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

[+wongojack]

PS1

Blood Omen:  Legacy of Kain 792

Rayman 50

 

A bit more time on the Playstation Classic for me.  Blood Omen continues to entertain, but there are some big faults from the era that come through on that one.  Namely that you spend a lot of time in the least interesting parts of the game like waiting for menus to load or trying to get to the map.  The game over screen requires you to wait through a scrolling animation, and then you still have to pick Load Game from a one click removed options menu.  There are even a few more little things that you can tell people have just thought about harder since 1995.  It is a really good game though.  I just wish I could spend more time actually playing the game during a session.

 

Rayman is always a confusing experience.  If you check the modern tracker you'll see I also played quite a bit of Rayman Legends this week.  The original game is full of REALLY high production values, but I find it sooo frustrating.  I'll say more about Legends in the other thread.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Apologies for being super late this week, the tablet that I do all my online stuff on died today and I spent the last 11 hours scrambling to recover what I could from it (including my household's play time log for the week) and transfer it all over to a new tablet. Thankfully I was able to recover everything important to me, so here's my household's times for the past week!

 

 

Ineligible
Darkwood (Nintendo Switch) - 110 minutes
Dust: An Elysian Tail (Nintendo Switch) - 225 minutes

 

Arcade
Pac-Man (Played on Namco Museum Arcade Pac for Switch) - 5 minutes

 

Sega 32X
Metal Head - 222 minutes

 

Sega CD
Battlecorps - 93 minutes

 

Sega Genesis
Mega Bomberman - 247 minutes 
Sonic & Knuckles - 120 minutes

 

 

Total Video Game Play Time This Week
1,022 minutes (17 hours 2 minutes) [687 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Sega Genesis: 367 minutes
Nintendo Switch: 335 minutes
Sega 32X: 222 minutes
Sega CD: 93 minutes
Arcade: 5 minutes

[carlsson]

Here's the summary for Week 29, running from July 15 - 21. We logged 4935 minutes of eligible play, playing 41 games on a total of 20 systems.

Top 10:

 

1. Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (PlayStation) - 792 min.

2. Dead of the Brain (NEC PC-9801) - 560 min.
3. Street Fighter Alpha - Warriors' Dreams (Arcade) - 497 min.
4. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 450 min.
5. Tetris (NES/Famicom) - 335 min.
6. Mega Bomberman (Genesis) - 247 min.
7. Metal Head (Sega 32X) - 222 min.
8. Bomb Squad (Intellivision) - 210 min.
9. Akumajou Dracula (Castlevania Chronicles) (Sharp X68000) - 200 min.
10. Dragon Quest V (SNES) - 197 min.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 450 min.
2. Bomb Squad (Intellivision) - 210 min.
3. Burgertime (Mattel Aquarius) - 78 min.
4. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 64 min.
5. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 56 min.
6. Moon Patrol (Atari 5200) - 45 min.
7. Breakout (Atari 2600) - 37 min.
8. Tetris (Alexsey Pajitnov 1984) (PDP-11) - 30 min.
9. Eggomania (Atari 2600) - 22 min.
10. Age of Heroes (C64) - 21 min.

 

Top 10 systems:

1. PlayStation (842)
2. Arcade (681)
3. Atari 2600 (615)
4. NEC PC-9801 (560)
5. Genesis (367)
6. NES/Famicom (355)
7. Sharp X68000 (255)
8. SNES (242)
9. Sega 32X (222)
10. Intellivision (210)

 

Blood and death is leading the main list this week, with relatively few pre-NES games on it. This is also reflected in the systems list.

 

No new entries to the 1000 Minute Club, though I noticed that Tetris for the NES now have obtained the "big random" number 4711 minutes of play time.

[+cvga]

Intellivision:

 

Lock and Chase - 75 minutes

[digdugnate]

I'm going to go ahead and post my times today- i'm pretty well done with Classic time.  Most of my 'productive' time will be spent on the Modern side. 

