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

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 89 minutes

Star Wars: ROTJ: Death Star Battle - 30 minutes

Hunchy 2 - 12 minutes

Phoenix - 10 minutes

 

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Pretty much business as usual around here the past week. I played a fudge ton of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the misses logged a little bit of time in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and we played some Road Rash II together one evening.

 

 

Ineligible

Sonic Mania Plus (Nintendo Switch) - 30 minutes

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo Switch) - 1,385 minutes

 

Sega Genesis

Road Rash II - 88 minutes

 

Super Nintendo

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (played on Super Nintendo Classic Edition) - 122 minutes

 

 

Total Video Game Play Time This Week

1,625 minutes (27 hours 5 minutes) [210 minutes eligible]

 

Individual System Play Times This Week

Nintendo Switch: 1,415 minutes

Super Nintendo: 122 minutes

Sega Genesis: 88 minutes

 

 

 

 

Edited December 17, 2019 by Jin

[+cvga]

Atari 2600:

 

Dragster - 3 seconds - I got bored and quit halfway through the game

 

 

 

 

On a serious note note, I can't wait for the holidays. I'm finished at work for the year after this Wednesday and plan on spending some time with my favorite systems!

[carlsson]

Here's the summary for Week 50, running from December 9 - 15. We logged 3416 minutes of eligible play, playing 39 games on a total of 10 systems.

Top 10:
 

1. Secret of Mana (SNES) - 856 min.

2. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 540 min.
3. Sydney Hunter and the Caverns of Death (SNES) - 205 min.
4. Realms of Antiquity (TI-99/4A) - 180 min.
5. Ghosts 'n Goblins (Arcade) - 161 min.
6. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 147 min.
7. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES) - 122 min.
8. Phoenix (Atari 2600) - 105 min.
9. Age of Empires 2 (Mac OS Classic) - 90 min.
10. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 89 min.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

1. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 540 min.

2. Realms of Antiquity (TI-99/4A) - 180 min.
3. Ghosts 'n Goblins (Arcade) - 161 min.
4. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 147 min.
5. Phoenix (Atari 2600) - 105 min.
6. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 89 min.
7. Star Wars: Death Star Battle (Atari 2600) - 83 min.
8. Eggomania (Atari 2600) - 77 min.
9. Attack of the Mutant Camels (C64) - 60 min.
10. H.E.R.O. (C64) - 60 min.
10. Legends II (TI-99/4A) - 60 min.
10. Wizard's Doom (TI-99/4A) - 60 min.

 

Top 10 systems:

 

1. SNES (1183)

2. TI-99/4A (890)
3. Atari 2600 (565)
4. Mac OS Classic (325)
5. Arcade (199)
6. C64 (120)
7. Genesis (88)
8. NES/Famicom (25)
9. Atari 8-bit (16)
10. Atari 7800 (5)

 

Our top two systems this week are the SNES and TI-99/4A which take every second place at the top of the main list, with SoM becoming the most played game this week as well, while Tunnels of Doom takes the pre-NES title. No new entries to the 1000 or 5000 Minute Clubs.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:
Animal Party - 8 min.
Moon Patrol Redux - 225 min.
Weihnachtsspiel - 4 min.

 

Genesis:
Aladdin - 3 min.
Sonic the Hedgehog 1 - 9 min. (two different carts)
Super Monaco GP - 8 min.

 

The A8 games were the result of last round + new round of the HSC.

 

The Genesis games are of a different kind, because all of those were duds until today, cartridges that never had booted or at some point stopped booting. By chance I came across a video on YouTube on how to repair those, as it appears each pad on the ROM has a small diode kind of thing that can go bad which causes that pin to not get any power. By measuring which pin - which on three genuine Sega carts ended up being the same pin - one can solder in a pull-up resistor of 1 kOhm and not repair, but circumvent the problem and make the cartridge run again, though who knows for how long. Even the fourth (Aladdin) which is a pirate cartridge with just a blob, emitted this problem though I had to solder in the resistor at a different pair of pads.

