What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2015 (Season 8)

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

Atari 2600:

River Raid - 1 min.

Genesis:

Davis Cup Tennis - 39 min.

Rambo III - 171 min.

SNES:

The Chessmaster - 150 min.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 - 2 min.

Sega CD:

Dracula Unleashed - 64 min.

32X:

WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game - 2 min.

N64:

Star Soldier: Vanishing Earth - 2 min.

Wheel of Fortune - 3 min.

Dreamcast:

The Grinch - 53 min.

Beat Rambo III on all four difficulties, though with the maximum number of lives (and lavish use of continues on Levels 1-5). I might try beating Hardest with the stock number of lives sometime this week, though I dislike the way the game amps up the helicopter boss fights on Hardest difficulty -- the non-stop cannon fire leaves you practically no chance to shoot back.

Otherwise it was incremental progress in The Grinch and Dracula Unleashed -- only about 30 minutes at a time on the latter, since that's about as long as my Sega CD will go without overheating -- and testing out new acquisitions. I also played a few matches in Davis Cup Tennis on the highest difficulty (Professional), though when I tried to play the career mode I kept losing in the second round of the tournament I entered.

Finally, last week I accidentally omitted some time I spent losing to The Chessmaster, so that's in the mix too.

[twoquickcapri]

PC (Win9x):
MechWarrior 4: Black Knight - 510 min.

So I have been trying to get this game to work for a better part of a decade now and finally figure out what was stop it from installing. Before the games would install with an error and then let me start it but then it would crash if I tried to do anything in the game. I figured it was a bad install disk. This game is an expansion to MechWarrior 4: Vengeance and Vengeance needs to be install before Black Knight. It ended up that my retail disks of Vengeance do a bad install and prevent Black Knight from finishing its install. Vengeance has always worked fine for me and I've completed it 5-6 times over the years but the installed exe file did not match what the installer for Black Knight wanted and it would end up causing the game to crash in the end. I'm glad that it's easy to find iso "back-ups" on the internet or I may have never found out what my problem was.

[WispFollower]

Colecovision

Cix - 120 minutes

Cye - 60 minutes

Joust - 60 minutes

Steamroller - 40 minutes

Jeepers Creepers - 30 minutes

Lock N' Chase - 25 minutes

Pac-man Collection - 25 minutes

Gorf - 5 minutes

 

Nintendo 64

Wave Race - 25 minutes

Wayne Gretzky's 3d Hockey - 10 minutes

Wayne Gretzky's 3d Hockey '98 - 20 minutes

Super Mario 64 - 12 minutes

WCW vs. NWO Revenge - 20 minutes

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 20, running from May 11 - 17. We logged 4374 minutes of eligible playtime, playing 42 games on a total of 16 systems.

Top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 778

2. MechWarrior 4: Black Knight (PC (Windows 95/98)) - 510

3. Silent Hunter (PC (DOS)) - 487

4. Dino Eggs (C64) - 360

4. Cix (ColecoVision) - 360

6. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 260

7. Rambo III (Genesis) - 171

8. Chessmaster, The (SNES) - 150

9. Smash TV (NES/Famicom) - 145

10. Joust (ColecoVision) - 135

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 778

2. Dino Eggs (C64) - 360

2. Cix (ColecoVision) - 360

4. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 260

5. Joust (ColecoVision) - 135

6. JetPack! (ColecoVision) - 125

7. SteamRoller (ColecoVision) - 75

8. Yars' Revenge (Atari 2600) - 70

9. Cye (ColecoVision) - 60

9. Schlange CV (ColecoVision) - 60

Top 10 systems:

1. ColecoVision (1010)

2. Atari 2600 (872)

3. PC (Windows 95/98) (510)

4. PC (DOS) (487)

5. C64 (360)

6. Atari 7800 (260)

7. Genesis (210)

8. NES/Famicom (175)

9. SNES (152)

10. N64 (92)

(Honorable mention: 11. Tandy MC-10 (69), which would have been #10 if last week's SNES Chessmaster time hadn't been overlooked.)

What a week! OK, there were some ColecoVision and SNES times held over from last week, but still, we put up some big numbers for the tracker. Kaboom takes two of three charts, while the CV takes the system crown.

