What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2014 (Season 7)

[twoquickcapri]

Atari Jaguar:
Raiden - 90 min.

 

PC (Windows 95/98):
Final Fantasy VII - 174 min

[zylon]

5200-

 

Dig Dug- 20min

 

A8-

 

Galactic Chase- 30min

Galaxian- 15min

 

SMS-

 

Wonder Boy III- 25min

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

Intellivision:

Old School - 28 min.

Tower of Doom - 29 min.

NES:

Battle Chess - 70 min.

Double Dragon II - 5 min.

Field Combat - 2 min.

Front Line - 12 min.

Ikari Warriors - 6 min.

SMS:

Danan - 14 min.

Game Boy:

Fortified Zone - 3 min.

Quarth - 74 min.

Genesis:

Twin Cobra - 3 min.

3DO:

Battlesport - 30 min.

Eye of Typhoon - 10 min.

Mazer - 9 min.

Virtuoso - 2 min.

Dreamcast:

Floigan Bros. - 355 min.

Beat Battle Chess for NES (on Level 5 with the Black pieces), and the oddball Dreamcast title Floigan Bros. Thoughts on both, and Rocky & Bullwinkle from last week, here.

Otherwise I nosed around with a few new acquisitions (and a few ROMs that piqued my curiosity), poked around a bit with old favorite Tower of Doom (with which I still have quite a lot of unfinished business), and had fun playing NES and 3DO with a friend who was in town for a visit.

He and his wife also played through almost all of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties while my fiancée and I made dinner -- but since I was only observing and occasionally advising, I decided not to count that one. They found it hilarious and appalling, as one should.

[zylon]

C64-

 

Forbidden Forest- 10min

Marble Madness- 25min

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 16, running from April 14 - 20. We logged 2746 minutes of eligible play, playing 60 games on a total of 16 systems.

Top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 756

2. Floigan Bros. (Dreamcast) - 355

3. Obelix (Atari 2600) - 245

4. Galaga (Atari 7800) - 195

5. Final Fantasy VII (PC (Windows 95/98)) - 174

6. Raiden (Atari Jaguar) - 90

7. Quarth (Game Boy) - 74

8. Battle Chess (NES/Famicom) - 70

9. Elk Attack (Atari 2600) - 60

9. Omicron (Atari 2600) - 60

9. Zero Tolerance (Genesis) - 60

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 756

2. Obelix (Atari 2600) - 245

3. Galaga (Atari 7800) - 195

4. Elk Attack (Atari 2600) - 60

4. Omicron (Atari 2600) - 60

6. Pac-Man Arcade (Atari 2600) - 40

7. Galactic Chase (Atari 8-bit) - 30

8. Tower of Doom (Intellivision) - 29

9. Old School (Intellivision) - 28

10. Motor Mania (C64) - 25

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1369)

2. Dreamcast (355)

3. Atari 7800 (195)

4. PC (Windows 95/98) (174)

5. NES/Famicom (97)

6. Atari Jaguar (90)

6. Genesis (90)

8. Game Boy (82)

9. Intellivision (57)

10. 3DO (51)

10. C64 (51)

When we first added post-crash consoles to the tracker a few years ago, there was some concern that more recent, time-intensive titles would crowd out the old-school games of yore, turning each week's charts into a compilation of JRPGs, RTS titles, FPSes, and other initialisms of the 1990s. It was an understandable concern, and hey, I've certainly done my share to put all three of those genres at the top in any given week.

But as a counterexample, witness this week's charts: the Atari 2600 is so dominant that it's only 8 minutes short of accounting for 50% of all gameplay in Week 16. Sure, the fact that Kaboom is #1 comes as little surprise, but the VCS would have won comfortably even without the Mad Bomber's help. Friends, the 8-bit generation is alive and well!

[Keatah]

I don't know 100% precisely how much time I've spent with Apple 2 gaming this year. But it would come very close to 700 hours on all varieties of games. It would be impossible to comment on the exact game names, but I tend to play action and simulation types. I have a strong preference for the single-file BRUN type games. Seemingly all action games from Sirius Software, Br0derbund, and subLOGIC would be included.

