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

[+cvga]

Intellivision - Pinball 30 minutes

[karokoenig]

5 hours ago, thegoldenband said:

 

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.

Thanks for clarifying that. I'm glad you did. I was ready to import Dragon Strike a few times in the past, expecting a dragon flight sim campaign. I guess I'll give the NES game with that name a pass then.

[+davidcalgary29]

Arcade (at the Calgary Airport)

 

Crazy Taxi, 10 minutes

[digdugnate]

not much this week on the Classic tracker- travelling for work.

 

PC:

 

Doom -- 124 minutes

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (July 29th through August 4th) on classic systems...

 

Arcade:

Pooyan - 12 min.

 

Atari 7800:

Baby Pac-Man - 7 min.

 

Colecovision:

Pac-Man - 9 min.

Carnival - 9 min.

 

This week I didn't play that many games because I got some visitors and also went swimming on some days. I replayed some favorites of mine, Pooyan and Baby Pac-Man. Then the Colecovision version of Pac-Man and finally Carnival which I played on the Atari 2600 last week. The Colecovision version seems to have all the features of the arcade game while the Atari 2600 version, as usual with Coleco, was more watered down than would have been necessary... they didn't even include the bear stage!

 

[oyamafamily]

Only Atari 7800:

Pac-Man Collection - 94 minutes

Summer Games - 20 minutes

 

Evidence of the week: my scores on Pac-Man Collection - Ms. Pac-Man, Plus OFF, Fast ON and five lives to start.

Edited August 5, 2019 by oyamafamily
Adding evidences

[agb]

Only one game this week due to really good weather. 

 

Solar Fox 111 minutes

[Eltigro]

I got a long list this week...  lots of random stuff, but nothing played terribly long...  all emulated this week except where noted.

 

Sega Saturn

Albert Odyssey - 45 min (Was gonna try to play this on stream, but with all the other programs open, it was really struggling.  Need a better computer to stream Saturn games it seems.  Does fine just playing them with little to know hiccups, but it can't keep up with the emulator, Chrome and OBS (streaming software) running.  Oh well.)

 

MAME/Arcade

AeroFighters - 15 minutes (Just played for a bit.  Not too much to say other than that I suck at it.)

Alpha Mission II - 5 min (Might want to put this one in Neo Geo... played it via MAME... anyway, I had no idea what I was doing.  The powerups didn't seem to make much sense.  It did look nice, though.)

Robotron 2084 - 10 min (Classic Robotron.  I like playing this version as I can get it to work with the dual analog sticks of a Playstation 2 controller.  Certainly easier than playing the 7800 version.  I couldn't get that version to work like I wanted to.)

 

TurboGrafx

Blazing Lazers - 60 min (Got to the last stage, but died there.)

Download - 40 min (Never really played this one much.  Got to the fourth (?) stage where you kind of go into a computer.  That stage had some really pretty impressive parallax scrolling I think.  Layers in the background moved at different rates horizontally, but also moved at different rates as I moved my ship up and down, giving a really good 3D effect.  Tough game, though.  I was able to slowly get better, but it was tough.)

Psychosis - 60 min (Trying to get through the first loop of this one with one ship again.  I've done it before, back in the day and recently.  But that was on real hardware.  Not sure if the emulation is adding in some lag or whatever, but it did seem to be tough.  It was getting late as I was trying, though, so maybe I was just tired.)

 

SNES/Super Famicom

Dragon Quest V - 180 min (Got a bit further in.  No spoilers, if you haven't played it, but I did just escape from slavery and find a town with a casino or something.  Seems like I'm maybe just now getting into the actual game?  More things seem to have opened up play-wise.)

 

Playstation

Castlevania SotN - 45 min (I love this game.  Probably my favorite Castlevania game.  I played until just after the doppleganger boss.  I used to own this game and it's one of the ones that still pisses me off when I think about not having it anymore.)

Gekioh Shooting King - 5 min (Shooter.  Looks like maybe Japan only?  Never played it before and wasn't good at it.)

