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

[Sonic R]

for 6-1-10

 

Jaguar

Alien vs. Predator - 45 minutes

Raiden - 20 minutes

Trevor McFur: Cresent Galaxy - 15 minutes

 

I received my Jaguars game lot upon arriving home from work and promptly tore into it!

 

Raiden is decent, though I favor the PlayStation version the most, Jaguar Raiden is still solid… but I REALLY could use rapid fire! the Jaguar does indeed support the use of the second player ship simply by just plugging into the player 2 port, which mean much to me as I prefer use of the blue ship.

 

it had been 15 years since I last played Trevor McFur, and I'll work on this game more when I have more time to dedicate, as I'll aim to conquer it as my skills have improved in general in shooters…

 

as for Alien vs Predator, I played as the marine (suggested by my friend) and I enjoy the game very much, possibly more now than when I rented it way back in 1994! but now I think I will seek a pro controller as it is a bit awkward to reach down on the keypad for strafing movements…

 

I still have yet to play from my lot, Wolfenstein 3D and Iron Soldier, and I just located a Missile Command 3D locally which I'll be picking up tomorrow. my Jaguar library has grown quite a bit from the two games I've had in just this week!

[accousticguitar]

7800

Centipede - 63 min

 

2600

Klax - 273 min

[+cvga]

It's been awhile but here is the Top Ten from Week #18 (May 3rd - May 9th)...

 

88 games played for a total of 2,913 minutes

 

Season 3: Week 18 Top Ten

1. Reactor (Atari 2600) 265 minutes

2. Phantasy Star 4 (Sega Genesis) 260

3. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (Turbo Grafx) 230

4. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 179

5. Smurfs Travel the World (Sega Master System) 133

6. Q*bert (NES) 105

6. Ikari Warriors (NES) 105

8. TMNT (NES) 90

8. Gemfire (Sega Genesis) 90

10. Download (Tandy CoCo) 82

 

 

Season 3: Week 18 Pre-NES Top Ten:

1. Reactor (Atari 2600) 265 minutes

2. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 179

3. Download (Tandy CoCo) 82

4. Dark Chambers (Atari 7800) 71

5. Ms. Pac-man (Atari 7800) 55

6. Galaxian Arcade (Atari 2600) 47

7. Centipede (Atari 7800) 40

8. GORF (Colecovision) 38

9. Mr. Do! (Colecovision) 37

10. Asteroids (Atari 7800) 34

[4Ks]

I've spent around 10 hours playing Chrono Trigger on Playstation, along with 5 hours of Final Fantasy IV (also on Platstation).

[+cvga]

Sorry, I'm a bit late again... on the other hand, someone else seems to be late too with the statistics... anyway, here are my times for the past week (May 10th through 16th)...

 

 

Ouch!

[+cvga]

Week 19 produced 64 games played for a total of 3,745 minutes...

 

Top Ten for Week 19 Season 3:

1. Pilotwings (SNES) 521 minutes

2. Bagman (Arcade) 234

3. TMNT (NES) 215

4. Q*bert (NES) 195

5. Abodox (NES) 185

6. Bio Hazzard Battle (Genesis) 175

7. The Last V8 (Commodore 64) 174

8. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 152

9. International Tennis Tour (SNES) 150

10. Impossible Mission (Commodore 64) 135

 

Pre-NES Top Ten for Week 19 Season 3:

1. Bagman (Arcade) 234 minutes

2. The Last V8 (Commodore 64) 174

3. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 152

4. Impossible Mission (Commodore 64) 135

5. Bubble Bobble (Arcade) 117

6. Bank Heist (Atari 2600) 90

7. Jawbreaker (Atari 2600) 89

8. Demon Attack (Atari 2600) 45

9. Dragonfire (Atari 2600) 35

9. Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back (Atari 2600) 35

[+cvga]

Congratulations to Demon Attack (Atari 2600) for becoming the 32nd member to join the 1,000 minute club!!

