What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2016 (Season 9)

[carlsson]

@Atarian7: Are you going to the CCAG in Ohio this Saturday, July 23? They're having a Kaboom! tournament. I'm not sure what you could expect to win, but you might be the closest thing I know to a professional Kaboom! player.

 

(We once held a Tetris tournament at a retro gaming event, and believe it or not, a professional Tetris player attended on a whim!)

[Atarian7]

It sounds tempting but I don't know. Where in Ohio? The eastern side or close to it? I live in Maryland so I'm not that far from it.

 

I went to their page and couldn't find anything about the tournament. Is it going to be on the 2600 or another Atari console?

 

Never mind about the 2600 question. I just found the answer and it is on the 2600.

Edited July 20, 2016 by Atarian7

[carlsson]

North Olmsted Soccer Sportsplex, looks to be just to the west of Cleveland. Good luck if you're going!

[+wongojack]

My extended family was all in North Olmsted . . . only one left though.

[Atarian7]

Will the Republican National Convention still be going on this weekend ? That's in Cleveland. Wouldn't want to run into any protestor violence. Plus if I went I would have to go Friday and spend the night

because a 5 hour drive, 5 hours of Kaboom!, and a 5 hour drive home would be too much for one day. I wonder if I would be able to find an inexpensive motel.

[carlsson]

The convention ends today, Thursday July 21.

[Nutsy Doodleheimer]

Here is what I have played for the week. Been on an arcade frenzy.

 

Colecovision:

 

Gorf: 10 Minutes

Donkey Kong: 10 Minutes

 

Vectrex:

 

Pole Position: 10 Minutes

Berzerk: 5 Minutes

 

Mame/Arcade:

 

Space Firebird: 15 Minutes

Kangaroo: 15 Minutes

Mario Bros: 20 Minutes

Night Driver: 10 Minutes

Vs. Super Mario Bros: 25 Minutes

King and Balloon: 10 Minutes

Rampage World Tour: 10 Minutes

Pole Position: 5 Minutes

The Simpsons: 15 Minutes

Vs. Mach Rider: 10 Minutes

Vs. Duck Hunt: 5 Minutes

Vs. Excitebike: 5 Minutes

Vs. Balloon Fight: 10 Minutes

Berzerk: 15 Minutes

Star Wars: 10 Minutes

Phozon: 10 Minutes

Boot Hill: 5 Minutes

Lunar Rescue: 5 Minutes

Gravitar: 5 Minutes

Strike Zone Baseball: 45 Minutes

Satan of Saturn: 15 Minutes

Zoo Keeper: 10 Minutes

Timber: 10 Minutes

Pleiades: 10 Minutes

Phoenix: 10 Minutes

Wizard of Wor: 5 Minutes

Journey: 25 Minutes

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Hover Bovver - 12 min.

M.U.L.E. - 70 min.

PC DOS:

Castle of Dr. Brain - 181 min.

Stunts / 4D Sports - 172 min.

So a friend of mine had a barbeque party last Tuesday. At the end of the evening, we played some modern-ish computer games including The Cave (2013), directed by Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame. Something about that game, the explanations what each puzzle is about, reminded me of something I used to play many years ago. After a bit of searching, I found Castle of Dr. Brain, which I finished on Novice level with 149 points. I'm not sure how many points you can get, but the fact that the game doesn't seem to recognize PS/2 mouse and that the Next186 core running on my FleaFPGA doesn't seem to support emulation of serial mouse, caused me to play through the game only using cursor keys which is a bit crude compared to using a mouse.

I also created some new tracks in Stunts and spent some more time with those. Finally a bit of Atari action on a Sunday afternoon after having spent most of the day tidying up one of my two desks.

[Opry99er]

TI-99/4A:

 

Barrage (70 minutes)

Henhouse (25 minutes)

Jedi Gauntlet-Demo (50 minutes)

Mad Marvin's Great Escape (60 minutes)

NeverLander (35 minutes)

Tunnels of Doom (75 minutes)

Wizard's Doom (245 minutes)

 

 

Intellivision:

 

Christmas Carol (30 minutes)

Snafu (50 minutes)

[karokoenig]

My times:

 

None. Not even had time to produce a token score for the High Score Club. On the plus side: Much of my free time went into watching my two-year-old having lots of fun and sleeping in a tent right in the middle of nowhere for the first time in his life. Priceless.