 

 

I already had a working copy of Super Monaco GP, but now I have a spare one. Also now I have two copies of Sonic 1, though none with a cartridge shell.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (December 16th through 22nd) on classic systems...

 

Atari 2600:

Superman - 18 min.

 

Arcade:

Jr. Pac-Man - 49 min.

 

This week I only played two games, Jr. Pac-Man and Superman, in one session each. I read that Superman was one of the earliest games featuring a game map (similar to Adventure which actually uses part of the same engine). I didn't too long to solve it, and I only played it once. It has a non-smooth framerate and a non-optimal flicker when multiple characters / things besides Superman are on the same screen. I think this comes from the game actually recalculating the position of all NPC's which probably takes longer than one frame, and the flicker follows the same lower frame rate. But at least all of the objects are color-striped.

As for Jr. Pac-Man, nothing special there except that I managed to stabilize my gameplay in round 5.

[agb]

Times for the week:

NES Super Mario Bros. 241 mins for the HSC. 
eggomania 63 mins

phoenix 16 mins for HSC

solar Fox 105 mins

squish’em 10 mind

all fun. 

 

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Asteroids - 16 minutes

Pac-Man - 28 minutes

Pac-Man 4K (for HSC) - 30 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Pac-Man Collection - 109 minutes

 

EVIDENCES OF THE WEEK:

 

1) Pac-Man 4K screenshot, with my score for 2600 HSC

 

2) My Asteroids gameplay footage, Game 32 A/A - Score: 36,090 points

 

3) My Pac-Man Collection gameplay footages, Random Mazes with Pac-Man on fast mode

 

Edited December 22, 2019 by oyamafamily

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

NES:
The Adventures of Rad Gravity - 436 min.

Infiltrator - 2 min.
Mystery Quest - 1 min.

 

Beat Rad Gravity for the first time since the early 1990s. How did I complete this as a kid? So much of the game is needlessly obscure, including some pretty mission-critical items.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Lots of Sega this week as I decided to take a little break from Breath of the Wild, and I got a couple new Genesis games as early Christmas presents from the misses so we spent a good bit of time playing them together. She got me Comix Zone and Vectorman, both of which are pretty darn awesome (and coincidentally both are late Genesis releases from 1995) though I've got a special fondness for Comix Zone since that was a game I owned and played a ton of growing up. We also both got to Level 3 in Road Rash II this week, after no small amount of crashing and failures

 

 

Ineligible

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo Switch) - 165 minutes

 

Sega 32X

Doom - 231 minutes

 

Sega Genesis

Comix Zone - 239 minutes

Mortal Kombat - 28 minutes

Mortal Kombat II - 49 minutes

Road Rash II - 388 minutes

Vectorman - 188 minutes

 

Super Nintendo (Played on Super Nintendo Classic Edition)

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - 22 minutes 

 

 

Total Video Game Play Time This Week

1,310 minutes (21 hours 50 minutes) [1,145 minutes eligible]

 

Individual System Play Times This Week

Sega Genesis: 892 minutes

Sega 32X: 231 minutes

Nintendo Switch: 165 minutes

Super Nintendo: 22 minutes

 

[digdugnate]

Little bit of Classic time this week across several systems!  We brought my mom up to Casa del Dig Dug for Christmas so I wanted to show her some of the retro stuff she might've remembered me playing as a kid.  It's been awesome having her up since usually on holidays she kind of just sits around her cabin by herself.

 

Plus- I'm not 100% that my mom would've appreciated some of the... content of Borderlands 3, so I ended up playing that mostly at bedtime and early morning.  She did comment that she thought that Zane from Borderlands 3 was 'cute', haha.

 

Arcade:

 

Dig Dug -- 17 minutes

 

C64:

 

H.E.R.O -- 300 minutes

 

Even time on this one because I'm trying to keep it to 15 minute chunks and stay productive at work, lol.  Why did I never play this game as a kid?