[+cvga]

41 games played for a total of 1,923 minutes in Week #20 (May 17-23rd). Here is the Top Ten...

 

Top Ten for Week 20 Season 3:

1. Klax (Atari 2600) 309 minutes

2. AD&D: Eye of the Beholder (SNES) 175

3. Gunstar Heroes (Genesis) 155

4. Gaiares (Genesis) 143

5. Worms World Party (Sega Dreamcast) 119

6. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 90

6. Marble Madness (Sega Master System) 90

8. Laser Gates (Atari 2600) 80

9. Decap Attack (Genesis) 60

10. Street Fighter II: Turbo (SNES) 50

 

Pre-NES Top Ten for Week 20 Season 3:

1. Klax (Atari 2600) 309 minues

2. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 90

3. Laser Gates (Atari 2600) 80

4. Riddle of the Sphinx (Atari 2600) 45

5. MisAdventure Revised (Atari 2600) 30

5. Mr. Robot (Commodore 64) 30

5. Gopher (Atari 2600) 30

5. Fathom (Atari 2600) 30

5. Atlantis (Atari 2600) 30

10. Quick Step (Atari 2600) 15

[+cvga]

28 games played in Week 21 (May 24-30) for 1,601 minutes. Thanks to everyone who kept posting while I was MIA!

 

Top Ten for Week 21 Season 3:

1. Klax (Atari 2600) 226 minutes

2. Tetris (NES) 180

3. Curse (Genesis) 162

4. Video Olympics (Atari 2600) 120

5. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 104

6. Golden Axe 2 (Genesis) 100

7. Marble Madness (Tengen) (Genesis) 94

8. Turtles (Emerson Arcadia) 61

9. Space Taxi (Commodore 64) 60

9. Excitebike (NES) 60

9. Tempest 2000 (Atari Jaguar) 60

 

Pre-NES Top Ten for Week 21 Season 3:

1. Klax (Atari 2600) 226 minutes

2. Video Olympics (Atari 2600) 120

3. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) 104

4. Turtles (Emerson Arcadia) 61

5. Space Taxi (Commodore 64) 60

6. Wonder Boy in Monster Land (Arcade) 59

7. Superbuy (Emerson Arcadia) 34

8. Malzak (Arcade) 30

8. Mr. Robot (Commodore 64) 30

10. Gauntlet (Commodore 64) 20

[zylon]

A8: Robotron 1hr

SMS: Afterburner 1hr

2600: Beamrider 20min

[Kurt_Woloch]

I'm a bit puzzled about the inclusion and non-inclusion of some of my played games in the Pre-NES Top Ten...

 

You did include "Wonder Boy in Monster Land" (Arcade) and "Bubble Bobble" (Arcade), but you did not include "Wonder Boy" (SG-1000). But some weeks ago, "Wonder Boy" (Arcade) WAS included in the pre-NES Top Ten.

 

The arcade of original of "Wonder boy" came out in 1986, and its successor, "Wonder boy in Monster Land" came out in 1987. The SG-1000 version of "Wonder Boy" also bears a 1986 copyright date. "Bubble Bobble" (Arcade) also came out in 1986.

 

So, since the SG-1000 version of "Wonder boy" came out before the arcade version of "Wonder boy in Monster land", I think either both games or only "Wonder boy", but not "Wonder Boy in Monster Land" should be included there. It also a bit depends on if you cut the pre-NES games game by game, or system by system. Technically, the SG-1000 is about on par with the Colecovision, and it's the predecessor to the Sega Master System which competed with the NES back in the time. So... if we include all games that run on pre-NES SYSTEMS, then "Wonder Boy" (SG-1000) should be included.

 

On the other hand, I wouldn't consider all the arcade games mentioned here being pre-NES. Wonder Boy has a gameplay similar to the NES's flagship game "Super Mario Bros." which I think came before it. Now you could say that at least in some countries, the arcade games "Wonder Boy" and "Bubble Bobble" were relased before the NES (I'm not sure about "Wonder Boy in Monster Land" which came out in 1987 as did the NES here), but...

