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

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-218 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 140,845

[carlsson]

Another week of zero true retro gaming. I played a bit on my Chintendo Vii-alike (yes, a clone of an impostor!) but while it supposedly has an emulated 6 MHz 6502 and some of the games look 16-bit, I won't argue to have them counted.

Edited October 13, 2013 by carlsson

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week...

 

TI-99:

 

Mr. Chin - 10 min.

TI-Scramble - 147 min. in 3 sessions

Titanium - 183 min. in 5 sessions

 

These are the three games I got introduced to at the TI-99 meeting on Wednesday. They are all relatively new homebrew games for the TI-99 which got shown at the international TI-99 meeting in the Netherlands (which I didn't attend). After that, I continued to play two of them at home.

 

Mr. Chin is an adaptation of a MSX game which was first ported to the Colecovision, then to the TI-99. In it, you have to run around and balance plates on sticks.

 

Titanium is a horizontal scroller somewhat similar to Xevious and Uridium, but with smooth scrolling and the ability to fly up and down. The objective of each level is to destroy all of the ground objects.

 

Finally, TI-Scramble is a port of "Scramble" to the TI-99 in outstanding quality, including smooth vertical scrolling and very original-like graphics.

[zylon]

5200-

 

Centipede- 20min

 

A8-

 

Aquatron- 25min

 

Space Hawks of Avabanana 4- 50min

 

Buck Rogers- 15min

 

Juno First- 30min

[twoquickcapri]

Atari 7800 :
Commando - 10 min.
Crazy Otto - 45 min.
Donkey Kong XM - 45 min.

Atari 8-bit :
Donkey Kong - 25 min.
Donkey Kong Jr. - 20 min.
Dig Dug "1982"- 25 min.
Dig Dug "1983"- 25 min.
Frogger - 23 min.
Hero - 25 min.
Pac-Man - 20 min.
Pac-Man Arcade - 45 min.
Rally Speedway - 15 min.
River Raid - 22 min.

Atari ST :
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 3 - 20 min

[+thegoldenband]

Just got back from out of state! For obvious (and self-serving) reasons I'll extend the deadline a bit -- until midnight, let's say.

 

Anyway, here are my times for the week:

 

Atari 2600:

Breakout - 12 min.

California Games - 10 min.

Centipede - 4 min.

Circus Atari - 10 min.

Circus AtariAge (WIP) - 2 min.

Combat - 12 min.

D.K. VCS (WIP) - 3 min.

Entombed - 5 min.

Ice Hockey - 8 min.

Incoming - 20 min.

Kaboom - 3 min.

Medieval Mayhem - 50 min.

Space Invaders - 6 min.

Space Rocks - 4 min.

Space War - 7 min.

Arcade:

Galaga - 12 min.

Genesis:

Adventures of Mighty Max - 7 min.

Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball - 18 min.

Power Monger - 3 min.

N64:

Super Smash Bros. - 100 min.

As you can see, almost all of it was family/party/multiplayer gaming on the Atari 2600 and N64. I usually dominated the competitive games on the VCS, but I have next to no ability at Super Smash Bros.!

I also played a 2P game of Galaga with my brother on a real arcade machine (couldn't tell whether it was an original or reissue), and tried out a few mediocre Genesis games.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 41, running from October 7 - 13. We logged 1603 minutes of eligible play, playing 49 games on a total of 10 systems.

Top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 221

2. Titanium (TI-99) - 183

3. Beamrider (Atari 2600) - 150

4. TI-Scramble (TI-99) - 147

5. Super Smash Bros. (N64) - 100

6. Gargoyle's Quest (Game Boy) - 63

7. Medieval Mayhem (Atari 2600) - 50

7. Space Hawks of Avabanana 4 (Atari 8-bit) - 50

9. Crazy Otto (Atari 7800) - 45

9. Donkey Kong XM (Atari 7800) - 45

9. Pac-Man Arcade (Atari 8-bit) - 45

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 221

2. Titanium (TI-99) - 183

3. Beamrider (Atari 2600) - 150

4. TI-Scramble (TI-99) - 147

5. Medieval Mayhem (Atari 2600) - 50

5. Space Hawks of Avabanana 4 (Atari 8-bit) - 50

7. Crazy Otto (Atari 7800) - 45

7. Donkey Kong XM (Atari 7800) - 45

7. Pac-Man Arcade (Atari 8-bit) - 45

10. Juno First (Atari 8-bit) - 30

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (524)

2. Atari 8-bit (365)

3. TI-99 (340)

4. Atari 7800 (100)

4. N64 (100)

6. Game Boy (74)

7. Arcade (32)

8. Genesis (28)

9. Atari 5200 (20)

9. Atari ST (20)

No shared titles this week, as the VCS takes the triple crown, led by evergreen #1 Kaboom. The top 10 looks a lot like the pre-NES top 10, as only 7 games were played on pre-crash systems, or less than 15%.