 

Continuing on with Street Fighter Alpha but slowing my pace a little.  I also got some Doom time in, but i've only been playing in spurts because the motion bob kind of bugs me.  When did I get SO OLD?

 

Arcade:

 

Street Fighter Alpha - Warriors' Dreams -- 367 minutes

 

PC:

 

Doom -- 259 minutes

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Alien Menace: 5 min

Gingerbread Man: 9 min

Lilys Woods: 4 min

Mean Santa: 7 min

Space Invaders Invasion: 8 min

 

Finally I was able to nick a few minutes to test a lot of homebrews/hacks I obtained from a fellow AA member recently. Of all these, Gingerbread Man is by far the most unique, the others being hacks with no major change of gameplay mechanics. Mean Santa is a nice oddity, and the box and manual are nice.

Recently, I slowly started to sell off most of my more modern stuff. In the long run, every bit above 16 has to go, and I want to focus my collection. I actually have a lot of PS1 consoles, some Gamecube stuff, PS2 here and there. All that was mostly "bycatch" anyway - cheap opportunity pickups from flea markets, intended to swap/sell for funds that can go into 8 and 16 bit material.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:
Frogger II - 28 min.

 

While I can't claim I've been busy with more important stuff, the past three weeks have barely been above detection limit even for me who usually don't spend too much time playing games. If it wasn't for the HSC, I probably wouldn't play anything at all.

 

(And yes, I'm on my way to become a daily YT addict, finding more and more stuff to watch that isn't particularly productive anyway)

 

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (July 22nd through 28th)...

 

Atari 2600:

Bobby is going home - 12 min. in 2 sessions

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the park - 10 min.

Carnival - 8 min.

Carnival 8K - 2 min.

Centipede 2K (2000) (PD) - 6 min.

Do Re Mi - 1 min.

Thunderground - 5 min.

Tron - 2 min.
 

Commodore 64:

Poc-Man (homebrew) - 2 min.

 

Non-eligible:

Rubik's Cube - 6 min.

 

I played some different Atari 2600 games, most of which I've played before. The 8K version of Carnival sadly still doesn't have the bear interlude, but also lacks scoring, so I reverted to the normal one for another game. Centipede 2K is just a graphics hack of Centipede. Do Re Mi is a puzzle game in development, but it's pretty simple and fast. Tron is also being in development, but I didn't manage to properly play it with just 1 joystick. Other than that, I revisited Thunderground, Bobby is going home and Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventure in the park, which is the prototype of the Atari 2600 version of a Colecovision game which itself is an adaptation of the MSX game Athletic Land by Konami which also was available in its original form over here. I'm not too good at it, so I didn't manage to complete the 3rd set of rounds. The same holds true for Bobby is going home, which is somewhat similar to the former game, but much slower. Finally, I took at a look at Poc-Man, which is a C-64 version of Pac-Man I attempted to code in BASIC back in 1985. While it's pretty slow, it's better than the Atarisoft version in some respects... the title tune is arranged correctly, and the ghosts are multicolored (I chose to make them 24 pixels wide, unlike in all other known Pac-Man clones on the C-64). I actually question if this game could be souped up to a full-blown Pac-Man clone which would be better than anything that appeared on the C-64 previously. Probably it could, but it would be much work.

 

Finally, I solved Rubik's Cube in about 6 minutes, but that's not an electronic game, so it's ineligible for the Top 10.

[+cvga]

Intellivision:

 

Dig Dug - 205 minutes

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 220 minutes

 

[agb]

Times for the week are:

atari 2600;

eggomanis 28 mins

kaboom 6 mins

solar god 107 mins

 

nes for high score club

tetris 353 mins. No improvement to my score. 

 

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

NES:

AD&D: Dragonstrike - 326 min.
Circus Caper - 108 min.

 

Beat Circus Caper. Would've taken half as long to do it, but the game crashed shortly before the final boss on my first playthrough.