 

Genesis:

 

Streets of Rage 2 -- 20 minutes

 

The observations from this game were pretty funny from my mom (For context, she's 5 foot 2 inches, talks softly and with a pretty strong Oklahoma accent).  Her and my dad divorced before I got my Genesis so she only remembered me playing NES stuff.

 

"My, this game is really violent."  (though she hadn't seen me immolate anyone in Borderlands 3 yet.  That came a little later.)

"Are those the bad guys' names on the screen?"

"Boy you sure beat up that table!"

 

I love my mom, haha.

 

NES:

 

Dragon Quest I -- 560 minutes

Super Mario Bros. -- 42 minutes

 

I ended up spending way more time on DQ1 than I intended.  I forgot how kind of grindy it is, plus was distracted watching stuff on Disney+ at the same time (the Jeff Goldblum show is fantastic!).  SMB was a purely nostalgia-based run through; my mom was like 'I can't believe that people still play Mario 30-plus years later', lol.

 

SNES:

 

Secret of Mana -- 434 minutes

 

Lost a little momentum on Secret of Mana this week since I played roughly an hour a day at bedtime and I was too tired to actively progress the story.  I mostly just ran in circles leveling XP, weapons and magic.

 

TI-99/4A:

 

I'm editing my post (again) because I remember I fired up my TI for Mom- she remembers Dad spending a lot of time programming and selling demos to TI.  She was amazed that 1) The computers still work now and 2) That mine looked so clean and shiny (I have the aluminum one with a Speech Synthesizer plus the P-Box).  Several cartridges used here- @carlsson, not sure if you want to 'count' Extended Basic, but I used that cartridge to load up my dad's demos (which my Mom was equally surprised that kind of stuff could still be loaded off disks).

 

Alpiner -- 20 minutes

Parsec -- 20 minutes

TI Extended Basic -- 37 minutes

Tunnels of Doom -- 35 minutes

[DragonGrafx-16]

Plok (SNES) 20 mins

[digdugnate]

5 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Plok (SNES) 20 mins

i remember renting this on the SNES way back when and playing through.  I never finished it, though, because it was friggin' hard for me.

[DragonGrafx-16]

1 hour ago, digdugnate said:

i remember renting this on the SNES way back when and playing through.  I never finished it, though, because it was friggin' hard for me.

Yeah I got a game over on like level 3... lol Really nice music though.

[eddhell]

On 12/16/2019 at 9:08 PM, cvga said:

Atari 2600:

 

Dragster - 3 seconds - I got bored and quit halfway through the game

 

wow...same EXACT thing happened to me....39 years ago!  Last time I even touched that cartridge was to stick it on the shelf between "Dolphin" and "Enduro"....

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Phoenix - 92 minutes

 

I didn't get to play much  because I was away for part of the week.

[carlsson]

6 hours ago, digdugnate said:

not sure if you want to 'count' Extended Basic

You can get a honorable mention, but I don't think general use of an operating system (which at the end of the day Extended BASIC is) should go into the tracker, just like we usually don't count development time and early test running of own games (though beta testing is fine once the game is in a such playable state). Though I can kind of see the charm with counting your weekly times spent on Lotus 1-2-3 or Deluxe Paint as doing anything retro.

[digdugnate]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

You can get a honorable mention, but I don't think general use of an operating system (which at the end of the day Extended BASIC is) should go into the tracker, just like we usually don't count development time and early test running of own games (though beta testing is fine once the game is in a such playable state). Though I can kind of see the charm with counting your weekly times spent on Lotus 1-2-3 or Deluxe Paint as doing anything retro.

that sounds perfectly workable to me- it makes sense in the spirit of it.   is why i asked.

[carlsson]

Here's the summary for Week 51, running from December 16 - 22. We logged 4089 minutes of eligible play, playing 36 games on a total of 10 systems.

