What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2013 (Season 6)

[+thegoldenband]

The main theme this week was tennis games for various machines.

 

Awesome. I've had idle pipe dreams about starting a blog where I play through, and review, all the tennis video games ever released. I thought I had a decent grip on what was out there pre-32-bit, but your post makes me realize how many there are that I've never even heard of!

 

Have you tried Championship Tennis for Intellivision? Many people don't like it, but so far it's the best pre-NES tennis game I've played, despite its bugs. Very tough learning curve, though.

 

Then, in keeping with Data East games, I noticed that Manhattan is now supported in MAME. This is a game I know from back in 1981, and I didn't think I'd get to play it again. Well, now I did. Actually, it's not that great, and it pales in comparison with "Burgertime" running on the same hardware.

 

Even so, it's pretty cool to see a Holy Grail game show up on the tracker! Manhattan was believed lost until fairly recently, wasn't it?

[Kurt_Woloch]

Something went wrong here... seems like the system charts and the pre-NES charts are swapped.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

1. Atari 2600 (463)

2. Arcade (350)

3. Atari 8-bit (231)

4. PlayStation (210)

5. Genesis (148)

6. MSX (124)

7. C64 (122)

8. NES/Famicom (66)

9. Game Boy (52)

10. Creativision (41)

 

Top 10 systems:

 

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 448

2. Super Breakout (Atari 8-bit) - 190

3. Burgertime (Arcade) - 111

4. Manhattan (DECO) (Arcade) - 79

5. Burger Time (MSX) - 65

6. Konami's Tennis (MSX) - 59

7. International Tennis (Commodore) (C64) - 41

7. Tennis (Creativision) - 41

9. Amidar (Arcade) - 40

10. Black Jack (Interton VC-4000) - 35

[+thegoldenband]

^Fixed, thanks!

[carlsson]

Have you tried Championship Tennis for Intellivision?

Not that I can recall. A few years ago I owned an Intellivision with some games, but due to I never found love for that system and its problems with overheating, I traded it all away. I suppose I could try emulation, but I prefer the real deal unless it is for development or an "emergency". I kind of expected more tennis games on the Atari 8-bit computers, but perhaps I didn't look close enough as I only found Atari's own.

 

Then the line has to be drawn what is actual tennis. Obviously pure Pong games don't fit into that category, although there are some homemade games that more resemble Pong with serve rules and lines to not cross.

[Kurt_Woloch]

How about Ping Pong? There is an arcade game by that name by Konami which was also ported to the C-64, Amstrad CPC, MSX and ZX-Spectrum computers. Similar to that would be Nintendo's VS Tennis, another arcade game I know. Based on that, Nintendo also put out Tennis games for the Gameboy and the NES.

 

More tennis games I know would be "Match Point" for the C-64, and similar to that, "Micro Tennis" for the TI-99/4A. Oh, and I did a Tennis game for the TI-99 in Extended Basic myself, but so far it's unreleased.

 

Then the line has to be drawn what is actual tennis. Obviously pure Pong games don't fit into that category, although there are some homemade games that more resemble Pong with serve rules and lines to not cross.

[carlsson]

Yes, I actually avoided Match Point on the C64 due to I played it on the ZX Spectrum. That game seems to have made it to additional formats under Imagic's release, e.g. IBM PC and others. Of course table tennis is a different sport than tennis, just like 100 meter dash is different to 1 mile running. I would have included some Genesis tennis game if I had one in my collection. I considered downloading something for the Amiga, but figured I'm mostly an 8-bit guy so those 8-bit systems I own (mainly computers, apparently) are good to start with.

[+thegoldenband]

Not that I can recall. A few years ago I owned an Intellivision with some games, but due to I never found love for that system and its problems with overheating, I traded it all away.

 

You might have better luck with the Intellivision II, which doesn't usually have overheating problems but has inferior controllers. I think later revisions using the Intellivision I form factor fixed the overheating problem, e.g. the Intellivision III, Super Pro System, possibly the Sears system.

 

Then the line has to be drawn what is actual tennis. Obviously pure Pong games don't fit into that category, although there are some homemade games that more resemble Pong with serve rules and lines to not cross.

 

Agreed. In thinking about my criteria, one would be that the game has to use something like a traditional tennis scoring system -- otherwise, it's likely to just be Pong.

 

Similar to that would be Nintendo's VS Tennis, another arcade game I know. Based on that, Nintendo also put out Tennis games for the Gameboy and the NES.