 

Excitebike (NES) obviously wasn't included in the Top 10 since it's clearly not pre-NES being on the NES. But Excitebike also appeared as an arcade machine, as did Super Mario Bros. And I can remember these two games being put up in the arcades well before the NES was released here... I think they appeared in 1984 or 1985 and were actually put in a "Super Vs." cabinet where players could play side-by-side, although it's obvious that Super Mario Bros. actually is for only one simultaneous player, though I think its name was even "Super Vs. Mario Bros" in the arcade. And unlike its predecessor "Mario Bros.", the arcade game "Super Mario Bros." and also "Excitebike" used Famicom / NES hardware which was roughly on par with the Nintendo arcade games produced before.

 

Besides, I think there was a bit of a craze about VS. games back then, driven by popular games like Gauntlet where up to 4 players could play at once, and additional players could buy in at any time while the game was already in progress. I think I even spotted a rewritten version of "Mario Bros." where a second player could buy in while a one-player game already was in progresss, but that version did have some serious bugs... I think it wasn't officially done by Nintendo that way, but rather a hack.

 

Anyway, the conclusion of this for me is that even though the NES in some countries wasn't released until 1987, it was already present in the arcades in 1985, so all games appearing after that shouldn't be included in the pre-NES Top 10. Furthermore, the Wonder Boy series and Bubble Bobble already had pretty advanced graphics and FM sound more comparable to advanced 8-bit consoles like the Sega Master System or the PC Engine which I both consider coming out after the NES. This would be another reason not to include them in the pre-NES Top 10.

 

Well, only my 2 cents... sorry for the long rant.

 

Oh, and you misspelled one Emerson Arcadia game I played... it's called "Superbug", not "Superbuy".

[+cvga]

I'm a bit puzzled about the inclusion and non-inclusion of some of my played games in the Pre-NES Top Ten...

 

[stuff deleted]

 

Oh, and you misspelled one Emerson Arcadia game I played... it's called "Superbug", not "Superbuy".

 

The answer is simple. I have a query that includes arcade games as pre-NES. I need to scrub the results more closely but I wasn't sure about that one.

 

I'll check to see if I made a typo in just the post or if I also made the same mistake in the database.

 

Thanks!

[psquare75]

Hmm. 2600 Friday night with the gf (no joke).

Tapper: half hour or so (She was better than I was )

MASH: 20 minutes maybe (FERRET FACE!!)

Armor Ambush: two games

Spider Man: 2 games. Ugh that game is still hard.

Lost Luggage: A few rounds.

 

It's funny, I have my living room dissected for carpet installation in a few weeks and I only have the TV, Stand, and.. out of all my systems, I let the 2600 up.. Ergo, it's been getting a ton of play.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (May 31st through June 6th)... it's been a big week for gaming, but rather out of desperation than joy... anyway...

 

The non-classic games:

 

Castaway (Online game): 532 minutes in 3 sessions

Exit Path (Online game): 9 minutes

 

The classic games:

 

Loco-Motion (Tomy Tutor): 285 minutes in 3 sessions

Jungler (Tomy Tutor): 51 minutes in 2 sessions

Deep Six (Tomy Tutor): 39 minutes in 2 sessions

Traffic Jam (TOmy Tutor): 27 minutes

Scramble (Tomy Tutor): 18 minutes

Pooyan (Tomy Tutor): 9 minutes

Cave Crawlers (Tomy Tutor): 2 minutes

Torpedo Terror (Tomy Tutor): 2 minutes

Car-Azy Racer (Tomy Tutor): 1 minute

 

Jungler (Arcade) 38 minutes

Loco-Motion (Arcade) 27 minutes

Turtles (Arcade) 15 minutes

 

This week, I completed Castaway, hence the long playing time. Then I also played "Exit path", a jump'n'run game which didn't hold my attention for too long.

 

Then I took a look at probably all of the games released for the Tomy Tutor in the USA. Actually, I wanted to play its version of "Turtles" (called "Turpin"), but I couldn't find that game. Here are some short descriptions of each...