Top 10:

 

1. Dragon Quest I (Dragon Warrior) (NES/Famicom) - 560 min.
2. Adventures of Rad Gravity, The (NES/Famicom) - 436 min.
3. Secret of Mana (SNES) - 434 min.
4. Road Rash II (Genesis) - 388 min.
5. H.E.R.O. (C64) - 300 min.
6. Super Mario Bros. (NES/Famicom) - 283 min.
7. Comix Zone (Genesis) - 239 min.
8. DOOM (Sega 32X) - 231 min.
9. Moon Patrol Redux (Atari 8-bit) - 225 min.
10. Vectorman (Genesis) - 188 min.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

1. H.E.R.O. (C64) - 300 min.
2. Moon Patrol Redux (Atari 8-bit) - 225 min.
3. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 109 min.
4. Phoenix (Atari 2600) - 108 min.
5. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 108 min.
6. Eggomania (Atari 2600) - 63 min.
7. Jr. Pac-Man (Arcade) - 49 min.
8. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 35 min.
9. Pac-Man 4K (Atari 2600) - 30 min.
10. Pac-Man (Atari 2600) - 28 min.

Top 10 systems:

 

1. NES/Famicom (1282)
2. Genesis (932)
3. SNES (476)
4. Atari 2600 (381)
5. C64 (300)
6. Atari 8-bit (237)
7. Sega 32X (231)
8. Atari 7800 (109)
9. TI-99/4A (75)
10. Arcade (66)

 

Dragon Quest returns to the tracker for the first time since 2012, now under its original name though the gamers in North America might know it better as Dragon Warrior. Nevertheless it takes the overall title ahead of another NES game, the Interplay/Activision game The Adventures of Rad Gravity. The pre-NES title goes to H.E.R.O. ahead of Moon Patrol Redux.

 

Systems wise, the NES/Famicom with 5 games ranging from 1 to 560 minutes takes the title ahead of the Genesis with 9 games ranging from 3 to 388 minutes.

 

In case anyone was late to post their minutes, we'll include those for next week which will be an extended week running December 23-31. I'm expecting to post stats on Friday 3rd or Saturday 4th.

 

Merry Christmas or whichever holidays you prefer to celebrate!

[Kurt_Woloch]

On 12/23/2019 at 2:01 PM, digdugnate said:

I'm editing my post (again) because I remember I fired up my TI for Mom- she remembers Dad spending a lot of time programming and selling demos to TI.  She was amazed that 1) The computers still work now and 2) That mine looked so clean and shiny (I have the aluminum one with a Speech Synthesizer plus the P-Box).  Several cartridges used here- @carlsson, not sure if you want to 'count' Extended Basic, but I used that cartridge to load up my dad's demos (which my Mom was equally surprised that kind of stuff could still be loaded off disks).

It's not surprising for me... I still have my TI-99 as well, but it doesn't seem to work properly anymore. But the thing that failed is actually the TV modulator which doesn't seem to deliver a good picture anymore. I never had the problem that one of its disks would have become unreadable over time... this only came about with 3 1/2" disks on the Amiga where I regularly created "working disks" with copies of software I used every day because I knew that the disks would eventually fail... and the same thing happened with some of my PC 3 1/2" disks. But the failure came from heavy usage, not from time passing.

But it seems we've gone through different kinds of main storage media now (which is where things get permanently stored)... first we used cassettes, then 5 1/4" disks, then 3 1/2" disks, CD's and DVD's, then external hard drives (with moving disks), and now these are being replaced by SSD's... at my company we now got new PC's which don't have optical drives anymore, and my new $200 notebook which I bought some months ago has virtually eliminated all moving parts, with an SSD replacing the internal hard disk, no fan and no optical drive. I just now came to the conclusion that after backing up all the data of my Amiga disks, I should back up the CD's and DVD's as well... preferrably to an SSD, because CD's now can be called obsolete as well. And a tiny USB stick the size of a thumbnail now holds up to 64 GB, which you previously needed 13 DVD's for (not counting how many of the other storage media this would be!). Somehow plugging in such a USB stick with data feels like plugging a cartridge into the old TI-99 because it works pretty much the same way, except that the cartridges were mostly read-only.