 

There was some time spent recovering a handful of "thought lost forever" disks. Maybe 10 hours. And about 100 hours doing "serious" Applesoft Basic programming.

 

15-20 hours of playing with ADTPro and Copy II+.

 

50-75 hours of actual productive work with AppleWorks, PFS, and a few other wordprocessors. About half of this time was spent messing around with Com-Ware (AppleCat modem software), Ascii Express, and various basic programs for the Hayes MicroModem II.

 

I spent some time enhancing Saturn Navigator as a personal project. 30 hours.

 

My Apple activities are so varied and involved it would be extraordinarily tedious to track everything to the minute.

 

Standout games this year, for me at the moment, would be Dig-Dug, Frenzy, StarMaze, WarpDestroyer, and Tranquility Base.

Edited April 24, 2014 by Keatah

[carlsson]

Welcome! It was me who pointed to this thread. If you like to log your gaming activities and post weekly or whenever you have the opportunity, you're definitely welcome! In this part of the world, it is the 2600 all other systems want to come close to in number of minutes to be played; the C64 which otherwise might be the "arch enemy" to the Apple ][ series usually is a minor system except for when Kurt has a stroke of play time of some particular game. :-)

[carlsson]

These are the amounts of gaming I've been up to in the past week:

 

Amiga:

Pinball Fantasies: Billion Dollar Gameshow - 25 min.

Pinball Fantasies: Speed Devils - 5 min.

Not sure if you like to count those two pinball courses separately, after all they belong to the same game.

Arcade:

Mr. Do - 1 min.

We had a mini competition with only playing for one life per game, which is why Arcade and Intellivision scores are so extremely short...

Atari 8-bit:

Caverns of Mars II - 10 min.

Neptune's Daughters - 2 min.

Quest for Quintana Roo - 3 min.

Rally Speedway - 11 min.

I prepared an AtariMax cartridge, and after play testing that every entry would run on an NTSC 800 (yes, we usually have PAL units over here but mine is NTSC), I got stuck with actually playing some of the game for a bit longer.

Intellivision:

Burgertime - 1 min.

Diner - 1 min

See above about the short play times. While I've played Burgertime before both on Intellivision and other systems, the follow-up Diner was an entirely new experience to me, and reminded me a little of an upside-down Congo Bongo or perhaps a Flip and Flop but of course with a completely different gameplay.

Edited April 27, 2014 by carlsson

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

California Games: 10 min

Motorodeo: 10 min

Skate Boardin': 5 min

 

NES

Blades of Steel: 15 min

Megaman 3: 7 min

 

Blades of Steel was a flea market pickup. You don't see NES too often over here. The playtime for Megaman was console testing.

 

Mega Drive

Donald Duck Maui Mallard: 7 min

Earthworm Jim: 8 min

Ghostbusters: 10 min

Prince of Persia: 2 min

Wonder Boy in Monster Land: 10 min

 

Gee, Prince of Persia sucks on this system just as much as on every other system I tried it. It just doesn't resonate at all for me. I picked up the whole Mega Drive lot on a flea market for 15 Euro (all with box, a few missing manuals), so I'm not too angry about this purchase. Good stuff.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-627 minutes

 

High score of the week: 95,670

 

 

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (April 21st through 27th)...

 

Arcade:

Frontline - 37 min.

 

Atari 2600:

Funky Fish - 31 min.

Front line - 17 min.

 

Emerson Arcadia:

Funky Fish - 115 min.

 

First, I played some more Funky Fish on the Emerson Arcadia. As I said before, it's got less variety than the arcade version. The enemy speed stays the same until Round 4 and then speeds up with each round while eliminating them also gets you more and more points. I managed to beat Round 6 and got to Round 7 where the enemies again are twice as fast than in Round 6. They are so fast it's hard to follow them.

 

The Atari 2600 version is a different beast. I didn't manage to beat Round 2 there because the seahorses there don't shoot straight up, but sway left and right in an unpredictable pattern so it's hard to avoid them in time.

