from October 31 - November 6. We logged 1834 minutes of eligible play, playing 23 games on a total of 11 systems.

 

Top 10:

 

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 511

2. Shining in the Darkness (Genesis) - 285

3. Berzerk (Atari 2600) - 240

4. Double Dragon (Game Boy) - 133

5. Dracula Unleashed (Sega CD) - 118

6. Blue's Journey (Neo Geo AES) - 82

7. Sonic Pocket Adventure (Neo Geo Pocket Color) - 80

8. Millipede (Atari 5200) - 75

9. Magician Lord (Neo Geo AES) - 72

10. Candy Catcher (Atari 2600) - 60

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

Not enough entries to make a top 10. Kaboom would have been #1, followed by Berzerk at #2.

 

Top 10 systems:

 

1. Atari 2600 (891)

2. Genesis (285)

3. Neo Geo AES (167)

4. Game Boy (133)

5. Sega CD (118)

6. Neo Geo Pocket Color (80)

7. Atari 5200 (75)

8. Dreamcast (34)

9. NES/Famicom (24)

10. TRS-80 Model I (15)

 

Another banner week for the Atari 2600, as Kaboom dominates the charts for a second straight week in a row. Meanwhile the Neo Geo makes an unexpected appearance at #3, and the venerable TRS-80 Model I gets its first-ever entry on the tracker.

 

@TheGameCollector: That is a funny coincidence indeed! I kind of liked Blue's Journey, though what I'd really like to see is a more structured home port to a machine like the 32X or 3DO. With unlimited continues, it tends to become too much of a mindless plowthrough. BTW I played via a Dreamcast emulator, which generally does a good job but the music engine went totally haywire halfway through the game.

[TheGameCollector]

Here's the summary for Week 45, running from October 31 - November 6. We logged 1834 minutes of eligible play, playing 23 games on a total of 11 systems.

 

Top 10:

 

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 511

2. Shining in the Darkness (Genesis) - 285

3. Berzerk (Atari 2600) - 240

4. Double Dragon (Game Boy) - 133

5. Dracula Unleashed (Sega CD) - 118

6. Blue's Journey (Neo Geo AES) - 82

7. Sonic Pocket Adventure (Neo Geo Pocket Color) - 80

8. Millipede (Atari 5200) - 75

9. Magician Lord (Neo Geo AES) - 72

10. Candy Catcher (Atari 2600) - 60

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

Not enough entries to make a top 10. Kaboom would have been #1, followed by Berzerk at #2.

 

Top 10 systems:

 

1. Atari 2600 (891)

2. Genesis (285)

3. Neo Geo AES (167)

4. Game Boy (133)

5. Sega CD (118)

6. Neo Geo Pocket Color (80)

7. Atari 5200 (75)

8. Dreamcast (34)

9. NES/Famicom (24)

10. TRS-80 Model I (15)

 

Another banner week for the Atari 2600, as Kaboom dominates the charts for a second straight week in a row. Meanwhile the Neo Geo makes an unexpected appearance at #3, and the venerable TRS-80 Model I gets its first-ever entry on the tracker.

 

@TheGameCollector: That is a funny coincidence indeed! I kind of liked Blue's Journey, though what I'd really like to see is a more structured home port to a machine like the 32X or 3DO. With unlimited continues, it tends to become too much of a mindless plowthrough. BTW I played via a Dreamcast emulator, which generally does a good job but the music engine went totally haywire halfway through the game.

 

 

The true Neo Geo AES version only give you three continues. The Dreamcast most likely gives you the MVS settings for adding credits.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-545 minutes

 

 

 

High score of the week: 118,993

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week.

 

This week, I did play some classic games:

 

Online (non-eligible):

Superhero Pizza - 67 min. in 2 sessions

 

Arcade:

Cavelon - 116 min. (pre-NES)

Fire Truck - 59 min. (pre-NES)

Sidewinder - 97 min. (post-NES)

Super Bug - 228 min. (pre-NES)

 

Total playing time: 567 min. (81 min. per day)

 

Superhero PIzza is a time management game where you have to put together and bake Pizzas for guests like Superman and Batman.

 

Cavelon, at first glance, looks very much like Tutankham, but has a different gameplay since you have to collect pieces of a door scattered around the maze. The enemies are relatively dumb, they often move back and forth without seeing you, but to make up for that, they shoot at you if you stay in their view for more than a second, and they even shoot backwards if they are not facing you currently. There is a time limit which makes it hard to complete a maze before the timer runs out. However, if you lose a life, you start with a fresh timer, but you get to keep the pieces you already have collected. There are 6 levels, and I think I reached the third one. The graphics quality is roughly on par with the NES with 3-colored sprites and a 3-colored background. I put this as a pre-NES game because such graphics were possible in the arcade a few years before the NES came out, starting with games like Galaxian and Rally-X.