Hydro Thunder - 10 min (I've seen this game a lot, but never played it.  Seems okay, but I've never been big on watercraft based racing games.  Didn't like Waverace 64, either.  I'll give it a try again some time, though.)

R-Types - 10 min (Played the R-Type 1 game on here.  Got to about the same spot where I usually get on the TurboGrafx version.  I like that there's a button option for rapid fire.  Every time I say that I have people crying about how you can't charge up the shot if you use rapid fire.  I know.  I do okay without it.  Calm down.  lol)

Tempest X - 15 min (Never played this one and that's too bad.  I just played the basic Tempest X version of the game, and it was pretty good.  I think it's interesting that some parts of the Jaguar version look better than this one, but it's not bad.  I'll play it more in the future, for sure.)

[Iwantgames:)]

Haven't been doing much gaming lately but I finally did a bit this week

 

Amstrad CPC 464 -

Scramble - 10min

 

Amstrad GX4000 -

Dawn of Kernal - 5min

 

Apple IIe -

Dig Dug - 10min

Pac-Man - 20min

 

Osborne 1 (CP/M) -

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - 10min

Zork I: The Underground Empire - 75min

[+wongojack]

No classic time for me this week.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:
Trolls and Tribulations - 32 min.

 

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

NES:
AD&D: Dragonstrike - 444 min.
Mega Man 5* - 14 min.

  (*played via the Mega Man Anniversary Collection on the GameCube, which I'm pretty sure is emulation; otherwise count this as GameCube time on the modern tracker)

 

Game Boy:
The Smurfs Travel the World - 24 min.

 

PlayStation:
Time Commando - 113 min.

 

Game Boy Color:
Snoopy Tennis - 40 min.

 

Completed AD&D: Dragonstrike on Easy with the Bronze dragon.

 

Otherwise I tried out a SNES-to-GameCube adapter, mostly for use with the Game Boy Player (works well, pity about the awful Game Boy Player lag), and messed around with Time Commando, a hilariously janky PlayStation game I can best describe as "a beat-'em-up with tank controls, FMV backgrounds, and unidirectional scrolling". It's wonderfully misguided, and frequently infuriating.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 188 minutes

 

 

[Skippy B. Coyote]

While the Nintendo Switch once again got most of the love around here this past week, I still made a little time for classic gaming and got an Atari joystick back in my hands for the first time in a while.

 

 

 

Ineligible 

DOOM (Nintendo Switch) - 405 minutes

Doom 3 (Nintendo Switch) - 680 minutes

Horizon Chase Turbo (Nintendo Switch) - 175 minutes 

 

Atari 2600

Ms. Pac-Man - 15 minutes

 

Nintendo Game Boy

Mortal Kombat II - 17 minutes

Solar Striker - 33 minutes

 

Nintendo Game Boy Color

Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition - 14 minutes

 

Sony PlayStation

Doom - 103 minutes

 

 

Total Video Game Play Time This Week

1,442 minutes (24 hours 2 minutes) [182 minutes eligible]

 

Individual System Play Times This Week

Nintendo Switch: 1,260 minutes

Sony PlayStation: 103 minutes

Nintendo Game Boy: 50 minutes

Atari 2600: 15 minutes

Nintendo Game Boy Color: 14 minutes

 

 

 

The big games for the week in my household were a trio of Nintendo Switch titles, including the 2016 DOOM reboot along with the recently released Switch port of 2012's Doom 3: BFG Edition, and the stellar classic arcade style racing game Horizon Chase Turbo that just got a physical release on the Switch last week. I started off the week playing DOOM, but after a little pondering decided to download and try out Doom 3 rather than finish a 4th play through of DOOM. 