No new additions to the 1000-minute club this week, but there is a new addition to the 5000-minute club, as Pac-Man Collection crosses that seldom-seen threshold! With 5042 minutes logged to date, it's now #5 on the all-time list, if I'm not mistaken.

Meanwhile Silent Hunter is creeping upward with 4012 minutes...but will it reach 5000 before karokoenig reaches the conclusion of his game?

[karokoenig]

PC (DOS)

Silent Hunter: 544 min

 

Not crossing the 5000 minutes, but roundabout 76 hours spent on this game is quite a project, considering how little time I have for playing these days.

 

The bombs have fallen and the war is over. In this career, I sank 3.3 million tons of enemy shipping, among them 9 battleships, a dozen carriers and countless cruisers. In the real war, American subs were responsible for a bit under 4.8 million tons sank. So much for the 100% realism setting, hehe... It needs to be said that the merchant ships' tonnage in the game is a bit excessive, also accounting for the high numbers I reached. Standard merchants go for 15,000 tons, and tankers even 18,000, when in reality, most of the ships were much smaller (in the 4k to 10k tons range).

 

Apart from such minor realism issues, the game is a must play for every fan of naval simulations. Highly recommended.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!- 846 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 358,770

 

 

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!- 846 minutes

 

High score of the week: 358,770

 

Things are on the upswing right there. Impressive scores these last two weeks.

[Atarian7]

Thank you.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (May 18th through 24th)...

 

Amiga 500:

A prehistoric tale - 381 minutes in 3 sessions

 

This week, I played only one game... A prehistoric tale on the Amiga. This is a game very much inspired by Dino Eggs. The game principle is the same... you have to collect all the eggs, remove all the boulders and cage all the hatching dinosaur babies. However, many changes have been made... instead of fires, you pick up mice and let them free, then they run around for some time. You don't see exactly how long, however. Without a mouse running around, Dino Papa will attack, but not with a giant foot, rather he'll send a shipload of creatures which still are much easier to avoid than the big dinosaur foot. The attack ends once you've set free a mouse or returned to your portal with some eggs or a caged dinosaur. Therefore it's not that important having a mouse going at all times.

 

The levels are also much more varied and there are much more of them... I got beyond Level 20, which takes more than an hour to reach. On the way you'll face obstacles which aren't present in Dino Eggs, floating platforms and spears. However, the controls are a bit more on the unfair side since you can't jump when you're on or even only in front of a ladder. The levels also get more difficult so that you have to figure out how to get to where you need to get the eggs. All in all, for me it's not as much fun as the original Dino Eggs, although it's more varied.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Fort Apocalypse - 16 min.

Yoomp! - 17 min.

VIC-20:

Clowns - 10 min.

Metagalactic Llamas - 17 min.

I was almost ready to call defeat for a week without gaming, but invested the last few hours on Sunday evening for a short session after all. On Metagalactic Llamas, I found a new tactic that almost immediately brought me a new highscore: 93868 pts which is more than 10K above my previous score, that even Yak said was rather good. My new tactic consists of keeping the roof as low as possible, holding the fire down to spit all the time, but as soon as a spider arrives, raise the roof in order to cut off the web as early as possible to get maximum bonus, then kill the spider either while falling or crawling on the ground, lowering the roof down again to adjust the angle. It can be a little risky to have falling spiders all the time, but done right I can get up to 600 + 600 = 1200 pts per spider, compared to 100 pts in the regular case when I kill it while it still is on its way down. Thus I can easily double my scores on the first few levels, which means with a bit of practise I'll likely to hit 100K on this game, a score that 30 years ago I would never have dreamed about - back then anything above 50K was a major feat.

I also found one of the wires on my SIO2SD cable for the Atari had broken off right at the diode, so that means I have a soldering job coming up this week. As for now, I managed to use the device by holding the wire to the diode with my fingers while loading a game, which works but is a bit primitive. :-)

Edited May 24, 2015 by carlsson

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

 

1) J.Ö.R.G.E.N. - 4 minutes

 

2) Pressure Cooker - 112 minutes. Highest score 252,770 points, for 2600 NEW HSC Season 4, Week 18.

