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What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2010 (Season 3)

cvga

By cvga
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cvga Quadrunner

+cvga

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6. James Bond 007 (Atari 2600) 90

7. Bombs Away (Atari 2600) 65

 

Arcade

Galaxian 65 mins

 

 

8. Atari Basic (Atari 8-bit) 60

8. Spiderman (Atari 2600) 60

 

Keep gaming!

 

Just seeing if I'm still awake, eh? :)

 

 

Hmmm, my query didn't include arcade games because I didn't assign a time period to them. I'll have to manually look through them in the future to catch the classics.

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VectorGamer Quadrunner

VectorGamer

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Arcade

Eagle 75 mins

Sinistar 45 mins

Super Breakout 45 mins

Gyruss 30 mins

Pole Position II 30 mins

1943 20 mins

Monaco GP 5 mins

Popeye 7 mins

Elevator Action 7 mins

Cosmic Avenger 3 mins

 

All games played at the Classic Arcade Gaming Dot Com 2010 tournament hosted at Richie Knucklez Arcade in Flemington, NJ.

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JayWI Stargunner

JayWI

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So far today. May play a bit more later.

 

Intellivision

 

Locomotion - 25 minutes

Thin Ice - 15 minutes

Night Stalker - 20 minutes

 

I just got Locomotion via Ebay this week and this morning was the first tryout. It's an interesting concept for a video game and I gotta say I like it a lot. It's another one of those game where I'll have to mute the volume though. The constant locomotive sounds wear on me.

 

Speaking of annoying sounds...Night Stalker. The only reason I play with the volume on is so I can hear when the robots are shooting. It helps me determine whether or not to make a move in some cases.

 

Thin Ice is a classic that I just couldn't ignore this morning. I got up to level 20-something before I lost out. My score probably wasn't as high as it could be because I was more concerned with just finishing levels that scoring points. The seal and polar bears move very fast as you advance levels to the point where you don't even want them near you.

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Kurt_Woloch River Patroller

Kurt_Woloch

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Here are my times for this past week (March 15th through 21st)...

 

The classic games (eligible for the Top 10):

 

Shamus (TI-99) 349 minutes in 7 sessions

Burger Time (Aquarius) 122 minutes in 2 sessions

Dig Dug (TI-99) 111 minutes

Shamus (Atari 400) 63 minutes

Moon mine (TI-99) 23 minutes

Munchman Beta (TI-99) 8

Munch Mobile (TI-99) 8

Shamus (C-64) 8

Burger Builder (TI-99) 7

Shamus (PC) 1

 

The non-classic game (non-eligible for the Top 10):

 

Shamus The Shadow Case (PC) 23

 

As you can see, I spent quite a lot of playing time on "Shamus" on the TI-99 again.... probably for the last time this week, because today I managed to finish it. The ending screen, however, only consists of the screen being cleared and "You win!" being written, so nothing spectacular. This breakthrough was basically fueled by a new discovery... if you remember what I wrote about being aligned to the walls last week, there is a trick which helps you being aligned correctly without having to enter a room from the left first... you have to leave a room upward or downward diagonally to correct your position. In this case, your character will travel a few pixels to the left or right before reappearing in the new room, and thus the alignment will be corrected if you previously entered a room from the right.

 

As for the other versions, they are Shamus, yes, but still different. The C-64 version suffers from your character being pretty big, so that it gets hard to avoid enemy fire. And due to the fact that your character does not align to full characters, it's not always possible to cancel out enemy fire before it reaches you. Also, sometimes your shots clearly go through enemies without hitting them.

The Atari 800 (or 400 with enough memory installed) version of Shamus is, of course, the original one, and it shows. It seems to have the smoothest movement of all. Here your character is not as big as on the C-64, so even though it's not always possible to cancel out enemy fire here as well, it's at least possible to dodge it most of the time. Still, since it's not always possible, this version is considerably harder than the TI-99 version. I think I actually only picked up the TI-99 version because it's relatively easy to play. One thing notable about the Atari 8-bit version is also that the keys don't always appear in the same room like they do on the TI-99. Two of the keys appear in one of several possible rooms in the Atari version.