[Eltigro]

A variety for me this week... 

 

GameBoy

The Legend of Zelda:  Link's Awakening - 180 min (Got through another dungeon and did some other things... but kinda got lost.  Pretty sure I made it farther than this back when I had the cartridge long ago, but don't remember any of it.  Will probably need to look at some walkthroughs.)

 

TurboGrafx-16

Blazing Lazers - 45 min (Just played until game over... was hoping to get farther than I did.  Got to somewhere in level 8.  Was playing this in emulation instead of on real hardware, so I wonder if that was part of it...  oh well, still did decent.)

Cadash - 10 min (Never really played this much.  Seems pretty rough.  The enemy respawn rate is crazy and they overwhelm you pretty quick.  I only played for 10 minutes, though, so it's not like I figured out much.  Maybe the respawning is good for leveling up?)

The Legendary Axe - 60 min (Did about as good as I usually do... got to the end of the 4th level.  Might not seem like far into the game, but several levels are split up in to a lot of sub levels... anyway...  I'll try again some time soon-ish and see if I can get past that boss.)

Neutopia - 72 min (Man, I'm starting to sour on this game.  I got a lot farther back in the day, but I'm having so much trouble attacking stuff without getting hit myself.  And there's hardly any health drops.  Enemies can drop some cherries that will fill like one block of health, but they're so rare.  Instead I keep getting the same two items over and over (and coins).  I don't know if I'll keep going or not.)

 

SNES/Super Famicom

Dragon Quest V (translated rom) - 150 min (I'm enjoying this despite the dated visuals.  It seems really apparent that this is an early-ish SNES game.  Games just a year later look so much better.  But it has been fun so far.)

Edited July 29, 2019 by Eltigro

[DragonGrafx-16]

Sorcer Striker (arcade) 10 mins... was playing this but accidentally ran the countinue countdown to 0 when I was trying to add more credits lol
Soldier Blade (PC Engine) 35 mins... was not playing the best and got frustrated on Operation 5 (usually get most of the way through Operation 6 when I play.)
Mario Kart 64 (N64) 5 mins (had family over)

[BurritoBeans]

Aquarius:

Tron Deadly Discs - 22 minutes

 

VIC-20:

Omega Race - 15 minutes

 

"Maybe I'll beat something" yeah that didn't work out.

 

So after struggling with the school I go to for a few days for screwing up my schedule the second semester in a row and not being able to get back all my courses I had one day of playing games. The Aquarius came out as for some reason I decided I wanted to try programming it again... yeah that's not happening, even playing Tron made my hand cramp up and the keyboard isn't much better. The VIC-20 fared a bit bitter with good 'ol Omega Race but I just didn't hold attention on it for very long, oh well. The PDP did get used for ~450 minutes or so, friends and I wrote a game in straight C forever back and I got my DECUS C compiler going after tons of effort so I'm going to see about porting it back if at all possible - so far so good but who knows how long that will last.

 

ReplayFX is this week and that means woohoo, arcade/pinball machines and probably a new console or handheld is coming home with me - no clue what it will be but I hope it will be fun. Since the PDP is going to be on I'll probably try something else with it but I've run out of RT-11 stuff and I still haven't built my drive adapter board so I can run a floppy and MFM drive, eventually that'll happen I guess.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

No classic gaming from my household this week, but we did play a fair bit of modern games and I actually took the time to get back in the swing of things and do one a full write up with a picture and all that good stuff like I used to do for the modern tracker this week. You can find the post here.

Edited July 29, 2019 by Jin

[+wongojack]

No classic gaming for me either this week, but I also posted some time in the modern tracker.

[+wongojack]

17 hours ago, thegoldenband said:

My times for the week:

 

NES:

AD&D: Dragonstrike - 326 min.
Circus Caper - 108 min.