[Kurt_Woloch]

23 hours ago, carlsson said:

You can get a honorable mention, but I don't think general use of an operating system (which at the end of the day Extended BASIC is) should go into the tracker, just like we usually don't count development time and early test running of own games (though beta testing is fine once the game is in a such playable state). Though I can kind of see the charm with counting your weekly times spent on Lotus 1-2-3 or Deluxe Paint as doing anything retro.

I wouldn't count development time as gaming time as well. The question is where to draw the line and what to do with "construction kit" games such as Pinball Construction Set where you can basically construct your own levels or tables or tracks within a game.

As for playtesting, I think I have a feeling when a game becomes "playable" and the times thus eligible to post here. This question came up during the development of the pinball portion of "Baby Pac-Man" for the Atari 7800 about a year ago... as long as I did the development, I didn't record my times... the game got better over time at doing realistic ball movements, but there were some key components missing... scoring wasn't added, losing a ball never cost you a life and never ended the game, and there wasn't a way to return to the maze section. Only when Bob added these parts of the game mechanics (even though the logic wasn't complete yet), I started logging the times on this game in the tracker here.

The same is to be said for Extended Basic games under development... development or debugging time generally doesn't count, I think, and the general question is... does it somewhat feel like a completed game? Would you come back to the game just to play it and see how far you get, not for testing it? Is there a way to lose the game or loses lives, gain scoring etc.? Or is it still a kind of demo which really doesn't have an end to it, like a program I wrote where one player controls Pac-Man and the other controls a ghost, but nothing happens if they meet... that's not what I'd call a game, thus it's not eligible for the tracker.

[Kurt_Woloch]

10 hours ago, carlsson said:

Here's the summary for Week 51, running from December 16 - 22. We logged 4089 minutes of eligible play, playing 36 games on a total of 10 systems. (...)

I'm surprised you didn't pick up one detail I noticed... last week several of the games in the tracker had some kind of "adventure" feel to them where you discover secrets, go for the king, enter the caverns of death or the Realms of Antiquity, or fight ghosts and goblins. This week, however, I see a bunch of variants on Pac-Man in the tracker instead.

[Opry99er]

Missed the deadline I guess--

 

We can add these to next week's times.  

 

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Alpiner (20 minutes)

Realms of Antiquity (210 minutes)

St. Nick (40 minutes)

Tunnels of Doom (270 minutes)

 

 

Arcade:

 

Rampage (40 minutes)

 

 

 

Classic Mac OS:

 

Age of Empires II (240 minutes)

Bugdom (360 minutes)

[Eltigro]

We're closing on the house today.  Moving tomorrow.  So much IRL stuff going on, I haven't logged any times the last couple weeks.  That's not to say I haven't played anything, just haven't written down any times or anything.  I've played a pretty good bit of Breath of Fire IV, but that's the only thing with any kind of substantial time.  It's just been as a winding down before bed.  Oh well.  I look forward to the year end stats and will start with new times in the new year in a new apartment.

[digdugnate]

56 minutes ago, Eltigro said:

We're closing on the house today.  Moving tomorrow.  So much IRL stuff going on, I haven't logged any times the last couple weeks.  That's not to say I haven't played anything, just haven't written down any times or anything.  I've played a pretty good bit of Breath of Fire IV, but that's the only thing with any kind of substantial time.  It's just been as a winding down before bed.  Oh well.  I look forward to the year end stats and will start with new times in the new year in a new apartment.

Good luck with the move!  We haven't moved in 6 years and that's 6 years too soon.

 

Looking forward to seeing your new times in new apartment!