This week also represents the first appearance of a 7800 XM game, with Donkey Kong XM at #9 on the overall charts and #7 on the pre-NES charts. I'm inclined not to count XM games as a separate system, since the XM is an expansion that augments a stock 7800 by adding RAM, sound hardware, and extra ports, vs. something like the Sega CD or 32X that add another CPU to the Genesis.

OTOH, we've been counting Intellivision ECS games under their own category, and the ECS adds RAM, sound hardware, and extra ports to the base Intellivision, so...

[karokoenig]

Do we count C128 games as extra, or Amiga 1000 games? Are there any, actually? I'd say count it. It IS a significant hardware upgrade, extra CPU or not.

[carlsson]

Dunno about C128 games, but in the Amiga world there should be a clear divide between OCS (Amiga 1000, 500, 2000), perhaps ECS (500+, 600, 3000) and definitely separate AGA games (1200, 4000). Now very few people seem to play games on the Amiga so in practise it matters very little, but as e.g. we keep MSX1 and MSX2 apart there should be a rule of thumb when two systems become different enough to count separately. Extra RAM itself should not be a divider, but extra custom hardware or a different media format should ring a bell. Doesn't the tracker keep Jaguar and Jaguar CD games apart? In that case I'd think it'd keep Genesis and Sega CD games apart as well.

 

Or perhaps we do this just for fun and as a group accept inconsistencies as long as nobody objects why hardware expansions to system X puts it in a new category while expansions to system Y don't.

 

Also, the past week seems to have been a remarkable Atari week with about 50% of all Atari systems ever made on the tracker. The gaming systems I consider missing from the list would be Atari Pong, XEGS, Lynx, Jaguar and Falcon.

Edited October 16, 2013 by carlsson

[twoquickcapri]

This week also represents the first appearance of a 7800 XM game, with Donkey Kong XM at #9 on the overall charts and #7 on the pre-NES charts. I'm inclined not to count XM games as a separate system, since the XM is an expansion that augments a stock 7800 by adding RAM, sound hardware, and extra ports, vs. something like the Sega CD or 32X that add another CPU to the Genesis.

OTOH, we've been counting Intellivision ECS games under their own category, and the ECS adds RAM, sound hardware, and extra ports to the base Intellivision, so...

 

The XM just add stuff that could fit in a cart if someone wanted too. So I don't see the point of separate it, plus Donkey Kong XM runs on a standard 7800, just without sound.

 

 

..... Amiga world there should be a clear divide between OCS (Amiga 1000, 500, 2000), perhaps ECS (500+, 600, 3000) and definitely separate AGA games (1200, 4000). Now very few people seem to play games on the Amiga so in practise it matters very little ....... Doesn't the tracker keep Jaguar and Jaguar CD games apart? In that case I'd think it'd keep Genesis and Sega CD games apart as well.

 

I would say OCS and ECS should be together with AGA separate. So you would have Commodore CDTV (500,600,1000,...) and Amgia CD32 (1200, 4000) as categories. Also, the Sega CD has a CPU, Video, Sound hardware and ram its almost a system in itself. The Jag CD is just CD hardware. So Sega CD/Mega CD should be separate and Jag CD should just be track with Jag carts.

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Beamrider: 19 min

Bobby goes home: 2 min

Congo Bongo: 57 min

G.I. Joe - Cobra Strike: 15 min

King Kong: 46 min

Smurf: 3 min

 

NES

Pac Man: 5 min

(played on the Game Boy Advance; NES Classics series. Count it or not at your leisure)

 

Arcade

Dig Dug: 8 min

Galaga: 12 min

Galaxian: 4 min

Ms. Pac Man: 10 min

(played on the Namco Museum cart, GBA. See above)

 

Game Boy Classic

Batman - the Video Game: 5 min

Gargoyle's Quest: 55 min

 

If it's not too much effort, could you check how much gameplay Gargoyle's Quest has gotten already? Is it anywhere near the 1000 minute club?

[+thegoldenband]

With the addition of your 55 minutes, I have just 223 minutes logged for Gargoyle's Quest. Before your times this year, it doesn't look like anyone else has played it on the tracker.

[+thegoldenband]

Or perhaps we do this just for fun and as a group accept inconsistencies as long as nobody objects why hardware expansions to system X puts it in a new category while expansions to system Y don't.

 

I like that answer.