 

3) Solar Plexus - 4 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Pac-Man Collection - 202 minutes. Highest score of this week: 1,002,370 points (Pac-Man, Plus OFF, Fast ON, Bell One, 3 lives and One Player)

Edited May 25, 2015 by oyamafamily

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

SNES:

Battle Racers (JPN) - 2 min.

Donkey Kong Country - 2 min.

Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius (JPN) - 3 min.

Sega CD:

Dracula Unleashed - 116 min.

Philips CD-i:

Dark Castle - 9 min.

Kether - 8 min.

Voyeur - 2 min.

PlayStation:

Chessmaster 3D - 2 min.

Grudge Warriors - 3 min.

N64:

Let's Smash [aka Let's Smash Tennis] (JPN) - 15 min.

Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey '98 - 1 min.

Dreamcast:

Unreal Tournament - 3 min.

Other than testing out new acquisitions from Ebay and flea markets, including the new CD-i I just picked up, my main gaming activity was playing Dracula Unleashed with my wife.

We finally got past the place where we were stuck back in 2011, or more correctly we discovered that we were never stuck to begin with -- an in-game event we thought we needed to trigger on day 2 of gameplay is actually scheduled for the following day. All thanks to a badly-written newspaper article!

[R.O.T.S]

I have a short attention span so there will be no long duration me thinks, rough estimates are-

(Atari2600) -Jr Pacman - 7min

BerzerkWho (Homebrew) - 20min

Venture - 12min

(C64) Scramble (2105 Homebrew) - 8min

(Arcade) Scramble , Astro Fighter , Nostradamus - 8min each

(Vic 20) Cosmic Firebirds ,Cloud Burst and around a hundred other titles. - 3min each

(Intellivision) Venture - 8min

(Coleco) Venture - 5min

(Game Gear) - Wizard Pinball 10min

Edited May 25, 2015 by R.O.T.S

[Atarian7]

Welcome, R.O.T.S

[carlsson]

Welcome. I'm not sure if thegoldenband will accept "a hundred other titles" times 3 minutes each, but the named ones are a great start.

[BillyHW]

 

My times for the week:

 

SNES:

Battle Racers (JPN) - 2 min.

Donkey Kong Country - 2 min.

Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius (JPN) - 3 min.

Sega CD:

Dracula Unleashed - 116 min.

Philips CD-i:

Dark Castle - 9 min.

Kether - 8 min.

Voyeur - 2 min.

PlayStation:

Chessmaster 3D - 2 min.

Grudge Warriors - 3 min.

N64:

Let's Smash [aka Let's Smash Tennis] (JPN) - 15 min.

Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey '98 - 1 min.

Dreamcast:

Unreal Tournament - 3 min.

Other than testing out new acquisitions from Ebay and flea markets, including the new CD-i I just picked up, my main gaming activity was playing Dracula Unleashed with my wife.

We finally got past the place where we were stuck back in 2011, or more correctly we discovered that we were never stuck to begin with -- an in-game event we thought we needed to trigger on day 2 of gameplay is actually scheduled for the following day. All thanks to a badly-written newspaper article!

 

 

So what was so bad about Wayne Gretzky Hockey that you turned it off after 1 min?

[+thegoldenband]

So what was so bad about Wayne Gretzky Hockey that you turned it off after 1 min?

 

Ha, nothing -- I was just testing things out. It's merely suffering a penalty, vs. the PS1 games, for its own lack of loading times.

 

Speaking of times, the summary will be posted later today!

[zylon]

a bit late, but for last week-

 

2600-

Missile Command- 45min (played while doing "burn-in" of new components on another member's H6er)

 

5200-

Pengo- 1hr 5min

Edited May 26, 2015 by zylon

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 21, running from May 18 - 24. We logged 2529 minutes of eligible playtime, playing 37 games on a total of 18 systems.

