+thegoldenband Posted November 10, 2015 Author Share Posted November 10, 2015 Here's the summary for Week 45, running from November 2 - 8. We logged 6764 minutes of eligible playtime, playing 89 games on a total of 19 systems. Top 10: 1. Crossfire (TI-99/4A) - 1070 2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 613 3. Sword of Vermilion (Genesis) - 607 4. Re-Volt (Dreamcast) - 600 5. Final Doom (PlayStation) - 375 6. Duke Nukem (Game Boy Color) - 332 7. Command & Conquer (PlayStation) - 282 8. Battleship (Game Boy Color) - 236 9. Boggle Plus (Game Boy) - 234 10. Silent Hill (PlayStation) - 209 Pre-NES top 10: 1. Crossfire (TI-99/4A) - 1070 2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 613 3. Henhouse (TI-99/4A) - 120 4. TI-Scramble (TI-99/4A) - 70 5. Dodgy Dealer (TI-99/4A) - 60 5. Reading On (TI-99/4A) - 60 7. Never-Lander (TI-99/4A) - 40 7. St. Nick (TI-99/4A) - 40 9. Q*Bert (Arcade) - 34 10. Millipede (Arcade) - 31 Top 10 systems: 1. TI-99/4A (1575) 2. PlayStation (866) 3. Atari 2600 (708) 4. Game Boy Color (678) 5. Genesis (607) 6. Dreamcast (600) 7. Game Boy (570) 8. PC (DOS) (520) 9. Arcade (239) 10. NES/Famicom (110) Well, TI-99/4A fans, you've finally gotten your wish, as the TI runs the table on all three charts! Its lead game, Crossfire, gets an instant trip to spot #179 in the 1000-minute club, with 1140 minutes logged to date. No other records were broken this week, though prior to this year's big times, our strong week of gameplay would've easily made the Top 10. However, Silent Hunter continues to, er, silently hunt, and is stealthily approaching the #3 spot on the all-time list -- which would be the first change in a long, long time to the top 3. 8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skippy B. Coyote Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 Great week everyone! The Top 10 lists were really diverse in every category this week, with all kinds of different systems and game genres being represented. I am curious though, thegoldenband, is there any record for a single person or household occupying multiple slots on the Top 10 most played games list for the week? I ask because I just realized that the bottom 6 games on this week's Top 10 games list all came from my household! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiLic0ne t0aD Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 Knightmare - ColecoVision ~ 4 hours San Fransico RUSH 2049 - Dreamcast ~ 2 hours Tony Hawk Pro Skater - Dreamcast ~ 1 hour Sonic Adventure - Dreamcast ~ 45 minutes Crazy Taxi - Dreamcast ~ 30 minutes Hydro Thunder - Dreamcast ~ 15 minutes 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karokoenig Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 However, Silent Hunter continues to, er, silently hunt, and is stealthily approaching the #3 spot on the all-time list -- which would be the first change in a long, long time to the top 3. We shall see... I'm currently in November '44 on my second playthrough. Some more playtime to come for sure. Please don't tell me any numbers on how close the game is to #3. I want to play it at my pace without bias. I have a war to fight, not an achievement to unlock . Now if you'll excuse me, I think I have a game of Battleship to get back to. I wonder if it's identical to "Battleships" on the Game Boy Classic. Sort of a campaign, with password system and extra weapons like multiple shots per round or similar, and more unlocking during the game? I think one was called "Harpoon"... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skippy B. Coyote Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 I wonder if it's identical to "Battleships" on the Game Boy Classic. Sort of a campaign, with password system and extra weapons like multiple shots per round or similar, and more unlocking during the game? I think one was called "Harpoon"... It's pretty darn similar! The gameplay mechanics are exactly the same, including the same weapon selection and campaign style gameplay that lets you "level up" to acquire more multi-shot weaponry and useful items like sonar scanners as you progress. The biggest difference is that the game is now in color and some of the graphics have been given an overhaul to make them more visually appealing. I'm not sure whether or not the computer AI was changed in the transition from the Game Boy to the Game Boy Color, but I do think the GBC version has a nice slow and steady difficulty curve. When I bought this game I didn't know anything about it and was expecting a digital version of the classic board game, so at first I was a little disappointed that it had all these new kinds of weaponry and items, but after spending a week playing it on my smoke breaks I gotta say that the new weapon and item additions really add a lot of strategic depth to the game and I've come to enjoy the Game Boy Color version of Battleship a lot more than the original board game. It's a definite keeper. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karokoenig Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 (edited) It's pretty darn similar! The gameplay mechanics are exactly the same, including the same weapon selection and campaign style gameplay that lets you "level up" to acquire more multi-shot weaponry and useful items like sonar scanners as you progress. [...] I gotta say that the new weapon and item additions really add a lot of strategic depth to the game and I've come to enjoy the Game Boy Color version of Battleship a lot more than the original board game. It's a definite keeper. Not so sure about the strategic depth you mentioned... I have played through the Game Boy Classic version, and I always had a feeling that the AI cheats. What I mean is that it looked to me that matches almost always ended on a razor's edge. Mostly in my favour, but still... Example: when I scored lots of big points early on (with me having sunk 3-4 ships and the computer none) it appeared to me the AI pulled out a 3-shot move and hit 3 different ships in that one move to even out the odds again. It was as if it switched from its usual stupid self to "I know exactly where your stuff is", only to return to the stupid version next turn. It wouldn't be too hard to program this, and it would make sense to keep matches interesting for the player. About halfway through, it started to annoy me a bit, though... Edited November 10, 2015 by karokoenig 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 To celebrate the date, today I have played Fallout. The Commodore 64 version, that is. Unfortunately it is dog slow so I had to enable 2000% warp mode so in practise every minute spent in the emulator should count for 20 in real life but I'll not insist on counting it in that way. :-) There is a similar game, Jumping Fallout that is more agile but not quite as visual and only allows rows to be shifted to the left. Yet I found it more challenging and spent a non-trivial amount of minutes. Exactly how much time I will invest in this game, the weekly summary at the end of the week will tell. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted November 11, 2015 Author Share Posted November 11, 2015 I am curious though, thegoldenband, is there any record for a single person or household occupying multiple slots on the Top 10 most played games list for the week? I ask because I just realized that the bottom 6 games on this week's Top 10 games list all came from my household! Unfortunately I don't collect that particular data, but 6/10 has to be high on the list. I can tell you that the odds of anyone having gotten 10/10 are pretty much zero, but we may have had 7 or 8/10. We shall see... I'm currently in November '44 on my second playthrough. Some more playtime to come for sure. Please don't tell me any numbers on how close the game is to #3. I want to play it at my pace without bias. I have a war to fight, not an achievement to unlock . Will do, or not do. Do you want me to tell you when you do cross past #3? To celebrate the date, today I have played Fallout. The Commodore 64 version, that is. Unfortunately it is dog slow so I had to enable 2000% warp mode so in practise every minute spent in the emulator should count for 20 in real life but I'll not insist on counting it in that way. :-) Oh, man, if I counted Video Chess for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision's USCF Chess that way, I'd have taken one or both games well past the 5000-minute mark. I can only speculate the numbers I'd have put up -- even in realtime, with the emulator cranked as fast as it could go, I brought both well over 1000 minutes. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karokoenig Posted November 11, 2015 Share Posted November 11, 2015 Will do, or not do. Do you want me to tell you when you do cross past #3? Nope. Let me know when the war is over . There's a good chance I will return to this game in the future anyway. There are some more difficulty settings I am quite tempted to try, raising overall difficulty way over 100%. As far as I understand it, those would turn the enemy escort ships into almost-god.like mode (which would be unrealistic from a historical point of view, since the Japanese never utilized anti-sub tactics to their full potential) Might turn the game into a downright unplayable mess, but we'll see. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skippy B. Coyote Posted November 11, 2015 Share Posted November 11, 2015 Not so sure about the strategic depth you mentioned... I have played through the Game Boy Classic version, and I always had a feeling that the AI cheats. What I mean is that it looked to me that matches almost always ended on a razor's edge. Mostly in my favour, but still... Example: when I scored lots of big points early on (with me having sunk 3-4 ships and the computer none) it appeared to me the AI pulled out a 3-shot move and hit 3 different ships in that one move to even out the odds again. It was as if it switched from its usual stupid self to "I know exactly where your stuff is", only to return to the stupid version next turn. It wouldn't be too hard to program this, and it would