 

twoquickcapri raises an interesting point about the Jaguar CD, though -- I'd been counting it separately, but didn't realize it added no additional CPU or RAM power to the base Jag (it does apparently have Cinepak built in, but I think that's basically it). What about the Turbografx-16's CD drive, does that add any CPU/RAM/sound hardware to the base system?

[karokoenig]

Thanks for looking, thegoldenband. I could have sworn that even me alone was more gameplay time. Need to give that game much more love.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-182 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 124,900

 

 

 

[carlsson]

Nintendo Famicom:

Astro Robo SASA - 6 min.
Flipull - 6 min.
Pac-Man - 6 min.
Zunou Senkan Galg - 5 min.

 

Flipull is also known as Plotting on other systems. The choice of odd games is due to what is included in my newly received multicart. I found Pac-Man to be unusually easy, it took me four levels to lose a single life, but I must admit the gamepad cross works unusually well with this old maze game. Normally I prefer real joysticks over gamepads though.

 

Commodore 64:

Ghosts 'n Goblins - 12 min.
Gyruss - 7 min.
Trailblazer - 22 min.

 

I have now offloaded my arcade game to other locations, so I played the C64 version instead. It is much more forgiving on early levels, and has some significant differences as some enemies that are non-shootable in the arcade, are perfectly fine to kill in the C64 conversion.

 

VIC-20:

Lazer Zone - 6 min.
Metagalactic Llamas - 7 min.
Mobile Attack - 10 min.
Sky Blazer - 5 min.

 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that Mobile Attack is a game I would like to like, but didn't get into. Now after a number of plays, I must admit it grows on me although the tactic to clear a level seems to be rather simple, just wait at the bottom of the screen and shoot enemies as they make their way down there. The fact that 95% of the score comes from bonus points after clearing a level (1000 pts for first level, 2000 pts for second level, 3000 pts for third level etc) also means the final score strongly depends on how many levels were cleared rather than how fast or good you cleared each level.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (October 14th through 20th)...

 

I only played one game, and I don't know if it's even eligible for the tracker, since it's a self-written homebrew game I wrote back in 1987 for the TI-99 in Extended Basic which is as of yet unreleased. It's a port of Marble Madness called "Marble", and I played it for 25 minutes.

 

As a proof that this game exists, I've attached it to this post (Marble.zip). You can use it in the DSK1 folder of Classic99, or put it on a simulated TI-99 disk (or onto the real thing if you have a way to do it).

 

The reason why I did that is that after playing TI-Scramble, I posted something in the thread about this game, and its creator, Rasmus, explained how the scrolling works and that the levels have been created using his homebrew screen editor Magellan. So I went to try that editor myself, and I started on doing levels for a TI-99 version of Marble Madness since I posted in that thread that a 1:1 conversion would probably be impossible due to the low number of available characters. So I tried to simplify it as well as possible while still retaining the general feel of the game and keeping to the original level designs as closely as possible. As an example, I've attached a screenshot of the first level as I created it, and the as of yet unfinished MAG file for use with Magellan. This is what I worked on for over 12 hours this week.

 

MARBLE.zip

Marble Madness map.zip

[zylon]

A8-

 

Underworld- 15min

Underworld II- 10min

Titan1- 10min

Sqoid- 15min

Popcorn!- 1hr 10min

Superfly1+ 20min

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

Microvision:

Blockbuster - 3 min.

Pinball - 5 min.

Genesis:

The Adventures of Mighty Max - 199 min.

Gods - 30 min.

Hit the Ice - 172 min.

RBI Baseball 4 - 60 min.

3DO:

Robinson's Requiem - 2 min.

Rush 'n' Fire Megadas - 15 min.

Atari Jaguar:

Iron Soldier - 5 min.

Beat a mediocre puzzle-platformer (The Adventures of Mighty Max) and a decent arcade-style hockey game (Hit the Ice) this week. I started playing Mighty Max on Easy to learn the game, but I didn't realize that the password doesn't encode the difficulty level, so I played much of the rest of it on Normal (the highest difficulty). However, I think the only difference between the modes is the number of lives you get -- and since the game has unlimited continues and you always respawn exactly where you died (including when you continue) with no penalty, the difficulty setting is essentially meaningless anyway.

Otherwise I tried some new acquisitions, including a Microvision I picked up yesterday (with a complete US collection of CIB games!), and made some progress in...

...actually I didn't make any progress in RBI Baseball 4, as I lost twice in a row to the 1987 incarnation of the Detroit Tigers, who seem able to hit home runs almost at will. The first game I lost 12-11 in extra innings, the other I don't recall, and either way I have to redo the game if I want to take on the Tengen team.

[+thegoldenband]

I only played one game, and I don't know if it's even eligible for the tracker, since it's a self-written homebrew game I wrote back in 1987 for the TI-99 in Extended Basic which is as of yet unreleased. It's a port of Marble Madness called "Marble", and I played it for 25 minutes.