 

As soon as we get into the NES era, there are tons of them. The best I've tried is Family Tennis for the Famicom. Most NES tennis games are really quite terrible!

 

Oh, and I did a Tennis game for the TI-99 in Extended Basic myself, but so far it's unreleased.

 

Interesting!

 

I would have included some Genesis tennis game if I had one in my collection.

 

Based on my experience so far, I'd rank them roughly like this: Davis Cup > ATP > Wimbledon > IMG > Agassi. I haven't played enough Jennifer Capriati or either of the Sampras games to place them yet (though I liked Capriati when I spent 20-30 minutes with it), and I want to try to get a better handle on David Crane's before I rank it (at the moment I'd put it below Wimbledon and above IMG). Agassi is truly horrible and the gameplay is amazingly broken but it's amusing, whereas IMG is just depressing in its stupidity; the only reason that I rank it lower than IMG is that at least IMG can offer a competent 2P game.

[WispFollower]

If you have not played Konami's Ping-Pong, you should check it out. I realize it is table tennis, but it's a very addicting game with well programmed difficulty levels and excellent controls. I got Pixelboy's Colecovision homebrew version, and I am very impressed.

[carlsson]

Of course I've played Konami's Ping-Pong in the past, both on MSX and C64. I browsed Moby Games and found that between 1985 and 2000, every table tennis game released used the exact same viewpoint as in the Konami game. Perhaps it is quite an obvious one, to only display the bat but quite remarkable that visually all games just copied the look with slight improvements for the next 15 years.

 

I also found that Takara released Real Tennis for the MSX, exact same visuals as on the Sord version, most probably 95% same code too with only sound output to make a difference. I also noticed that Match Point a.k.a. Tournament Tennis is the same game on Amstrad CPC, C64, Colecovision, DOS, Thomson TO, ZX Spectrum and QL. Tennis for the Intellivision looks very much alike Commodore's own International Tennis a couple years later, but it may just be the sideways view. Unfortunately Creativision seems to completely lack on Moby Games so its tennis game, dated 1981 can't be found on that particular site.

[Atarian7]

testing testing

 

Just checking to see if I could post still. I left a comment about someone's blog and it said it had to be

approved by the moderator before being posted.

Edited August 10, 2013 by Atarian7

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-371 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 119,919

Edited August 11, 2013 by Atarian7

[karokoenig]

Test successful, Atarian?

 

Here are my times for the week. Was at home where my consoles are for a few days, and was able to test a few flea markets pickups. That, and some High Score Club entries as well:

 

Atari 2600

Return of the Jedi: 5 min

Skiing: 8 min

Sky Jinks: 11 min

Towering Inferno: 24 min

 

NES

Mega Man 3: 5 min

Super Mario Bros: 3 min

Super Mario 3: 5 min

 

Mega Drive

FIFA 95: 12 min

Ghouls 'n Ghosts: 21 min

Kick Off 3: 6 min

 

I thought I'd never say this... but FIFA 95 might be a sports game which I can imagine giving another go. Towering Inferno is the new game of the week in the 2600 HSC. Anyone want to join?

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit

Strip Poker: 24 min

 

C64

Fraction Fever: 7 min

Galaga (H. Wening 1982): 9 min

Motor Mania: 60 min

 

MSX

Hyper Olympic 1: 35 min

Hyper Sports 3: 14 min

 

MSX2

Quarth: 36 min

 

RCA Studio 2

Bowling: 76 min

 

Tandy MC-10

Lost World Pinball: 2 min

Micomainia: 7 min

Pac-Man (Greg Dionne): 5 min

Tetris (Greg Dionne): 12 min

 

VIC-20

Dodgecars: 9 min

Metagalactic Llamas: 9 min

 

I started with some Konami sports games on the MSX. I nominate Hyper Sports 3 to be the hardest sports game ever, at least on 8-bit systems. Even passing the qualifying limits on the first two events - cycling and triple jump - require an extreme joystick performance.

 

The game I played the most this week is Bowling on the RCA Studio 2, or more specifically I played on my clone system, Conic M1200. While I haven't played every single of the original RCA games, I must say that bowling is the one that sucks the least... err, I mean most playable. I should try Paul Robson's new games, I hear he is getting the most out of the 1802.

 

The MC-10 games were played on my red Alice which is a licensed MC-10 from France with AZERTY keyboard and RGB output. The two machine code games by Greg Dionne were quite playable, much higher resolution than what can normally be achieved in Basic.