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Dragster - 6 minutes

Grand Prix - 10 minutes

Keystone Kapers - 15 minutes

Missile Command - 10 minutes

Mouse Trap - 45 minutes

Pac-Man - 30 minutes

Space Invaders - 65 minutes

 

ATARI 5200:

Pengo - 20 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Astro Fighter - 20 minutes

Pole Position II - 3 minutes

Wasp! - 10 minutes

 

COLECOVISION

Mouse Trap - 95 minutes

[Kurt_Woloch]

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

 

Arcade:

Mario Bros. - 42 min.

 

Atari 2600:

Mario Bros. - 36 min.

 

Atari 7800:

Mario Bros. - 142 min. in 3 sessions

Mario Bros. (Hack) - 12 min.

 

Colecovision:

Mario Bros. (Early Demo) - 23 min.

 

Commodore 64:

Mario Bros. (Atarisoft) - 49 min.

Toy Bizarre - 205 min. in 5 sessions

 

NES:

Mario Bros. - 18 min.

Mario Bros. Classic - 65 min.

 

Online (non-eligible):

Endless Expansion - 145 min.

Cargo Bridge - 8 min.

 

ZX-Spectrum:

Mario Bros. - 19 min.

 

This week, I mostly played various versions of Mario Bros. But first I played "Endless Expansion" until I reached a point where I had created most of the things you can create in this game. In "Cargo bridge", you have to build bridges using various planks, and the bridges should be stable enough not to break under the load.

 

And now for the different versions of Mario Bros, in the order I played them. I played those versions where the system is able to deliver a convincing impression of the game.

 

Arcade: This is, of course, the original version all others are compared to.

NES: There actually seems to be 3 versions of that game... one was made in 1983, then a Japanese version containing ads appeared in 1988 and was again reworked for the 1993 Classic version, which is called "Mario Bros Classic".

 

The 1983 version is already pretty close to the arcade, but has got some differences... most notably, the turtles have got different graphics, having their head on top of the body while those in the arcade has got it in front of the body, and the last moving turtle is purple with a blue head instead of changing just the shell into red. Slipice is thin and skinny, and the round structure is different with the third bonus round already occuring in Phase 13. Also, the fireballs are smaller and the horizontally moving fireballs move much slower. These differences, strangely, also appear in the Atari 7800 version of the game, to the point that I think the makers of the 7800 port actually took the first NES version as a reference rather than the arcade machine.

 

I didn't try the 1988 version, but in the 1993 version, all of those differences have been corrected. Also the crabs now appear flicker-free while they always flicker in the 1983 version. But new differences have been introduced... Mario and Luigi can now turn around in mid-air, which isn't possible in any other version of the game. Also the round structure incorporates a third turtle round as Phase 3. And the game is pretty fast. It helps if you play it on a PAL machine (which it is probably intended for), but even then it seems to be faster than the arcade original... reminds me a bit of Ocean's version actually. The 7800 version is much slower than that. Still the 1993 version seems to be the only port having the intermissions and the iceicles appearing after the 3rd bonus round.

 

I already described the 7800 version last week, the only thing to add is that the different graphics at least in part is explainable in that the differences from the first NES version have been reproduced here. But I played a hack which corrects some of those differences, for instance the turtle graphics. The hack is to be found in this thread:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/216044-another-7800-game-to-update-like-donkey-kong-xm/page-3?do=findComment&comment=2968737

 

The C-64 version by Atarisoft is much more playable than the one by Ocean. The Atarisoft version is rather on the slow side, but contrary to the 7800 version, it has taken the actual arcade game as a reference, that is, all the differences I mentioned for the first NES and the 7800 version don't apply here. The sprites are actually pretty decently converted from the arcade version, much more so than on the 7800 and even on the Ocean version. The physics feels right and there's no sign of sloppy programming. There have been some simplifications made, maybe in order to fit the whole game into 16K of ROM, maybe because it's actually only a prototype which was yet to be finished. The intermissions are missing (like in all other versions except the NES Classic version), as is the screen counting up the coins after the bonus round. Instead you get the points for them right as you catch them, only the bonus points get added in the end... but contrary to the Ocean version, they add up to the correct amount. Also the music is only monophonic The game contains graphics of frozen platforms, but the corresponding physics doesn't seem to have been implemented. Slipice appears (as wide as he should be) and behaves correctly except that it never stops and actually freezes the platforms. But you'll only find out if you get that far in the game. Still, the simplifications only seem to affect non-critical game play elements, and what's there concerning gameplay does work pretty well and is fun. I remember playing this version very often together with my mother back in the day.