 

I think in the past (2008-2009), cvga didn't count homebrew authors testing their own games, since it could potentially throw the stats way off. Oddly enough the issue hasn't come up since then, but I think I'm inclined to say that if you're playing the game, rather than just testing and debugging, then it should count.

 

The game looks nifty, and I love Marble Madness, so I'll try to find a way of checking it out! I don't have anything but a bare-bones TI-99/4A, so it'll be emulation one way or another.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Well, there is a difference between the program and the map I posted. The map you can see in the post, as of yet, is just that, a map. The program from 1987 has a simpler map in just two colors per level (red and yellow for the first, black and blue for the second) and also doesn't adhere as closely to the arcade version, although it has got features I left off the "new" maps due to character count constraints (most notably, the ramps that go down if you roll upwards). The new maps have been created with constant reference to the arcade maps while for the maps contained in the program, I only had screenshots of a few sections of the second level and worked from memory for the rest of the levels. Actually I can still remember drawing up the maps and the tiles needed for them during music lessons back at school.

 

The playing I did had the purpose of comparing the maps contained in the program from 1987 to the maps I've drawn up now. I found out that they weren't as good as I remembered them, and they also contain some graphical errors where I picked wrong tiles in some places, or maybe the tiles with the correct graphics haven't even been included in the character set. Though it's not "testing" my homebrew since I don't have plans to improve it anymore. If anything, I can envision a new version of Marble Madness on the TI-99 with smooth scrolling coded in Assembler, using the newly created maps, but I would have to work together with Rasmus in order to achieve this, whom I don't even have contacted yet about this. And I doubt I'll have enough time to do this.

[twoquickcapri]

Arcade:

Asteroids - 5 min.

Donkey Kong Jr. - 7 min.

Dig Dug - 5 min.

Defender: Stargate - 3 min.

Frogger - 5 min.

Galaga - 5 min.

Missile Command - 3 min.

Pac-Man - 7 min.

Pole Position - 10 min.

R-Type - 5 min.

Rampage - 5 min.

Road Blaster - 5 min.

Robotron 2084 - 5 min.

Scramble - 5 min.

Space Invaders - 3 min.

Tron - 5 min.

Zaxxon - 3 min.

 

Atari 2600:

Turbo - 10 min.

Atari 7800:
Super Cobra - 35 min.

Atari 8-bit :
Pac-Man Arcade - 20 min.
Ms. Pac-Man - 25 min.

 

Went to Disneyland this weekend and they have a nice little 80's arcade next to Space Mountain. It should be somewhat new because last year and the year before that I was at Disneyland and there was just a really small Neo Geo arcade and a crane game in this area.

 

[carlsson]

Cool! Perhaps the arcade is the result of Wreck-It Ralph?

[twoquickcapri]

Cool! Perhaps the arcade is the result of Wreck-It Ralph?

 

They had three Wreck-It Ralph arcades there.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 42, running from October 14 - 20. We logged 1327 minutes of eligible play, playing 58 games on a total of 13 systems.

Top 10:

1. Adventures of Mighty Max (Genesis) - 199

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 182

3. Hit the Ice (Genesis) - 172

4. Popcorn! (Atari 8-bit) - 70

5. RBI Baseball 4 (Genesis) - 60

6. Congo Bongo (Atari 2600) - 57

7. Gargoyle's Quest (Game Boy) - 55

8. King Kong (Atari 2600) - 46

9. Super Cobra (Atari 7800) - 35

10. Gods (Genesis) - 30

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 182

2. Popcorn! (Atari 8-bit) - 70

3. Congo Bongo (Atari 2600) - 57

4. King Kong (Atari 2600) - 46

5. Super Cobra (Atari 7800) - 35

6. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 8-bit) - 25

6. Marble (TI-99) - 25

8. Trailblazer (C64) - 22

9. Pac-Man Arcade (Atari 8-bit) - 20

10. Beamrider (Atari 2600) - 19

Top 10 systems:

1. Genesis (461)

2. Atari 2600 (334)

3. Atari 8-bit (165)

4. Arcade (120)

5. Game Boy (60)

6. C64 (41)

7. Atari 7800 (35)

8. NES/Famicom (28)

8. VIC-20 (28)

10. TI-99 (25)

The Genesis and Atari 2600 have often been fighting neck-and-neck for the top spot this year, and this week the 16-bit console gets the edge. It bookends good ol' Kaboom in the second spot with a pair of titles at #1 and #3, and a spread of less than 30 minutes between 'em.

BTW the "arcade" platform has the unusual distinction of being #4 on the system charts, despite not having any games this week in either of the individual Top 10 charts!