 

By chance, I stumbled across a disk image with a mix of C64 games. The Galaga clone by Henrik Wening was quite good, and seems to almost entirely made up of CBM character graphics rather than sprites. I see that he made two improved versions commercially released, I might look up those later to see if they add anything to the first version. As for the original arcade by Namco, I kind of never understood the difference between Galaga and Galaxian, both by Namco. Perhaps it is the way attack waves arrive on the screen that make up the difference? Then I got stuck in front of Motor Mania for an hour, and ended with a highscore of 7009,7 points, miles or whatever it counts.

Edited August 11, 2013 by carlsson

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (August 5th through 11th)...

 

Arcade:

Amidar - 125 min. in 2 sessions

Cavelon - 64 min.

Pooyan - 8 min.

 

Atari 2600:

Amidar - 51 min.

 

PC (non-eligible):

Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013 - 11 min.

 

TI-99:

TI Invaders - 37 min.

 

I continued to play the original version of "Amidar" until I managed to beat the 4th screen. Then I tried the Atari 2600 port, which is another port that's more watered down than necessary. The differences in gameplay between the two distinct main rounds are more or less eliminated, the characters are much smaller than in the original, and the banana bonus round and the music are completely missing. That's what you get from trying to cram Amidar into 4K. I think they could have done better in 8K. Even the handheld version of the game included the banana round!

 

Then I replayed Cavelon and Pooyan. For Pooyan, one game was enough, and I gave up on Cavelon after a few rounds.

 

Then I tried to do a program that automatically plays games. I tried to teach it to play "TI Invaders" on Classic99, but struggled on how to read the screen so that it can see where the objects are. In the end, I decided to play the game myself, using the slowdown feature of Classic99. But still in half speed, I didn't manage to get over a certain round where the enemies move so fast that it's nearly impossible to shoot them all before they reach the ground.

 

But I didn't play as much as last week because I bought something new to play with... a robotic vacuum! Sadly, it's got some problems with the cliff sensors and the rotating brushes in my flat which features multiple layers of carpet, but I didn't feel like playing any more games after getting this robot. That is, except for "Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013" which is a pretty boring game. You play a robot vacuum moving across multiple rooms of a flat picking up all the dust crumbs (or whatever is displayed there).

[Kurt_Woloch]

The Galaga clone by Henrik Wening was quite good, and seems to almost entirely made up of CBM character graphics rather than sprites. I see that he made two improved versions commercially released, I might look up those later to see if they add anything to the first version. As for the original arcade by Namco, I kind of never understood the difference between Galaga and Galaxian, both by Namco. Perhaps it is the way attack waves arrive on the screen that make up the difference? Then I got stuck in front of Motor Mania for an hour, and ended with a highscore of 7009,7 points, miles or whatever it counts.

 

I think the version of Galaga you played was some kind of in-between version. Mr. Wening originally developed it for the PET, which I suppose doesn't have hi-res graphics or even customizable character sets. This C-64 version is basically the same, only with colors and sound added. I think he did sell the PET version. Later he converted it to "Galaxy" which was distributed by Kingsoft. Firebird, by the way, did another Galaga clone on the C-64 called "Zalaga".

 

As far as I know, Galaga is more or less the sequel to Galaxian. In Galaxian, the formations instantly appear with all enemies in place, and they move in sync while in Galaga the formation expands and contracts. Back when they developed Galaxian, Namco's hardware, though pretty advanced compared to that of other manufacturers, only supported 6 or 8 sprites and some bullets in addition to that, so the formation actually is made out of scrolling character graphics, with the starfield being another hardware-generated layer in the back of everything else.

 

Galaga adds the incoming formations, the challenging stages, the ability of enemies to capture your ship and the expanding and contracting formation.

 

Another evolution to Galaga, though by a different company, would be Gyruss which retains many game elements of Galaga but completely changes the perspective around (literally speaking). Amazingly, Gyruss has been ported to the Atari 2600 (but doing away with displaying the formation) while Galaga hasn't.

[zylon]

5200-

River Raid- 25min

 

INTV(Tandyvision One)

Pole Position- 10min

Edited August 12, 2013 by zylon

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

Genesis:

David Crane's Amazing Tennis - 280 min.

Junction - 353 min.

RBI Baseball 4 - 36 min.

 

PlayStation:

Gauntlet Legends - 279 min.