 

Beat Circus Caper. Would've taken half as long to do it, but the game crashed shortly before the final boss on my first playthrough.

I have never played either of these games.

 

I'm instantly interested in D&D games.  A flying D&D game sounds pretty interesting.  (wikipedia link)

[Agamon]

NES

Arkanoid (10 min)

Bionic Commander (12 min)

 

Played a bit of NES this weekend, but not as much as I'd have liked...

[carlsson]

Here's the summary for Week 30, running from July 22 - 28. We logged 2789 minutes of eligible play, playing 38 games on a total of 13 systems.

Top 10:

 

1. Street Fighter Alpha - Warriors' Dreams (Arcade) - 367 min.
2. Tetris (NES/Famicom) - 353 min.
3. AD&D: Dragonstrike (NES/Famicom) - 326 min.
4. Doom (PC (DOS)) - 259 min.
5. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 226 min.
6. Dig Dug (Intellivision) - 205 min.
7. Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Game Boy) - 180 min.
8. Dragon Quest V (SNES) - 150 min.
9. Circus Caper (NES/Famicom) - 108 min.
10. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 107 min.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 226 min.
2. Dig Dug (Intellivision) - 205 min.
3. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 107 min.
4. Lock 'n' Chase (Intellivision) - 75 min.
5. Eggomania (Atari 2600) - 28 min.
5. Frogger II: Threedeep! (Atari 8-bit) - 28 min.
7. Tron: Deadly Discs (Mattel Aquarius) - 22 min.
8. Omega Race (VIC-20) - 15 min.
9. Bobby Is Going Home (Atari 2600) - 12 min.
10. Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park (Atari 2600) - 10 min.

 

Top 10 systems:

1. NES/Famicom (809)
2. Atari 2600 (440)
3. Arcade (377)
4. Intellivision (280)
5. PC (DOS) (259)
6. TG-16/PC Engine (222)
7. Game Boy (180)
8. SNES (150)
9. Atari 8-bit (28)
10. Mattel Aquarius (22)

 

While the NES/Famicom is having a strong week systems wise and three games on the individual list, the arcade game Street Fighter Alpha by a margin of 14 minutes still takes the title. I presumed that when agb wrote Solar God, it was supposed to mean Solar Fox as I couldn't find any game by that other name, though it kind of sounds cool and I suppose it is what Lady Gaga might've been singing about: Ra, Ra, Ra-Ra-Ra-Ra.... she clearly had a bad romance with an Egyptian prehistoric god. And yes, Kaboom! in the top of the pre-NES list, as so many times before.

 

We have one new entry to the 1000 Minute Club in form of Doom on PC (DOS) which now is up to 1148 minutes and becomes #380. As you may have remembered, our previously latest entry was The Ultimate Doom on the same system, making two Doom members in a row.

 

Also the Nintendo version of Tetris on the NES/Famicom is now part of the 5000 Minute Club with 5064 minutes. With a mere 24 members, this club still is kind of exclusive. Out of those, 7 are for the Atari 2600, 3 for NES/Famicom, 2 each for Game Boy Color, PC (DOS) and PlayStation, and finally one game each for the Atari 7800, Game Boy, Genesis, Intellivision, N64, SNES and TI-99/4A.

[+thegoldenband]

On 7/29/2019 at 4:28 PM, wongojack said:

I have never played either of these games.

 

I'm instantly interested in D&D games.  A flying D&D game sounds pretty interesting.  (wikipedia link)

I wish either of them were as good as they could have been. Circus Caper has some clever ideas but it's too clunky and limited to shine.

 

Dragonstrike is undone by its own ungainliness, and it's amazing how annoying those 5 extra seconds of delay after a GAME OVER can become after the 50th restart...