Top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 846

2. Silent Hunter (PC (DOS)) - 544

3. Prehistoric Tale, A (Amiga) - 381

4. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 202

5. Dracula Unleashed (Sega CD) - 116

6. Pressure Cooker (Atari 2600) - 112

7. Pengo (Atari 5200) - 65

8. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 45

9. BerzerkWho (Atari 2600) - 20

10. Yoomp! (Atari 8-bit) - 17

10. Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time (VIC-20) - 17

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 846

2. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 202

3. Pressure Cooker (Atari 2600) - 112

4. Pengo (Atari 5200) - 65

5. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 45

6. BerzerkWho (Atari 2600) - 20

7. Yoomp! (Atari 8-bit) - 17

7. Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time (VIC-20) - 17

9. Fort Apocalypse (Atari 8-bit) - 16

10. Venture (Atari 2600) - 12

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1050)

2. PC (DOS) (544)

3. Amiga (381)

4. Atari 7800 (202)

5. Sega CD (116)

6. Atari 5200 (65)

7. Atari 8-bit (33)

7. VIC-20 (33)

9. Arcade (24)

10. Philips CD-i (19)

Last week we had 1010 minutes of ColecoVision -- so naturally, the VCS had to one-up that. Its 1050 minutes this week are mostly thanks to Kaboom, while Silent Hunter singlehandedly scores high, securing handily the #2 spot for DOS.

[BillyHW]

Lots of Amiga this week. A system I always wanted, but never got. Sigh.

[Atarian7]

Lots of Amiga this week. A system I always wanted, but never got. Sigh.

I never even heard of Amiga.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom!- 751 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 226,958

 

 

Not as good as the past two weeks but still getting some decent scores.

 

 

[carlsson]

Amiga:

Speedball II - 25 min.

Apple II:

Choplifter - 4 min.

Impossible Mission - 3 min.

Channel F:

Dogfight [Videocart 4] - 8 min.

Pac-Man - 13 min.

Video Whizball - 24 min.

PET:

AFO - 3 min.

Alligator Moeras - 7 min.

Android Nim - 5 min.

Lawn! - 22 min.

Those games played through emulation, while sifting through 12 floppy disk images worth of PET games to determine which are so good they deserve writing to real floppy and run on my real PET 3032. More to come about that in the next week, hopefully.

RCA Studio II:

Bowling - 2 min.

Space War - 2 min.

VIC-20:

Metagalactic Llamas - 62 min.

Yes! I made it past 100K thanks to my new tactic introduced last week. New personal high is 115524 pts on level 9.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (May 25th through 31st)...

 

Amiga:

 

A prehistoric tale - 42 min.

 

Arcade:

 

Centipede - 218 min. in 4 sessions

 

Commodore 64:

 

Dino eggs - 52 min.

 

I played three different games this week. First I continued my run of "A prehistoric tale", but didn't manage to reach Level 20 again, so I gave it up after one game (which already took 42 minutes). For a comparison, I revisited the C-64 version of Dino Eggs, which A prehistoric tale was inspired of. This time I managed to fare better regarding score because I set my priorities on caging dinosaur babies instead of grabbing eggs, which yields more points. I think I reached 517 points even though I didn't even reach Level 9 this time.

 

I mainly got into Centipede because of the static recompilation done by Norbert Kehrer and published on his homepage. I took a peek into his Javascript version, wondering what optimizations could be made. I still count this as "arcade" because it's essentially running the arcade code, only that the 6502 mnemonics have been translated into Javascript, instruction by instruction. However, some of the sessions were done in MAME where I set the game to an easier level which is impossible with the Javascript version because you can't access the DIP switches there. I wanted to see how many color schemes the game has since it only displays 4 colors on screen at any time. There is a color scheme change with every round (each time you defeat one centipede), and there are 14 distinct color schemes, after which the colors repeat in the same order. Surprisingly, I reached Round 15 on the first time I tried this, but had a hard time getting there and beyond again, but I managed to do it meanwhile.

 

I was generally into optimizing code this week. I took a peek into the IL code and the machine code generated by .net and VB5 and found out that it's actually pretty effective, although there are pitfalls and things you can do to speed up your code greatly since some instructions generate long strings of instructions even though they appear pretty short in the source code... some of them being IIf's and accesses to form element properties. Knowing them, I started to optimize some of my programs so they get smaller and faster.

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

J.Ö.R.G.E.N.: 5 min

Space Rocks: 8 min

 

Tiny contribution this week due to lack of time. Been travelling and working a lot. The two homebrews above were played for participation points in the High Score Club. Everyone knows Space Rocks, but JÖRGEN is a lesser-known title. Not exactly brilliant, but it's a recommendation for a few quick and messy games every now and then.