make sense to keep matches interesting for the player. About halfway through, it started to annoy me a bit, though... It sounds like they must have reworked the computer AI for the Game Boy Color version, because I'm currently on Mission 16 and I haven't experienced anything that would give me the impression that the computer truly knew where my ships were. The computer is starting to make smarter use of sonar and spreading out their shots more with the multishot weapons at this point, but it still feels like the computer is making educated guesses rather than actually knowing where my ships are. There are some games where I completely steamroll the computer with some lucky guesses, or they completely steamroll me, but I've yet to encounter a situation where the AI got "conveniently lucky" when I was ahead by a significant margin. I can't say for certain, but based on your experiences it does sound like the computer AI was reworked for the Game Boy Color version of Battleship. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted November 12, 2015 Share Posted November 12, 2015 I am pleased that the TI continues to do well. 90% of my hobby time this week has gone into organizing and promoting a Holiday demo programming contest for the TI. I spwnt waaaaay too much time programming a couple demos and almost as much putting together the packaging for the compendium release. If anyone ever wondered what could be accomplished in only 10 lines of BASIC code (TI Extended BASIC in this case) you should check out the TI forum and run a few of these demos. Some real skill being shown by some very clever programmers. I have played a bunch of St. Nick for the TI this week... That is about all I have had time for. I am in some serious Christmas spirit--seriously early this year. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 I have managed nothing but St. Nick this week... Hours of it... And it is not a very good game, I just cannot stop playing it for whatever reason. It is like a sickness.... 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skippy B. Coyote Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 (edited) I have managed nothing but St. Nick this week... Hours of it... And it is not a very good game, I just cannot stop playing it for whatever reason. It is like a sickness.... I know exactly how you feel, because this week I've been playing a ton of Star Wars: Yoda Stories on the Game Boy Color. I know it's not a good game, it controls poorly, and it's completely repetitive on pretty much every level from the gameplay to the music. And yet... I just can't stop playing it! For some bizzare reason beyond all logic or comprehension I just love this game and can't seem to put it down. lol I've played a few other games this week too, but Yoda Stories has made up the bulk of my gaming time. Edited November 14, 2015 by Jin 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BurritoBeans Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 Well, I'm not going to get any more playtime in this week as I'm going to be watching Desert Bus for Hope on Twitch as much as possible, so I'm just going to post stuff now before I'm watching the stream and forget to post. Atari 2600: Pitfall - 22 minutes Tennis - 15 minutes NES: Dungeon Magic - 40 minutes Swords & Serpents - 148 minutes Sharp X68000: Cameltry - 20 minutes TI-99/4 Tunnels of Doom - 215 minutes Shamus - 50 minutes Total playtime - 510 minutes Well, a decent week for games. I noticed all the TI-99 going around here, and decided to dust mine off after a year and play it for a bit. I've had the thing for forever but never noticed any community for it and couldn't find many games locally so I kinda just set it off to the side. I forgot how much fun Tunnels of Doom was to me, and Shamus was a game I never played before but it was fun. I also decided to play some more NES, and ran through a bit of Swords & Serpents. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karokoenig Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 (edited) Atari 2600 Congo Bongo: 7 min Fire Birds (aka Sky Alien): 5 min Stargunner: 10 min Sega Master System Alex Kidd in Shinobi World: 10 min James Bond 007 - The Duel: 4 min Lemmings: 5 min The Ottifants: 4 min Zillion: 7 min PC (DOS) Silent Hunter: 345 min A bit more variety this week, as I finally got round to cleaning and testing a few recent flea market finds. I found Stargunner just this morning. Paid 10 Euro for it without knowing anything about it. I would have probably paid even more, because it is another cart design I didn't have in my collection yet. The huge variety in cart designs for the 2600 are one of the most pleasurable aspects in collecting - at least for me. It's an R7 over there in your neck of the woods, and finding it here in Germany - in the wild even - is almost miraculous. Probably one of the rarest, if not THE rarest cart in my entire collection. Very happy to have it. Game's not terrible either. Repetetive, but ok. Apart from that, I have brought two new projects home, in the form of a