[+cvga]

4 hours ago, carlsson said:

Also the Nintendo version of Tetris on the NES/Famicom is now part of the 5000 Minute Club with 5064 minutes. With a mere 24 members, this club still is kind of exclusive. Out of those, 7 are for the Atari 2600, 3 for NES/Famicom, 2 each for Game Boy Color, PC (DOS) and PlayStation, and finally one game each for the Atari 7800, Game Boy, Genesis, Intellivision, N64, SNES and TI-99/4A.

Looks like you're holding out on us. 7+3+2+2+2+1+1+1+1+1+1+1= 23.  We demand an answer

[carlsson]

Oh. I had missed one of the PC games, making the distribution 7+3+3+2+2+1+1+1+1+1+1+1.

 

Current top 24 for that matter:

 

1. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 219182 min. (5551 min this year)
2. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 16540 min. (4703)
3. Lawnmower Man, The (SNES) - 14730 min. (0)
4. Christmas Carol vs. the Ghost of Christmas Presents (Intellivision) - 13340 min. (0)
5. Silent Hunter (PC (DOS)) - 13129 min. (169)
6. Galaxian (Atari 2600) - 12829 min. (346)
7. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 11294 min. (1195)
8. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 10164 min. (68)
9. Berzerk (Atari 2600) - 8560 min. (0)
10. Historyline 1914-1918 (PC (DOS)) - 8458 min. (270)
11. Dragon Warrior III (Game Boy Color) - 6815 min. (0)
12. Asteroids (Atari 2600) - 6716 min. (2216)
13. Suikoden II (PlayStation) - 6635 min. (0)
14. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 6512 min. (345)
15. Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation) - 6102 min. (2740)
16. Final Fantasy (NES/Famicom) - 5953 min. (1977)
17. Monopoly (Game Boy Color) - 5784 min. (0)
18. Baseball Stars (NES/Famicom) - 5773 min. (0)
19. Sword of Vermilion (Genesis) - 5131 min. (0)
20. Hunchy II (Atari 2600) - 5116 min. (300)
21. Pokemon Red Version (Game Boy) - 5107 min. (0)
22. GoldenEye 007 (N64) - 5090 min. (0)
23. Tetris (NES/Famicom) - 5064 min. (995)
24. NetHack (PC (DOS)) - 5046 min. (0)

 

Edited July 31, 2019 by carlsson

[karokoenig]

On 7/30/2019 at 10:49 PM, thegoldenband said:

Dragonstrike is undone by its own ungainliness, and it's amazing how annoying those 5 extra seconds of delay after a GAME OVER can become after the 50th restart...

I played a lot of Dragonstrike on the Amiga at my friend's house back in the day, and that version is pretty awesome. Not having an Amiga myself at that time, I had to be content with the C64 version at home, which I played through several times. Yes, the C64 version is quite a slideshow, but with my internal "anything AD&D must be great" filter in place, I rather enjoyed it. I did revisit the C64 version a few years ago on an emulator and - of course - couldn't really relive the same experience. But oh well. I have very fond memories of that early time, and still love the concept.

[+thegoldenband]

9 hours ago, karokoenig said:

I played a lot of Dragonstrike on the Amiga at my friend's house back in the day, and that version is pretty awesome. Not having an Amiga myself at that time, I had to be content with the C64 version at home, which I played through several times. Yes, the C64 version is quite a slideshow, but with my internal "anything AD&D must be great" filter in place, I rather enjoyed it. I did revisit the C64 version a few years ago on an emulator and - of course - couldn't really relive the same experience. But oh well. I have very fond memories of that early time, and still love the concept.

 

The NES release is a case of "same name, different game". It plays from an exclusively overhead perspective -- kind of like a cross between Dragon Spirit on the NES and the overhead stages of Thunder Force II on the Genesis.

 

The biggest problem is that your velocity is constant and you can't control your speed at all, so you're forced into these constant turns that bog the game down. And there are plenty of other issues -- lack of clear altitude indicators in the terrain, the fact that your enemies can pass through the same obstacles that damage you, the foolish lack of an air-to-ground attack, the tedium of the boss fights...