What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2017 (Season 10)

[+wongojack]

Sorry tracking team, all of my gaming time lately has been on modern stuff. I played a little Brutal Legend and got started on The Book of Unwritten Tales. I've also been playing PSVR titles like Batman VR.

[Eltigro]

Same here wongo, more time with Forza 6 and going back and replaying some Skyrim. There was talk of a modern What Have You Actually Played tracker, but never saw anything more.

[+thegoldenband]

There was talk of a modern What Have You Actually Played tracker, but never saw anything more.

 

My impression was that Jin was planning to start one in 2018 (was that correct, Jin?). I'll definitely throw in my GameCube and GBA times once it happens!

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 42, running from October 16 - 22. We logged 3836 minutes of eligible play, playing 75 games on a total of 20 systems.

Top 10:

1. Burger Time (MSX) - 355

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 319

3. Jajamaru Gekimaden: Maboroshi no Kinmajou (NES/Famicom) - 209

4. Super Final Match Tennis (J) (SNES) - 197

5. Forbidden Lands (Odyssey^2) - 182

6. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 157

7. Zaak van Sam, De (Philips CD-i) - 144

8. Knight Lore (TI-99/4A) - 140

9. Sonic Chaos (Game Gear) - 130

10. Pac-Man (Atari 8-bit) - 121

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Burger Time (MSX) - 355

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 319

3. Forbidden Lands (Odyssey^2) - 182

4. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 157

5. Knight Lore (TI-99/4A) - 140

6. Pac-Man (Atari 8-bit) - 121

7. Asteroids (Atari 2600) - 108

8. Missile Command (Atari 8-bit) - 94

9. Super Burgertime (Arcade) - 84

10. Project Firestart (C64) - 80

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (866)

2. TI-99/4A (400)

3. MSX (395)

4. Game Gear (290)

5. NES/Famicom (279)

6. Atari 8-bit (234)

7. SNES (229)

8. Odyssey^2 (227)

9. Atari 7800 (183)

10. Philips CD-i (144)

Tasty, tasty patties take Burger Time to #1 over close pursuer Kaboom. However its host platform only makes #3 on the system charts, as the MSX is just barely edged out by the TI-99...

...while both are surpassed, with a margin of over 2:1, by this week's #1 system, the Atari 2600.

Speaking of the VCS, yet another unplayed game gets knocked off the list this week, as Tac-Scan shows up on our tracker for the first time, believe it or not. Only 29 NTSC games left! And, our newest 1000-minute club member in spot #304 is Solar Fox, with 1152 minutes logged to date.

Finally, notice that the main top 10 has ten games on nine different systems: always nice when that happens.

[carlsson]

Since Jin mentioned he will try to make 2018 an all Atari year, unless he gets an Ataribox with some unique titles, he can't participate himself in a modern tracker next year. Of course it doesn't prevent him from moderating one, standing on the sidelines and watching others play post-2000 games while he at most can get to 1996-ish with the Jaguar.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Since Jin mentioned he will try to make 2018 an all Atari year, unless he gets an Ataribox with some unique titles, he can't participate himself in a modern tracker next year. Of course it doesn't prevent him from moderating one, standing on the sidelines and watching others play post-2000 games while he at most can get to 1996-ish with the Jaguar.

 

You got it Carlsson! I had been pondering what to do to mix things up a bit gaming wise in 2018 and was giving serious consideration to trying to run a modern gaming tracker, but ultimately the Atari Challenge sounded more appealing. And if I do go through with trying to play nothing but Atari systems in 2018 then running a modern gaming tracker at the same time doesn't seem like the best idea. Tracking times for people playing great modern games on the PS4 and Nintendo Switch while not being able to play anything newer than the Atari Jaguar just seems like a recipe for depression.

Edited October 26, 2017 by Jin

[carlsson]

I still think your Atari challenge should replacde "only" with "also", at least for the first season of operation. It will make a lot of us viable to participate, while you at the same time can enjoy the occasional modern game too.

[+thegoldenband]

Ah, I'd missed Jin's Atari challenge -- cool project. Hey, Jin, be sure to play some Hover Strike! (Actually I kinda liked that game...)

[Iwantgames:)]

If Jin’s not gonna do the modern games tracker I might be willing to run one if nobody else wants too

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Q-Bert: 75 min

 

Sega Master System

Ghost House: 7 min

Thunder Blade: 3 min

 

SNES

Out to Lunch: 4 min

Super Dropzone: 6 min

 

Some testing of new stuff. The SMS and SNES games work. Not that they're good, though... Q-Bert was played for week 1 of the IFART Team Tournament.