Master System 1 and a totally rotten dirty, sticky Master System 2. Picked those up last week from two sellers with 7 games all in all, for a total of 17 Euro. I would have paid at least as much just for the games, so it was a good steal for me, even if none of the two systems work. After opening the MS2 and a good cleaning, it looks pretty good. Maybe it works . I'll hook it up it tomorrow to test it. The MS1 has a broken power supply. Anyone of you guys an idea if I can use any other Sega power supplies? I have Mega Drive 1, 2 and Mega CD, as well as Master System 2 bricks. None seems to have the exact values I need for the MS1. Any harm in doing it anyway, so I can at least test it? Edited November 14, 2015 by karokoenig 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shift838 Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 Ti-99/4A : Crossfire 230 minutes 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 The MS1 has a broken power supply. Anyone of you guys an idea if I can use any other Sega power supplies? I have Mega Drive 1, 2 and Mega CD, as well as Master System 2 bricks. Yes, Mega Drive 1 and Master System 1 share the same characteristics - centre negative polarity, about 9-10V DC. The MD1 power supply should have enough watts/ampere to support the MS1. Personally I tend to use ZX Spectrum power supplies with Famicom, SC-3000, Master System 1, Mega Drive 1, Super Cassette Vision and just about anything that matches the same spec (probably would work with a Jaguar too, if I had one). Supposedly there is a voltage regulator to get 5V inside, so 9 or 10V makes nearly no difference, perhaps it runs a bit cooler at a lower input voltage. As long as the number of watt/ampere is equal or larger than required, you're fine. Never rely on a weaker power supply than specified, it might take damage. Since I'm unsure if there will be any more play time for me this week, I'll post the summary as well: C64: Fallout [Addison-Wesley] - 6 min. Jumping Fallout [ballantine Books] - 12 min. Yup, that's it. Both originally are type-ins from books, and the Addison-Wesley game requires at least a 10-15 MHz overclocked C64 to be enjoyable which makes me curious to investigate the algorithm and see if it could be optimized. Then again it is a such simple type of game that it isn't worth putting much time into fixing. The other game plays faster, but isn't as visual and has limited movement. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 @BurritoBeans: The AtariAge /4A community is VERY active. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BurritoBeans Posted November 14, 2015 Share Posted November 14, 2015 @BurritoBeans: The AtariAge /4A community is VERY active. Yeah, I just noticed the subforum, must've been under a rock not seeing it there from the looks of it. I'll just have to check around more, I kinda want to figure out what I can do with the TI. Lesson of the day - Actually look at more than four areas of the forum 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted November 15, 2015 Share Posted November 15, 2015 Wont get much more time this week... Managed some good time on Crossfire today, but most of my week was programming Christmas demos and playing St. Nick on the TI (as you will see) TI-99/4A: Crossfire (120 minutes) St. Nick (540 minutes) That's it... Weird week, man... 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Ksarul Posted November 15, 2015 Share Posted November 15, 2015 I haven't had much playtime at all this week--vehicle maintenance got in the way. . . TI-99/4A Crossfire: 35 minutes (on an original physical TI cartridge no less--the only one I know of in circulation) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarian7 Posted November 15, 2015 Share Posted November 15, 2015 Atari 2600 Kaboom! - 875 minutes High score of the week: 349,983 I had a break in the middle of this game (I forget why.) so if it doesn't count then 298,566 would be my high score. Sad news: My Grandma passed away yesterday (November 14). It was the same exact date my aunt (her daughter) died back in 2009. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karokoenig Posted November 15, 2015 Share Posted November 15, 2015 My condolences, Atarian. A long life? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarian7 Posted November 15, 2015 Share Posted November 15, 2015 (edited) She was 84 , almost to 85. When my Granddad passed away he predicted she would live to be 100 and I really thought that was going to happen. The good thing is that it happened fast so she didn't have to suffer much. She had been diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma about a month ago and was getting ready to start chemo when her liver started to fail. She was on pain meds the last few days. Edited November 15, 2015 by Atarian7 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted November 15, 2015 Share Posted November 15, 2015 Condolences. Glad she lived a full life. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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