 

Loco-Motion is a port of the arcade game by Konami which also has been ported to the Intellvision, and it's quite good and challenging.

Jungler is another port of a Konami arcade game, with slightly inferior but still good graphics and, most notably, only two snakes instead of three, I suppose due to speed issues.

Scramble is another Konami port which Tomy also ported to a handheld which I owned. As was to be expected, the scrolling is choppy, but the graphics are quite well drawn. It seems to be quite a lot easier than the original, for instance you can fly backwards more quickly than the scrolling is, which isn't possible in the arcade. They completely changed the ending, however... Tomy's ending reminds rather of their handheld game than of the original. The scrolling stops, and there's a separate screen with an enemy behind a wall of fireballs which release from the wall and come at you. You have to hit one row of the wall multiple times successively and then hit the mother ship through it. In the handheld version, the wall consisted of three columns of blocks where you had to eliminate some of the blocks in order to get through, and each column was scrolling upwards or downwards in a different speed... and if you hit all 4 blocks of a column, all of them reappeared, so you had to leave some over.

Pooyan is a rather poor adaptation of the Konami arcade game... the feel just isn't right, and the graphics are a bit too simple. For the music, instead of the nice polyphonic music in the background of the arcade version, it just repeats a monophonic version of the title tune over and over. But I still like that version better than the Atari 2600 version with its LCD-like animation.

Deep Six is an underwater game where you have to defeat a big number of enemies in two screens in order to get to the bottom screen where you have to get to the treasure. The animation here is rather choppy... pretty much everything moves in full-character steps.

Traffic Jam is a variation on Pac Man with some twists... you have to fill all the roads on screen with a different color, but one of your enemies from time to time turns to a painting truck painting some piece of road back to the original color. The enemy cars basically all home in on you, but move rather slowly in the first levels... maybe 20-30% of your speed. You get power ups by driving over randomly appearing gas stations giving one unit of power each, which you can then activate with your fire button (similar to the bones in Mouse Trap). This only lasts for some seconds, during which you can stun some of your enemies for a bonus of 300 points each.

I can't remember what Cave Crawlers was, but it probably wasn't very good.

Torpedo Terror is another underwater game, this time with furious action and fast-moving enemies which are sometimes hard to avoid and whose movements are also hard to predict.

Car-Racy Racer seems to be some kind of educational game... can't remember what exactly you have to do there.

 

All in all, the Tomy Tutor games aren't too well done. There are some highlights (Loco-Motion and Traffic Jam), but on many games, animation is very choppy, and there are often timing glitches where games run at an inconsistent speed (most notable in Scramble where slowdowns occur out of no apparent reason). There are also long waiting times between different screens, and some of the sound effects reappear over and over in different games. It seems like some of the sound effects are pre-programmed in the BIOS and only called by the games. One of them is also to be heard before the cartridge even gets accessed, but reappears in some of the games. Also, some parts of the screens sometimes flicker as if they are drawn in a different way and then overdrawn. Overall, the games for the Tutor leave a rather sloppy impression.

 

For a comparison, I also played the arcade versions of "Jungler", "Loco-Motion" and "Turtles" (which I couldn't find on the Tutor). Loco-Motion actually seems to be a bit easier in the arcade, and in Jungler, you somehow manage to get farther than on the Tutor version, maybe due to the arcade mazes being smaller in size and three snakes being out at the same time meaning you can fight the ten snakes of each round more quickly than with only two of them out at one time. But Jungler is actually a good game... I never played it before. I think there's also a version on the Emerson Arcadia, maybe I will check that out sometime. However, for Turtles, it now seems that I've played every available version except for Entex's dedicated handheld game and the version in their "Select-a-game" handheld.

[StanJr]

2600:

 

Solar Storm 15 mins.

Subterranea 20 mins.

Donkey Kong Jr. 10 mins.

Frontline 30 mins.

Mr. Do! 15 mins.