[carlsson]

Apple ][:

Apple Cider Spider - 3 min.

Choplifter - 5 min.

Atari 8-bit:

Demon Birds - 12 min.

Demon Dungeon - 7 min.

Demon Hunt - 8 min.

Ghost Hunter 2 - 16 min.

Ghostly - 33 min.

Midnite Magic [2012] - 24 min.

Nightmare Maze - 2 min.

Spooky Castle - 5 min.

Twilight World - 4 min.

PC Engine:

Blodia - 2 min.

Bomberman '93 - 24 min.

Gomola Speed - 6 min.

Puzznic - 5 min.

Yokai Dochuki - 3 min.

A good chunk of Atari 8-bit HSC were we have one of those 9 games rounds. I also took a break from my futile attempts to get the Super Serial Card working on my Apple ][+ clone and instead played some games. Finally I got a working PC Engine again, paired with a hand controller so for the first time since this July, I finally got to play some of the games.

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Asteroids - 10 minutes

Space Invaders - 10 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Donkey Kong - 12 minutes

Midnight Mutants - 38 minutes

[karokoenig]

Please add 30 minutes of Q-Bert to my gameplay times. I was able to squeeze in one last quick session trying to get a highscore for my team.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (October 23rd through 29th)...

 

Arcade:

Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory - 328 min. in 4 sessions

 

Non-eligible:

Stockstream - 196 min. in 7 sessions

Rubik's Cube - 8 min.

 

This week I only played a single classic game, but I played it pretty extensively... I replayed Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory because it's one of the sequels to Burger Time which I played last week. I didn't manage to complete it yet, but I got to the 8th and last pattern a few times.

 

Other than that, I played some Stockstream again (but not as extensively as in previous weeks) and solved Rubik's Cube two more times.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 252 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 83,865

 

I think I'll rest most of this week. Maybe play a little Hunchy II.

Edited October 29, 2017 by Atarian7

[zylon]

5200-

Centipede- 40min

 

Genesis-

Mean Bean Machine- 35min

Tetris(hack)- 48min

Madden '92- 25min

Arcade Classics (Missile Command)- 10min

 

C64-

1942- 10min

Centipede- 17min

Mario Bros- 18min

Night Driver- 5min

 

Arcade-

1943(via XBL)- 1hr 5min

Edited October 29, 2017 by zylon

[BurritoBeans]

Apple II:

The Lurking Horror - 70 minutes

 

Commodore 64:

Friday the 13th - 20 minutes

Mad Doctor - 30 minutes

 

Game.com:

Resident Evil 2: 175 minutes

 

PC-98:

Kizuato - 55 minutes

 

Sharp X68000:

D.P.S. SG - 100 minutes

D.P.S. SG Set 2 - 100 minutes

D.P.S. SG Set 3 - 100 minutes

 

ZX Spectrum:

The Rats - 100 minutes

 

Well, this week turned out to be a great week for games compared to what I thought it would be.

 

The "predicted" game to play - the Beast Busters NGPC game - wasn't played in the end as I determined that it "wasn't horror enough" to qualify for a "horror" month, sure there's a few skulls and zombies but Mega Man 2 is more scary and it's not even supposed to be horror. Instead, the Game.com comes in as my handheld of choice as I brought Resident Evil 2 with me - holy crap that game is bad, I don't know what I was thinking as I knew it sucked but I still took it in the end. Now, the one reason I'm even able to stick with this game is because you can tell that they at least made an honest attempt at something - past that, it's pretty much a Game & Watch with some pseudo-3D mixed in for all I care. I would say I wasted my time, but others found it to be super enjoyable to watch how bad it could be at times so I wouldn't say it was that bad.

 

Moving on from that, I brought out some old Alice Soft titles for the X68000 that I had got for dirt nothing at a convention alongside a few Elf titles a while back but had never played - the D.P.S. (Dream Program Series) games are just collections of scenarios, with at least one of each title having some element of horror to it. All of the games play very similarly - you select a story and click through making decisions every now and then which change what's going on. The first game is quite odd for the horror story, involving a scenario where you play as either a female SS Officer or a prisoner which ends up having you torture/be tortured by the other - I was just about confused the whole way through. The second horror story involves a couple who are trapped in a haunted mansion and you pretty much choose what the girl does making everything just go screwball crazy or make no sense again - I would say this had the most chance at being "horror" but towards the end, especially if you made the choice that ends up with you as the girl being eaten alive, the dialog is just so stupid that it's impossible to take it seriously. Finally, the third horror scenario has you playing as a guy who gets trapped in the room with a really strange prostitute - past that, I honestly couldn't make sense what was going on.