I also briefly tried the MS-DOS version of Shamus, which actually seems to work fine if you start if from Windows XP SP3, but the keyboard input is somewhat screwed up in that if you hold down one of the cursor keys for a second, your character continues to run in that direction for much longer and eventually runs into a wall and dies. However, one unique feature in that game is that the arrival of the shadow is signalled by briefly changing the CGA pallette from the red-yellow-green scheme to the purple-white-cyan one.

 

The way the difficulty picks up is also different from version to version. In the TI-99 version, there's a huge leap from the blue level to the red one in that the number of enemies approximately doubles. After having finished the game, it starts on the expert level, which means that the enemies now move twice as fast (essentially they are now as fast as you are), and your rate of fire decreases along with the joystick responsiveness - your character now travels two characters at once!

On the Atari 800 version, some rooms of the black level are already filled well with enemies, but when you get to the blue level (I didn't manage to get further than that), the speed of the whole game increases. I suppose it continues to increase in the green and red levels as well.

 

Finally, I played a modern version of Shamus called "Shamus The Shadow Case". This is a scrolling game which is in fact only loosely based on the original Shamus game. You conquer 4 or 5 levels which scroll instead of changing from room to room, with pretty impressive graphics. Your character is steered by moving forward and backward and turning left and right, and you can fire much more than 2 shots at once. There are only few enemies on the screen at once, but they get replenished by generators which you also have to destroy with several shots. However, the game is not too long, and it's also not very challenging in that you get a very high amount of extra lives - I think I finished the game with 32 lives left.

 

So much for Shamus. Apart from that, I tried the Mattel Aquarius version of Burger Time, which actually is pretty well made, although it runs at a pace of maybe 4 frames per second, and the characters move in 1-character steps, which is understandable if you consider that the Aquarius is a character-based system without hi-res graphics and without sprites. However, the game is pretty hard because the enemies run considerably faster than in other versions... they start out at 75% of your speed in level 1, and by level 5 or 6 they are nearly as fast as you. The range of your pepper is also limited... it only affects the character space adjacent to yours, so if you move into the direction you sprayed your pepper, and another enemy comes from that direction, you're screwed.

 

Then I played some more TI-99 games, most notably Dig Dug, which actually seems to be highly patterned, in that from some point in the game on, the same four rounds repeat indefinitely (including the bonus items appearing at those rounds), and you only have to figure out how to play them best and then execute that pattern as well as possible. My personal goal was to make it to round 17, which I did. Notable about this version is that it seems to award bonus lives at irregular multiplies of 10,000. I always got an extra life at 10,000 points, and then most of the time, but not always, at 40,000 and 70,000... then the next one at 80,000 (?!). But this error may be emulation-related (I tried it in M.E.S.S.).

 

Moon mine is a pretty monotonous game where you shoot enemies bouncing around in the center of the screen before they reach you (you can see them getting bigger and bigger). What's strange about this one is that it remains relatively easy until Level 20, and then suddenly it gets much more difficult by having multiple enemies on screen at once, among other things.

 

Munch Mobile is a pretty slow-paced game where you play a car that has to collect food with a hand that reaches out from the left or right of the car (strange concept, but whatever...). I never quite got the hang of it since the steering of the hand is somewhat confusing.

 

Then there is the beta version of "Munch Man" which is still pretty close to Pac Man... you have the power pills there and the dots you have to eat, and the maze is also more similar to Pac Man's maze than it is in the final version of Munch Man. What amazes me here is the speed of the game... it really puts Atarisoft's Pac Man for the TI-99 to shame in that respect, although I think TI clearly came out with their version before Atarisoft did.

 

Finally, Burger Builder is an amendment to Burger Time with slightly different rules. In Burger Builder, your enemies always stay on the same platform level (similar to the second screen of Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600) and change shape if your squash them with an ingredient. They start out as a sausage, then become cheese, then onion and so on... and finally they revert to being sausages. And they actually always move faster than you, although they become even faster when turning to other kinds of enemies. The building of the burgers themselves has also been made harder in that in Burger Builder, you can only let an ingredient drop if the space below it is free. If there is an ingredient on the level below it, it won't drop.

 

Oh, and here we have the rare case of one system actually appearing both in the eligible and in the non-eligible list... the PC managed to turn up before the crash (I think in 1983) and still is there today, so I think it actually depends on which games you play if it's eligible for inclusion or not. I think Shamus is a safe bet here because the MS-DOS version also was released in the early 80's along with the other home computer versions.

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