 

Finally back in the saddle! Feels good to be back!

 

[+thegoldenband]

Times for the week:

 

Genesis:

After Burner II - 2 min.

Awesome Possum - 4 min.

Chakan - 7 min.

Curse - 25 min.

Dark Castle - 53 min.

Deadly Moves - 7 min.

Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine - 3 min.

Fatal Labyrinth - 93 min.

Lion King - 5 min.

Mortal Kombat - 18 min.

Phantom 2040 - 4 min.

Shaq-Fu - 3 min.

Super Monaco GP - 8 min.

Trampoline Terror - 3 min.

 

SNES:

Street Fighter II Turbo - 70 min.

 

Dreamcast:

Worms World Party - 115 min.

 

I finally beat Curse, and also beat SFII Turbo on 7-star difficulty (out of eight).

[psquare75]

Do you guys sit there with a pen and paper and a stopwatch?

[accousticguitar]

Not a stopwatch, or we'd list the seconds too.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-177 minutes

[Atarian7]

Do you guys sit there with a pen and paper and a stopwatch?

 

 

I have a pen and paper. I look at the clock and write down the time when I start and write down the time when I finish. No big deal.

[Sonic R]

Do you guys sit there with a pen and paper and a stopwatch?

 

at first, I wrote down on paper, but I don't bother any longer. as for times, I start my game, and glance at the clock then when I'm done I glance again and round to the closest 5 minute point…

 

and now for my plays…

 

for 6-6-10

 

Jaguar

Super Burnout - 1 hour 30 minutes

Missile Command 3D - 40 minutes

Alien vs. Predator - 30 minutes

 

Lynx

Klax - 30 minutes

 

as is apparent, I've been bit by the cat!

I am hooked on Jaguar since I've received a total of 7 new titles to my library bringing me to a total of 9 games for Jaguar…

 

I really am liking Super Burnout - it's a nice, fun game and I like the quick pick up and play aspect of it… the game just feel smooth and is just engaging to me…

[pinball22]

Beach-Head (C64) 20 minutes

Beach-Head 2 (C64) 30 minutes

Impossible Mission 2 (C64) 90 minutes

 

Good to see you and the stats back, cvga!

Edited June 7, 2010 by pinball22

[+thegoldenband]

Do you guys sit there with a pen and paper and a stopwatch?

Actually, if I have my laptop nearby, I just close it and put it to sleep right before I start playing. Then when I'm done, I open it back up, and for a couple seconds it'll display the "old time" before it updates the clock. No stopwatch necessary, and since I keep my logs on my laptop, it's right there.

 

Otherwise, yes, occasionally I'll jot down my start times before a game -- but more frequently, I'll glance at the clock and make a mental note of what time I started. Takes two seconds; no big deal. And of course, some games already tell you how long you played, whether it's incidental (Worms World Party), inherent in the game (Pitfall!), or fixed beforehand (Utopia).

 

Of course, I do rough estimates when I'm playing in very short sessions, like when I'm testing a bunch of new games to see if they work. But it's not hard to gauge the difference between two minutes of "OK, it works, but boy, this game sucks!" and five minutes of something rather better.

 

It may seem silly, but I really like the way that keeping logs has changed my style of gameplay, and made me more mindful and less haphazard about what I do play. It's telling to see which games I spend a lot of time on, and how it relates to my perception of time. It still amazes me that a full game of Marble Madness takes less than ten minutes, for instance -- it seems like a lot longer when you're in the thick of it.

Edited June 7, 2010 by thegoldenband

[Wickeycolumbus]

Super Mario Bros. (NES) - 40 minutes

Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) - 40 minutes

[Sonic R]

for 6-7-10

 

Jaguar

Missile Command 3D - 1 hour

 

played several games in all three modes… mostly of the 3D mode, which I enjoy, but tackled VR mode and I'm starting to get the hang of it and will be putting in more time here soon… all around a great game and a nice package! of note, I had never played a Missile Command game in my lifetime until I get this Jaguar game… it's fun and addictive!