 

Next up in the week for me was the ZX Spectrum... I don't know why but I've really been wanting to mess with Sinclair comptuers in recent weeks, I think I'm starting to grow a liking for the things anyways. The game this week was The Rats, a game which is based on a novel. The game is a government simulator with you sending emergency forces to confine a threat of masses of rats alongside a text adventure in which you try to survive rats but occasionally will die - as long as your main people don't die you're fine, but if they do it's game over. At first I had trouble figuring this out, constantly having someone die in the text bits or being overrun, but after a while I started to figure it out - turns out the strategies are simple as long as you realize what does what. One big issue I found was that the game liked to crash on loading screens on most runs... this ended up ruining a lot of playtime, but whatever - it was still fun.

 

The PC-98 popped out, with the game Kizuato - this is a game about a dude who has odd nightmares, finds out the males in his family are partially beasts who want to hunt people, and has to try to figure out what to do. Originally I was going to play this with the game form the same people - Shizuku - which is similar in a way or two but I didn't have time for Shizuku so Kizuato was good enough. I'm fairly sure I played this one not too long ago but I still ran it again anyways - if you have any amount of common sense and can read quick this is a very short title as the only way to really get a bad ending is to purposefully pick stupid things to do. Since there's still the 30th and 31st, maybe I'll run Shizuku - it's one I know I haven't played in years but I'm not sure how long it would take me. Also, a little fun fact - if you have a Game Boy Color, you can make a ROM version of Shizuku to be played on the GBC... I wouldn't recommend it too much unless you like reading cramped text and grainy images, but hey it's something sort of neat that you can do.

 

The C64 got my last bit of time before I took a trip this weekend as I wanted to play a few things on it. Friday the 13th I've talked about a few times before - it's a fun one but very short and it's good at murdering ears so if you check it out, keep the volume a bit low if you like your jumpscares not to permanantly damage your hearing while they're at it. Mad Doctor is a very odd and short game in which you pull a Dr. Frankenstein - by gravedigging and murdering people in a town you must collect six body parts to make your own humanoid creature... it's very simple, looks quite similar to Friday and plays a bit similar, but eh it's fun.

 

Finally, the Apple II got some time using an emulator on my phone - I needed a game to play in the car as I took a trip with a few friends to West Virginia to check out a Radio and Technology museum which had a ton of old radios, computers, a 50s broadcasting station, etc. which was neat. So, for my leg of not driving, I picked The Lurking Horror AKA a horrible choice as it's a text adventure and I suck at typing on my phone. It's a silly plot involving the player at a place like MIT in which you have to attempt to finish a term paper but a blizzard causes issues, there's demons, and someone even committed suicide. You have to set things right and finish that paper or something like that... I don't know, it's a good adventure - the plot can be creepy at times - but in the end it's just a bit silly.

 

So yeah, that was the week. I have Shizuku/Kizuato out on my desk here alongside the Windows remakes so I'll probably start figuring those out, and past that I've really wanted to play some TI-99 - I have no real reason but all of the sudden as of a day or so ago I just got the feeling so that will probably come out. Past that, hey maybe the ZX80 will come out... I found a few more homebrew "games" so those could be cool anyways.

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

SNES:

Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S: Covert-Action-Teams - 19 min.

Super Battleship - 124 min.

Super Final Match Tennis - 48 min.

Made incremental progress in all three games, including WildC.A.T.S, a passable beat-'em-up I'd never played before.

[agb]

All Atari 2600

Bowling 7 minutes

Dodge’em 10 minutes

Solar Fox 142 minutes

Stampede 4 minutes

Video Pinball 9 minutes.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Alright! After having my technological world turned upside down by the death of my tablet last week I've finally got everything worked out and am back to my usual online activities with an old black 2008 MacBook that I've got set up to do most of the things I like to do online. With that business out of the way here's a recap of last week's play times from my household with a picture to go with them before I get onto this week's times and a writeup for both weeks:

Ineligible
Cursed Mountain (Nintendo Wii) - 692 minutes

Atari 2600
Adventure - 22 minutes
Warlords - 17 minutes

Atari 7800
Asteroids - 25 minutes
Centipede - 32 minutes
Choplifter! - 6 minutes
Dig Dug - 23 minutes
Food Fight - 30 minutes
Robotron 2084 (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 13 minutes
Scramble (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 19 minutes

Atari 8-Bit Computer
Blue Max (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 10 minutes
Missile Command - 94 minutes
Pac-Man - 121 minutes
Pole Position - 9 minutes

ColecoVision (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)
Montezuma's Revenge - 20 minutes
Zaxxon - 7 minutes

PC-DOS (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)
The Ultimate Doom - 106 minutes

PlayStation
Silent Hill - 47 minutes


Total Play Time This Week
1,293 minutes (21 hours 33 minutes) [601 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Nintendo Wii: 692 minutes
Atari 8-Bit Computers: 234 minutes
Atari 7800: 148 minutes
PC-DOS: 106 minutes
PlayStation: 47 minutes
Atari 2600: 39 minutes
ColecoVision: 27 minutes

And here's this week's:




Ineligible
Dream Pinball 3D (Nintendo Wii) - 36 minutes
Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil (Nintendo Wii) - 123 minutes
Sonic Unleashed - 189 minutes

Atari 7800
Centipede - 41 minutes
Donkey Kong (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 121 minutes
Ms. Pac-Man - 27 minutes

Atari 8-Bit Computer
Pac-Man - 27 minutes

PC-DOS (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)

Doom II - 100 minutes

The Ultimate Doom - 66 minutes

Sega Genesis (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)
Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind - 18 minutes


Total Play Time This Week
748 minutes (12 hours 28 minutes) [400 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Nintendo Wii: 348 minutes
Atari 7800: 189 minutes
PC-DOS: 166 minutes
Atari 8-Bit Computers: 27 minutes
Sega Genesis: 18 minutes



A lot of last week's gaming time from around here (and a little bit of this week's) was due to the misses having a friend come visit who grew up with the NES and Commodore 64 and had never experienced an Atari system before. With that in mind we both ended up sharing some Atari 7800 as well as a few Atari 2600 and 8-Bit Computer favorites with him. Two player Team Play mode in Centipede and Asteroids on the 7800 in particular were big hits, as were Warlords and my wife's favorite Atari 2600 game Adventure. Getting back to the 8-bit computer stuff though, last week we finally got one!

 

The XEGS shown in last week's picture arrived early in the week and was tons of fun once we got it set up and started playing… for about 2 hours that is until half of the difficulty switches on the console failed. I ended up taking it apart and doing a bunch of troubleshooting on it with the help of some fellow AtariAgers, and the short version of the story is that it now has a working Start and Reset switch but I will have to order replacement console switches for the Select and Option buttons from Best Electronics before the XEGS is in full proper working order.

 

The only other game of note from last week was Cursed Mountain on the Wii, which I bought on a whim for $6 from a local Half Price Books and ended up loving so much that I did a full play through of it in a single week. I just couldn't put it down, and I would go as far as to say that it's the best survival horror game I've played since Resident Evil 4. That may largely be due to how much time I spent studying Eastern philosophy in college though, as Cursed Mountain does expect you to have a decent working knowledge of Buddhism and related terminology. For instance, if you don't know what the concept of dharma or a Yogini is the game might leave you more confused than entertained much of the time; but if you're reasonably familiar with Buddhism then you'll probably find it to be a fantastic and very unique survival horror game.

 

Moving on to this week, I really didn't play a whole lot this week. I did a bit of Donkey Kong for the Atari 7800 High Score Club, finished the PC-DOS version of The Ultimate Doom and started in on Doom II, tested out a recently acquired copy of Dream Pinball 3D, then played a little Resident Evil on the Wii to get the Halloween spirit. For the misses' part in things she found a copy of Sonic Unleashed at a local game store this week and quickly abandoned her game of Silent Hill to start in on the seasonally appropriate Sonic game. She's been having a lot of fun with it, and I gotta say that the game's new character Chip is quite possibly the cutest thing on two legs. Other than Sonic Unleashed the only games the spousal unit played this past week were Ms. Pac-Man on the 7800, Pac-Man on the XEGS, and a bit of emulated Bubsy on the Genesis just to see how bad it actually was. Spoiler Alert: It's pretty bad (Though she did make it 3 levels in before giving up which I thought was actually rather impressive).