 

Then I tried Front Line (the Taito arcade conversion, not the Combat clone), first on the Atari 2600. This is a game in the same vein as Commando and Ikari Warriors (more similar to the later), but in contrast to those games, the enemy soldiers, although there are not that many of them on screen at once, have more freedom of movement... they move up and down as well while they are restricted to a narrow band in Commando and Ikari Warriors. It's still severely watered down in contrast to the arcade version... on the 2600, as far as I can see, you can't throw grenades as a soldier. The arcade version is somewhat hard to control because of the rotary knob. I tried to play it in MAME, but it's a big chaos with all the buttons you'd have to operate. I didn't manage to beat the first level, in contrast to the Atari 2600 version where I could do it. I only watched a video of the Colecovision version which is closer to the arcade, but has the enemy soldiers animated in a way making you think they're all dancing.

[+Ripdubski]

My week:

 

Atari 7800 Dobkey Kong Jr. 5

Atari 7800 Ms. Pac-Man 15

 

Atari 2600 Donkey Kong 5

Atari 2600 Keystone Kapers 70

[zylon]

A8-

 

Centipede- 10min

Millipede- 25min

 

C64-

 

Threshold- 15min

Zaxxon- 10min

[oyamafamily]

MY WEEK (April 21st to 27th, 2014):

 

Atari 2600 only:

1) Asteroids - 68 minutes

2) Battlezone - 1 minute

3) Circus Atari - 2 minutes

4) Crazy Climber - 2 minutes

5) Dragster - 1 minute

6) Dragon Defender - 75 minutes

7) INV+ - 20 minutes

8. Kaboom! - 1 minute

9) Lock 'n' Chase - 16 minutes

10) Marine Wars - 14 minutes

11) Venture - 1 minute

12) Walker - 11 minutes (variant of Clown Down Town)

13) Z-Tack - 58 minutes

 

CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING VIDEOS:

 

1) INV+ - 2 gameplays in ONE VIDEO: Difficulty BB and Difficulty AA, Visible Invaders

 

2) Dragon Defender - 1,000,000 points (Rolled The Score)

 

3) Z-Tack - 414,292 points (PAL format)

 

4) Marine Wars - 13,040 points

 

5) Walker - 1469 points

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OrLecWkPtU

 

6) Asteroids - Game 1-BB - More than 100,000 points

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T9U7DjWMwE

 

7) Asteroids - Game 1-AA - More than 100,000 points

 

8. Lock 'n' Chase - 2 gameplays in ONE Video - Difficulty BB and Difficulty AA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MNNDfgOnxo

Edited April 27, 2014 by oyamafamily

[oyamafamily]

And one more game played today (April 27th):

 

Kangaroo (Atari 2600) - 3 minutes

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

Intellivision:

Tower of Doom - 759 min.

Dreamcast:

Worms World Party - 39 min.

Other than a quick game of WWP, just about all my gaming time this week was spent in systematically exploring Tower of Doom, largely with the help of my fiancée.

There's no really substantive information about this game on the Internet, but over the course of a couple evenings, we figured out most of the magical items and the game's scheme for determining the power of weapons, and mapped out the largest non-randomly-generated adventure, the 20-level Tower, which I was able to clear with the Novice character. I also cleared the 8-level Tower with the Warlock, and the 6-level Fortress with the Novice.

Then, on my own and during various intervals of free time, I started assembling a library of screenshots using the jzintv emulator, though I don't know if I'm up to digitally mapping out all 46 levels across the four non-random dungeons.

[twoquickcapri]

PC (Windows 95/98):
MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries - 700 min.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 17, running from April 21 - 27. We logged 2931 minutes of eligible play, playing 49 games on a total of 12 systems.

