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Poll: Is ET as bad as people claim?


Andromeda Stardust

In light of the ET dig...  

176 members have voted

  1. 1. Is ET a bad game?

    • Yes, it sucks and deserves to be buried for all time. No one should have to play this abomination.
      32
    • No, it's awesome piece of history and needs to be played to be fully appreciated.
      144

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Well, I'm going to put my 2 cents in for it's worth.

  1. It's an Atari game! If you owned an Atari you were pretty much the go-to place before the crash.
  2. It was made in a short time frame. I remember reading a magazine article discussing the fall of Atari. They did an interview with the creator of E.T. for the 2600. Even he said he needed more time to make a decent game. Atari didn't give him the time. They wanted it before the Holidays.
  3. It's on the 2600. The 2600 is a neat and fun console. But here is a system, originally designed for Pong-style games, doing things it wasn't suppose to do. Limitations can lead to problems. Most of the games on the 2600 were fun or fun to watch if nothing more. It just depends on how they are seen.
  4. It came before the video game crash.

Truthfully, while I never really could figure the game out, I enjoyed it. The only copy I played was a cart-only so I didn't know what I was suppose to do. It was hilarious to watch family and friends play the game, get stuck, and make comments I don't care to repeat here. But I did enjoy the game for what it was and what it was playing on. It didn't seem to suffer from flicker issues like most other 2600 games. I voted No...I don't believe this game is as bad as others claim it is. And I would bet that all the returns were due to most purchasers thinking they could by the game, plug the cart in their system without reading the instructions (if they could read), and figure it out. Not being able to they most likely returned the game after about a month or more of owning it. Granted it wasn't a Space Invaders, Defender, or anything of the like. It was an exclusive original title and I think the developer did very well considering the time he was given to finish it. E.T. wasn't a bad game. Atari's managing and marketing skills were.

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What the hey, I'll add my 2 cents, not like anyone's minds are going to be changed by this thread!

 

Is it Good or Bad?

You could ask the same question about ANY game and get divided answers, some people swear by Sonic and hate Mario, some vice versa, some think Sports Games are the end-all-be-all of games, some think sports games have no place in video gaming.

 

The real question is, is it a well programmed game or a broken mess of unplaytested shyte.

 

It's definitely well programmed, it has a title screen, end sequence, 3 difficulties, and many things you can do given the limitations of the hardware.

Despite what anyone says, it is NOT broken. As was stated above, if you can hop from alligator to alligator or time a jump so as to properly climb down the ladders in Pitfall! you should have no issues with floating ET out of a hole.

However I will say, a little playtesting by a subjective audience would have helped this game. Getting used to the "Zones" can be tricky, and the area with holes EVERYWHERE is gonna drain your energy sending you into a pit you didn't want to enter just because you sometimes can't help but fall in a hole if you enter the area from the wrong side.

And I'm sure a playtester or two would have complained about this too and better alternatives might have arose, but then again he was under a tight schedule so he still may not have been able to make said changes.

 

Now for some other titles.

 

Swordquest... a virtual lottery ticket of trial and error with god knows how many possible item combinations to try, it'd be easier to systematically find the combination to a highschool locker I'm sure.

And people continued to buy it AFTER the contest was over... the contest was the only reason to attempt these games.

Raiders of the Lost Ark... Without the Manual AND Hint Sheets included, I doubt anyone could have finished this game or even understood what the environments/items represented... and why oh why is an hourglass a grappling hook... why not make it a grappling hook???

I kinda understand the Ankh in that I imagine the Ankh is a 'magical item' hence it's ability to transport you around, and it's place in Egyptian history but even I'm stretching things there.

Ghostbusters... the Driving Scenes are completely unecessary with nothing to dodge and when catching a ghost your ion beams disappear long before the trap opens up, giving the ghosts more than enough time to escape making every ghost catch a crapshoot.

And the list goes on when it come to games that tried to be more than a 2 minute arcade points-rack-em-up... this was Pong hardware after all!

 

I'm not saying any of these games are bad, I like all 3, and I'm sure some here hate all 3, but if people want to rag on a game based on bad game mechanics I can think of only one reason everyone picks on ET... because they're jumping on the bandwagon.

Sure some people aren't gonna like it... some people don't like Space Invaders either.

But for EVERYONE to say it's a bad game? I'm sure %90 of those claiming so never played more than 2 minutes of it... if they played it at all.

 

*EDIT

 

From what I've seen they were also digging Yar's Revenge carts out of that dump... guess that game really sucked too! I mean why else would Atari bury it... right?

Edited by Torr
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I've played far worse games for the Atari 2600. E.T. has it's flaws, but it's not a total waste. I'd say the worst thing about the game is the underdeveloped collision detection. Also, like many other games, it takes just a few minutes to complete... and that's kind of lame.

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Nothing could actually be as bad as E.T. is claimed to be. And it's actually not even close... I remember the day I bought it, not long after it came out. The woman at the store said, in a very "it's-bad-but-I-want-you-to-buy-this-anyway" tone, "it's a challenging little game". I took it home, was briefly frustrated, then figured out what was going on and have enjoyed it ever since.

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Here's another doing well

eBay Auction -- Item Number: 3609196621131?ff3=2&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&item=360919662113&mpt=[CACHEBUSTER]

 

Oh I just remembered, don't post ebay auctions here, sorry

I don't think anybody cares if you post links. ET is hot right now as the subject indicates. The proof in the pudding as far as market trends go is if demand for other titles go up. If the cost of a minty CIB ET soars 400% or more but all other games remain the same, blame it on media. If the price of everything Atari related goes up, then it reflects a genuine interest in classic gaming.

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Played it a lot yesterday. If you follow RT recomendations, it's a fun game to play. In the harder difficult, it's almost impossible to complete all the tasks to reach the escape ship (there always some thug robbing your items/carrying you to other places). Sure, it's not the best 2600 game, but also not the monstrosity people claim.

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Yea, of course that must be the reason.

 

There are a lot of games for the Atari 2600, NES, SNES, and beyond that require quick reflexes and perfect timing, but most people don't seem complain. They just practice and learn new video game skills. Somehow E.T. is different in their minds, but they can figure out how to get out of the wells and they can figure out how to run around the wells without falling in if they really want to. These skills are actually easier to learn than the torturous crap that is in a lot of other video games.

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I wonder if kids who experimented with programming were more receptive to E.T.? I think the game irritates people by confounding their expectations -- expectations that are based on the behavior of an assumed physical world, as the "E.T. fixed" page notes. But if you've got a working knowledge of programming, even very basic BASIC, maybe it's easier to intuit how the game operates.

 

I certainly notice that people complain endlessly about how the collision detection in a particular game is "broken" or "impossible to figure out", yet I have no problem grasping how the game operates and working with it. Some people are really bothered by hitboxes that don't show up where they want them to be, I guess. (Now inconsistent behavior is quite another thing...)

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I didn't vote, because I don't flat out agree with the verbage of either option, but I will say this - as someone who has played the 2600 version of the game, I thought it sucked. Badly.

 

Was it the worst Atari 2600 game, ever? I doubt it... has anyone here ever played Sorcerer for the 2600? P.U... :P

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