 

It ended up being a good choice, because at 7 hours I'm still having a total blast playing Doom 3 again for the first time in about a decade. The new Switch port of Doom 3 is a bit different than the original version I played back in the Xbox days, on account of now having your flashlight mounted to your armor rather than it being a handheld affair, so you can now use the flashlight and a weapon simultaneously. It might not sound like a big change but it definitely makes the game feel significantly different to play, and while it does lower the feeling of tension and dread creeping around the darkened tunnels of the Mars base quite a bit it's also really convenient to not have to constantly switch back and forth between your flashlight and a weapon. I've got mixed feelings on the change and do wish they would have included an option to play the game the original way, but other than the flashlight issue it's a solid port and still very much Doom 3 in every respect. 

 

While I've been working my way through Doom 3 the misses got back to her game of Doom on the PlayStation this past week, blasting through another half a dozen or so levels, and then we both played a fair bit of Horizon Chase Turbo on the Switch. I don't generally get into racing games because they often require major time investments making a character or customizing cars, sitting through some long story, or learning all the subtle nuances of a complicated control scheme, but this one feels just like you walked up to a racing game arcade machine back in the 90's and plunked in a couple quarters. It's fast and simple to jump into, has a beautifully clean cel-shaded visual style and catchy music, easy to use controls, 100+ tracks and dozens of cars to unlock, and the races only take 2 or 3 minutes to complete. Horizon Chase Turbo has been a big hit with everyone around here and I'm sure it's a game we'll be filling lots of a little snippets of free time here and there with whenever we have some downtime. 

 

Rounding out the week I pulled my backlit original Game Boy out of it's case for the first time in a few months to play some old favorites, and with the next season of the Atari 2600 High Score Club starting in a week and a half or so I felt like it was a good time pick up an Atari joystick and fire up the Light Sixer again last night. I only played one game of Ms. Pac-Man, but it was still just as enjoyable as ever and I'm seriously looking forward to playing some more Atari in the weeks to come.

 

I think that just about covers everything for this week, so until next time and as always, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours!

Edited August 5, 2019 by Jin

[BuckoBrand]

Yesterday I played a number of things.

 

 

IOS Ipad:

 

Idle Supermarket Tycoon(amazing game, you should play)-10 minutes

Brawl Stars(another awesome game)-30 minutes

 

 

OS9 IMac:

 

 

Age of Empires II-70 minutes

 

 

Asus Computer:

 

Minecraft-100 minutes

Edited August 6, 2019 by BuckoBrand

[carlsson]

^^ Nice, I'll likely add those to the modern tracker though technically the first version of Mac OS 9 was released in October 1999.

 

Edit: Or well, we've listed Age of Empires II for Mac OS before and that game was released in September 1999 so perhaps that one belongs here.

Edited August 6, 2019 by carlsson

[carlsson]

Here's the summary for Week 31, running from July 29 - August 4. We logged 2163 minutes of eligible play, playing 42 games on a total of 19 systems.

Top 10:

 

1. AD&D: Dragonstrike (NES/Famicom) - 444 min.
2. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 188 min.
3. Dragon Quest V (SNES) - 180 min.
4. Doom (PC (DOS)) - 124 min.
5. Time Commando (PlayStation) - 113 min.
6. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 111 min.
7. Doom (PlayStation) - 103 min.
8. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 94 min.
9. Zork I: The Underground Empire (CP/M) - 75 min.
10. Age of Empires 2 (Mac OS Classic) - 70 min.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 188 min.
2. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 111 min.
3. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 94 min.
4. Zork I: The Underground Empire (CP/M) - 75 min.
5. Trolls and Tribulations (Atari 8-bit) - 32 min.
6. Pinball (Intellivision) - 30 min.
7. Pac-Man (Apple II) - 20 min.
7. Summer Games (Atari 7800) - 20 min.
9. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 2600) - 15 min.
10. Pooyan (Arcade) - 12 min.

 

Top 10 systems:

1. NES/Famicom (458)
2. Atari 2600 (314)
3. PlayStation (301)
4. SNES (180)
5. TG-16/PC Engine (160)
6. PC (DOS) (124)
7. Atari 7800 (121)
8. CP/M (85)
9. Game Boy (74)
10. Mac OS Classic (70)

 

This week there almost is a double dragon on the list, though not the beat 'em up. Kaboom! however slides in right above Dragon Quest V. There also are two dooms, to keep the rhyming pattern. More Pac-Man on the pre-NES list, and systems wise the NES/Famicom for another week retains the crown.