 

Super Bug is the first scrolling game ever, made by Atari back in 1976. It's a simple top-view racing game. The map consists of a grid of 16x16 road parts where each grid cell fills a screen and displays a road part consisting of 16x16 objects which in turn are 16x16 pixels tall. Actually, there aren't too many different objects. Most of the time you will only see roadside sticks and trees, and sometimes some cars, oil slicks and sand on the road, but usually one of them at a time. The only moving object is your player sprite which is centered on screen. The whole landscape is displayed in 4 gray tones (like on the Game Boy), but each object only has got one shade of gray against the black background. The sound effects aren't too bad, however.

 

Fire Truck is an extension of Super Bug made in 1977 where two players can cooperatively control a fire truck. There is a new map with a vastly improved number of different objects on it. I mapped out both games, Super Bug and Fire Truck.

 

Finally, Sidewinder is a game by Arcadia based on the Commodore Amiga hardware which was also released for the Amiga itself on disk. The arcade version is pretty identical to the Amiga one except for a bit different logic controlling the attract mode, the coin insertion sequence and the continuing of games. And the changes between the levels are much faster since the levels are loaded from ROM chips in the arcade, while they are loaded from disk on the Amiga. This is clearly not a pre-NES game because it came out in 1989 and uses Amiga hardware, which I generally consider post-NES although the Amiga, in some markets like Austria, was actually released before the NES.

[+thegoldenband]

Fire Truck - 59 min. (pre-NES)

[...]

Fire Truck is an extension of Super Bug made in 1977 where two players can cooperatively control a fire truck. There is a new map with a vastly improved number of different objects on it. I mapped out both games, Super Bug and Fire Truck.

Love that game! It's so much fun on the full-size cabinet with two players.

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

TRS-80 Model I:

Quest For The Key Of Night Shade - 95 min.

 

Intellivision:

Thin Ice - 24 min.

 

ColecoVision:

Congo Bongo - 3 min.

 

Genesis:

Shining in the Darkness - 219 min.

WarpSpeed - 185 min.

 

32X:

Virtua Fighter - 45 min.

 

Unexpectedly got sucked in to WarpSpeed, which is often reviled as one of the worst Genesis games in the library. It's a lazy downport of the SNES version that hardly lives up to its 16-bit hardware, but if you treat it like a late 1980s computer game, it doesn't seem so bad. Anyway, I beat the first four scenarios on Novice mode.

 

I also beat Virtua Fighter on Easy for the first time, and more momentously, beat Quest for the Key of Night Shade! It was on difficulty 1 of 20, admittedly, so I need to try the harder settings...but still, 25 years or so after first playing it, it's pretty satisfying to finally win the game.

 

Finally, I'm about to start the third level of the Labyrinth in Shining in the Darkness, having completed the Trials and mapped the second level.

[TheGameCollector]

I've had a busy week full of gaming excitement:

 

Playstation

King's Field (Japanese) - 643 minutes

King's Field - 828 minutes

 

Game Boy Color

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe - 271 minutes

 

These two King's Field games are completely different games. The Japanese-only King's Field is the first in the series, while the US release is the second and is called King's Field II in Japan. To continue the confusion, the US King's Field II called King's Field III in Japan.

 

To avoid confusion, I'd just say call the games by their US titles and just call the first one King's Field (Japanese).

 

I put a lot of time into both King's Field games beating the first over a course of 3 days and the second over a course of 2 days with longer play times per session. I had not legitimately beaten either of them before. Having finally done so, I feel accomplished and like a more skilled gamer than I was 4 years ago - the last time I had played a King's Field game. Well, onto King's Field II (King's Field III for Japan) this upcoming week! Keeping the sharpened skills rollin'.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 46, running from November 7-13. We logged 3358 minutes of eligible play, playing 14 games on a total of 9 systems.

 

Top 10:

 

1. King's Field (PlayStation) - 828

2. King's Field (Japanese) (PlayStation) - 643

3. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 545

4. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (Game Boy Color) - 271

5. Super Bug (Arcade) - 228

6. Shining in the Darkness (Genesis) - 219

7. WarpSpeed (Genesis) - 185

8. Cavelon (Arcade) - 116

9. Sidewinder (Arcade) - 97

10. Quest for the Key of Night Shade (TRS-80 Model I) - 95

 

Pre-NES top 10:

Not enough entries to make a top 10. Kaboom would have been #1, followed by Super Bug at #2.

 

Top 10 systems:

Not enough entries to make a top 10. PlayStation would have been #1 with 1471 minutes, followed by the Atari 2600 with 545 minutes.

 

In an otherwise thin week, King's Field is king!

[zylon]

Times from last week since I forgot.

5200:

Millipede 1hr

2600:

Millipede 25min

A8:

Millipede 40min