Top 10:

1. Tower of Doom (Intellivision) - 759

2. MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries (PC (Windows 95/98)) - 700

3. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 628

4. Funky Fish (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 115

5. Dragon Defender (Atari 2600) - 75

6. Keystone Kapers (Atari 2600) - 70

7. Asteroids (Atari 2600) - 68

8. Base Attack [aka Z-Tack] (Atari 2600) - 58

9. Worms World Party (Dreamcast) - 39

10. Front Line (Arcade) - 37

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Tower of Doom (Intellivision) - 759

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 628

3. Funky Fish (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 115

4. Dragon Defender (Atari 2600) - 75

5. Keystone Kapers (Atari 2600) - 70

6. Asteroids (Atari 2600) - 68

7. Base Attack [aka Z-Tack] (Atari 2600) - 58

8. Front Line (Arcade) - 37

9. Funky Fish (Atari 2600) - 31

10. Millipede (Atari 8-bit) - 25

10. Marble Madness (C64) - 25

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1048)

2. Intellivision (761)

3. PC (Windows 95/98) (700)

4. Emerson Arcadia 2001 (115)

5. Atari 8-bit (61)

6. C64 (60)

7. Dreamcast (39)

8. Arcade (38)

9. Genesis (37)

10. Amiga (30)

Vaulting to the top is Intellivision roguelike Tower of Doom, which takes the #1 spot in a week with big numbers from three contenders. It also becomes the 123rd member of the 1000-minute club, with an all-time total of 1236 minutes that puts it at #89 on the overall list. However, the Atari holds on to its crown on the system charts.

By the way, the 121nd and 122nd members to join the 1000-minute club were the PC version of Final Fantasy VII and the arcade version of Funky Fish. Both reached that milestone in Week 14, and currently have 1549 minutes (#54 overall) and 1056 minutes (#108 overall), respectively.

[zylon]

A8-

 

Missile Command- 40min

[+thegoldenband]

Found another member of the 1000-minute club I'd overlooked: in Week 10, Phoenix for Atari 2600 crossed the milestone, becoming the 119th member of the club. It now has a total of 1175 minutes logged, making it #96 on the all-time charts.

 

By the way, here are the 10 games that are closest to joining the 1000-minute club. Some have been on the edge for years!

 

Pac-Man Arcade (Atari 2600) - 993

Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation) - 990

Burgertime (Atari 2600) - 983

Othello (Atari 2600) - 975

The Legend of Zelda (NES/Famicom) - 975

Go Fish! (Atari 2600) - 970

Wolfenstein 3D (Atari Jaguar) - 970

Super Battleship (Genesis) - 957

Cavelon (Arcade) - 956

Enduro (Atari 2600) - 953

[zylon]

A8-

 

Galaxian- 20min

 

Galactic Chase- 40min

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Gorf: 9 min

Raumbasen-Attacke: 4 min

River Raid: 74 min

Tapper: 5 min

 

SNES

Final Fight 3: 120 min

Sim City: 15 min

 

Master System

Ghostbusters: 10 min

 

Mega Drive

Cliffhanger: 6 min

Dynamite Duke: 5 min

True Lies: 8 min

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego: 45 min

 

Game Boy Color

R-Type DX: 9 min

 

 

Not much to say about this week, despite the fact that I fiddled around qith quite a lot of different games. Beat Final Fight on easy. First Beat'em Up I ever spent considerable time on.

 

 

[+Ripdubski]

Bad game week for me. I got goose eggs.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!-671 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 109,979

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Boulder Dash - 6 min.

Caverns of Mars II - 19 min.

Flip & Flop - 1 min.

Satan's Hollow - 8 min.

Trailblazer - 13 min.

Nintendo 64:

F-1 World Grand Prix II - 5 min.

PC DOS:

Stunts / 4D Sports - 4 min.

Vectrex:

Vectrexagon - 4 min.

In preparation for a retrogaming expo I participated on as a vendor, I visited a friend to play test some borderline (N64) and non-eligible (GC, Xbox) stuff. In the end, the only N64 game that I enjoyed enough to actually play to be added to the tracker was the only N64 game that I failed to sell at the expo! I suppose that is a sign that I have a different taste in which games to play.

Out of the others, the Atari gaming was additional testing before exhibiting it. The Vectrex game is a brand new homebrew in playable beta, introduced during the expo. I would have played it for longer if I didn't have other things to attend to.