 

No new games crossing either the 1000 or 5000 minute marks.

[+thegoldenband]

2 hours ago, carlsson said:

^^ Nice, I'll likely add those to the modern tracker though technically the first version of Mac OS 9 was released in October 1999.

 

Edit: Or well, we've listed Age of Empires II for Mac OS before and that game was released in September 1999 so perhaps that one belongs here.

 

Yeah, I always considered Mac OS 9 games -- and all Mac OS Classic stuff -- fair game for the classic-era tracker. I guess there may hypothetically be games that will only run under OS 9.1, but I'd see that as just an update of the underlying OS 9 framework.

 

By the way, speaking of modern vs. classic, I have a correction to make to my post:

 

On 8/5/2019 at 9:56 AM, thegoldenband said:

NES:
Mega Man 5* - 14 min.

  (*played via the Mega Man Anniversary Collection on the GameCube, which I'm pretty sure is emulation; otherwise count this as GameCube time on the modern tracker)

The more I learn about the MMAC, the more it appears to be either a port, or some sort of weird hybrid of emulation and port. The six NES games on the MMAC all seem to be adapted from a set of six Japan-only PlayStation releases, which do things like overlay a hint structure onto the game, use digital audio for the music instead of generated audio, etc. Based on this page --

 

https://gbatemp.net/entry/gamecube-game-patching-mega-man-anniversary-collection.15925/

 

-- it appears that the MMAC loads a Japanese version of each ROM into memory, but then doesn't use it?! Very strange.

 

So, a GameCube adaptation of a PlayStation port of a NES game? No idea how to call this one, but I'm thinking it should probably go on the modern tracker as a single collection...

 

...but then again it's clearly trying to be the NES game (not e.g. an updated port), and how many questions do we really want to get into about what's going on under the hood? Sigh.

[+wongojack]

I'd log it as NES.  As you say, it wants to be the NES game. Also people playing it want to play the NES game and most wouldnt notice a difference.  That all feels about the same as emulation even if this is something slightly different.

[carlsson]

Yeah, we already had a couple of collections listed as new implementations while we treat other collections as full scale emulations of old implementations. I don't know if in all of those cases, the executable code was analyzed in detail to know exactly what or how it does it, but the fact it is trying to load a Famicom ROM should be a sign of wannabe emulation.

[BuckoBrand]

On 8/4/2019 at 11:10 PM, Iwantgames:) said:

Haven't been doing much gaming lately but I finally did a bit this week

 

Amstrad CPC 464 -

Scramble - 10min

 

Amstrad GX4000 -

Dawn of Kernal - 5min

 

Apple IIe -

Dig Dug - 10min

Pac-Man - 20min

 

Osborne 1 (CP/M) -

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - 10min

Zork I: The Underground Empire - 75min

I LOVE DIG DUG

 

 

 

ps. I'm sorry, i love dig dug so much i forgot the period.  :3

[Iwantgames:)]

Probably play some more later but so excited I figured out how to make Osborne disks from downloaded images I had to post

 

Invaders - 20min

This is a really decent port of Space Invaders! Love it! 

 

Pacmanos - 15min

a nice looking Pac-Man port (must be played in 80 column mode) but the controls are kind of crap.

 

Zork I - 45min

continuing my adventures in the underground empire

[carlsson]

Unfortunately the past week has been another zero gaming week. I suppose I'm getting my kicks out of compiling the stats right now (and watch lots of non-gaming related YouTube videos).

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this week (August 5th through 11th) on classic systems...

 

sorry, due to the hot weather I didn't play any classic games this week, but for a change, I did play a modern game (see the modern tracker).

[+cvga]

Not much playing so far this week:

 

Intellivision:

 

Pinball - 25 minutes