 

 

Well, I think that about covers everything from around here for the last two weeks! With any luck I'll be able to stay on track with my usual weekly posts for the rest of the year, since it sure does take some time to catch up when you get behind! Until next time, fingers crossed and happy gaming to you and yours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

… And oh, Happy Halloween!

Edited October 30, 2017 by Jin

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 43, running from October 23 - 29. We logged 2720 minutes of eligible play, playing 60 games on a total of 16 systems.

Top 10:

1. Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory (Arcade) - 328

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 252

3. Resident Evil 2 (Game.com) - 175

4. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 142

5. Donkey Kong (Atari 7800) - 133

6. Super Battleship (SNES) - 124

7. Q*bert (Atari 2600) - 105

8. Doom II (PC (DOS)) - 100

8. D.P.S. SG (Sharp X68000) - 100

8. D.P.S. SG Set 2 (Sharp X68000) - 100

8. D.P.S. SG Set 3 (Sharp X68000) - 100

8. Rats, The (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) - 100

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory (Arcade) - 328

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 252

3. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 142

4. Donkey Kong (Atari 7800) - 133

5. Q*bert (Atari 2600) - 105

6. Rats, The (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) - 100

7. Lurking Horror, The (Apple II) - 70

8. Centipede (Atari 7800) - 41

9. Centipede (Atari 5200) - 40

10. Midnight Mutants (Atari 7800) - 38

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (549)

2. Arcade (393)

3. Sharp X68000 (300)

4. Atari 7800 (239)

5. SNES (201)

6. Game.com (175)

7. PC (DOS) (166)

8. Atari 8-bit (138)

9. Genesis (136)

10. C64 (100)

10. Sinclair ZX Spectrum (100)

While the Atari 2600 takes the system laurels, the #1 spot on both individual charts belongs to Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory, which also becomes the 305th member of the

1000-minute club with 1060 minutes logged to date.

But the big news is that this week's #2 game, Kaboom, has reached the 200000-minute mark with 200,019 minutes logged so far. Wow, that's a lot of bombs!

[Atarian7]

Ok, that isn't all mine. Do you know how much I've played total? I was kind of hoping to get to 999,999 before reaching 200,000 minutes.

[+thegoldenband]

I'm not sure, alas, since I don't normally track times by individual.

 

What I can tell you is that at the start of 2014, other members had logged a total of 4358 minutes of Kaboom. I don't believe I've gone back through the times again (i.e. to calculate non-Atarian7 Kaboom times) since that.

[carlsson]

Well, given those stats it is reasonably easy to extend them. Obviously I'm only counting the 2600, not those who played versions on the Atari 5200, 8-bit, TI-99/4A, RCA Studio II etc.

 

End of 2013

Atarian7: 97419 mins (95.7%)

Everyone else: 4358 mins

 

2014

Atarian7: 26530 mins (99.8%)

cvga: 35 mins

oyamafamily: 1 min

 

2015

Atarian7: 35388 mins (98.3%)

cvga: 215 mins

zylon: 175 mins

karokoenig: 72 mins

Jin: 67 mins

BurritoBeans: 30 mins

Opry99er: 28 mins

oyamafamily: 8 mins

 

2016

Atarian7: 22752 mins (97.9%)

zylon: 188 mins

wongojack: 159 mins

Nutsy Doodlehammer: 45 mins

karokoenig: 30 mins

adamchevy: 30 mins

cvga: 25 mins

 

2017 so far

Atarian7: 12329 mins (98.9%)

zylon: 490 mins (refers to Atari 5200, so not counted)

BurritoBeans: 110 mins

adamchevy: 20 mins

Iwantgames:): 5 mins

 

That would bring us to 200,509 200,019 mins which is 490 mins more than what thegoldenband has recorded. It happens to match zylon's play time this year, but perhaps that is just a coincidence? My mistake, those were for the 5200.

 

In any case, it would appear that Atarian7 has recorded about 194,418 mins, give or take due to input errors. You have nearly 5600 mins or 93 hours left of play time before you roll 200,000 minutes.

 

BurritoBeans by the way mentioned in early January this year that he had played some Kaboom! that week but never mentioned any minutes.

Edited October 31, 2017 by carlsson

[+thegoldenband]

That would bring us to 200,509 mins which is 490 mins more than what thegoldenband has recorded. It happens to match zylon's play time this year, but perhaps that is just a coincidence?

You had me worried for a second, but fortunately those play times -- 228 minutes here, and 262 here, for a total of 490 minutes -- are for the 5200 version. Phew!