 

It seems like this week's theme was "games that unlock bonus levels when you beat them". First, I beat Gauntlet Legends with my fiancée, but defeating the final boss (and seeing the credits) unlocked four more bonus levels which we'll play through. These aren't in the N64 game, so it's a nice little reward at the end of a port that's otherwise inferior to the N64 version in pretty much every way.

 

Then I beat the arcade-style puzzle game Junction on Normal by clearing the brutal last level (Stage 50) with over 100k points. That unlocked ten more levels to beat -- but since the game has no battery, if I turned the game off, I'd have to beat Stage 50 again in order to access the extra levels! So I just kept the console on and played through them. Most weren't too bad, but Stage 60 was ferociously difficult, even harder than Stage 50, and took me quite a while to get through. I'm not sure how soon I want to try to beat this game on Hard, it's plenty tough on Normal.

 

Finally, I won another game of RBI Baseball 4, and worked my way up the exhibition ladder in David Crane's Amazing Tennis by beating the five lowest-ranked players. The toughest of those, Rajid, took me a bunch of attempts to finish off -- I kept winning the first set, dropping the second, and losing interest. But by improving my net play, I was eventually able to beat him in straight sets.

[Atarian7]

I forget if it's the second or third building but Towering Inferno becomes impossible.

It will be interesting to see if someone gets past it.

[twoquickcapri]

Atari ST:

Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 3 - 30 min

 

Atari Jaguar:

Val d'Isere Skiing and Snowboarding -15 mins

 

Super Nintendo:

Knights of the Round - 5 min.

Super Road Blaster - 10 min.

 

Famicom Disk System:

Zelda no Densetsu - The Hyrule Fantasy - 15 min.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 32, running from August 5 - 11. We logged 2209 minutes of eligible play, playing 44 games on a total of 21 systems.

 

Top 10:

 

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 371

2. Junction (Genesis) - 353

3. David Crane's Amazing Tennis (Genesis) - 280

4. Gauntlet Legends (PlayStation) - 279

5. Amidar (Arcade) - 125

6. Bowling (RCA Studio II) - 76

7. Cavelon (Arcade) - 64

8. Motor Mania (C64) - 60

9. Amidar (Atari 2600) - 51

10. TI Invaders (TI-99) - 37

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 371

2. Amidar (Arcade) - 125

3. Bowling (RCA Studio II) - 76

4. Cavelon (Arcade) - 64

5. Motor Mania (C64) - 60

6. Amidar (Atari 2600) - 51

7. TI Invaders (TI-99) - 37

8. Hyper Olympic 1 (MSX) - 35

9. Pac-Man Collection (ColecoVision) - 30

10. River Raid (Atari 5200) - 25

 

Top 10 systems:

 

1. Genesis (708)

2. Atari 2600 (470)

3. PlayStation (279)

4. Arcade (197)

5. C64 (76)

6. RCA Studio II (76)

7. NES/Famicom (73)

8. MSX (49)

9. TI-99 (37)

10. MSX2 (36)

 

Everyone knows King beats Jack, right, so how could it be otherwise? But while Kaboom just edges Junction for the top spot on the individual charts, the Atari 2600 can't hold off the Genesis, which hops to #1 on the system charts.

 

This week also marks the first appearance of the Tandy MC-10 on the tracker. (It only missed the Top Ten by 4 minutes!)

[WispFollower]

Colecovision

Pacman Collection - 30 minutes

 

NES

Summer Carnival '92: Recca - 30 minutes

Crisis Force - 30 minutes

 

I have something exciting on the way to my collection right now. You will probably see a fair amount of it in my playing times in the next couple weeks. It's a rare game which looks fun from the one or two videos I can find of it. I will find out for myself in the next couple days. I'm hoping for another experience like I had with Steamroller- it blows me away that this game has so few people talking about it! Steamroller is one of my all time favorite games of ANY console, and I have about twelve different systems I game with, many more if you count emulation.

[WispFollower]

Oh, I posted too late. Sorry!

[+thegoldenband]

No worries, I'll add 'em in.

[carlsson]

Not that it matters much in the short run, but shouldn't NES/Famicom account for 73 min this week?

 

NES

Mega Man 3: 5 min

Super Mario Bros: 3 min

Super Mario 3: 5 min

NES

Summer Carnival '92: Recca - 30 minutes

Crisis Force - 30 minutes

[+thegoldenband]

^Ah, yes. I added NES to the Top 10 list manually (i.e. didn't regenerate it from my spreadsheet) to reflect WispFollower's post, but forgot to include karokoenig's time. Sorry that I've been making an error each week lately -- I'll plead jet lag!