 

The "Early Demo" on the Colecovision looks promising. I know that it has meanwhile been finished, but I don't have this finished version. What's there in the demo looks pretty good (even the intermissions are there), there are just some flaws, but most of them have probably been fixed in the final version.

 

Atari 2600: This one suffers from a greatly simplified game logic. The physics is mostly incorrect, and there's only one enemy per level at a time (not counting the fireballs), to the point that the enemies actually turn around at the end of a ledge instead of falling down if there's an enemy on the next lower floor. This version is fun, but I think it could have been much better if the programmer could have implemented the gameplay correctly (probably in more than only 8K ROM). The game also gets harder later on in that the fireballs speed up (which they never do in other versions).

 

Spectrum: Oh, what a disaster! The turtles look nice, but Mario doesn't really look like Mario, and worst of all there's a serious flaw... I sometimes jumped up with an enemy right on top of me, but the enemy wasn't affected by this! And it seems to be random if Mario hits the enemy or not! The sprites are also pretty big which unfortunately means you don't have much space to manoeuver. That's why I left this version alone pretty quickly.

 

Finally, I played Toy Bizarre on the C-64, which is somewhat similar to Mario Bros. in that you first have to stun your enemies (for instance by jumping over them) before you can pick them up. I finally made use of a built-in trainer with infinite lives so I got to see all the rounds there are.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 297 minutes

Megamania - 82 minutes

River Raid - 25 minutes

Sky Jinks - 124 minutes

Grand Prix - 301 minutes

Decathlon - 1 minute

 

 

Kaboom! High score of the week: 226,824

 

 

[oyamafamily]

EVIDENCES OF THE WEEK:

 

1) 2600 Space Invaders

 

2) 2600 Mouse Trap

 

3) 5200 Pengo Novice

 

4) 7800 Wasp!

 

5) Colecovision Mouse Trap (statistical table accompanies this video)

[+Ksarul]

This week's contributions from my house came from the boys, as I didn't get to play at all. . .

 

TI-99/4A

 

Killer Caterpillar: 15 minutes

Jet Set Willy: 30 minutes

Bouncy: 30 minutes

Pac Man: 9 minutes

Pole Position: 6 minutes

TI Scramble: 61 minutes

Road Hunter: 5 minutes

Titanium: 6 minutes

Picnic Paranoia: 1 minute

Arcturus: 10 minutes

Car Wars: 6 minutes

Burger Builder: 10 minutes

Sabre Wulf: 5 minutes

Jet Pac: 8 minutes

Flappy Bird: 10 minutes

 

They had a lot of fun this week!

[Iwantgames:)]

Sega Genesis -

 

Sonic 1 - 120min

Streets of Rage 2 - 55min

Columns - 20min

 

 

65xe -

 

Alien Ambush - 6min

Boulders & Bombs - 15min

Claim Jumper - 5min

Fantastic Voyage - 5min

Necromancer - 15min

Pitstop - 10min

River Raid - 20min

Space Invaders - 10min

 

 

2600 -

 

Pitfall - 30min

 

 

Wonderswan -

 

Lode Runner - 20min

Makaimura - 30min

Space Invaders - 15min

 

Almost forgot. TI-99/4A -

 

Jedi Gauntlet Demo - 75min

Edited July 25, 2016 by Iwantgames:)

[Skippy B. Coyote]

When I was contemplating what to play at the beginning of the week I really thought that I was going to play something other than the Game Boy and Game Boy Color this time around, but old habits die hard.




Arcade
Centipede - 13 minutes
Centipede (played on Atari Anniversary Advance for Game Boy Advance) - 4 minutes
Ms. Pac-Man - 11 minutes
Ms. Pac-Man (played on Namco Museum for Game Boy Advance) - 12 minutes
Pac-Man - 10 minutes
Super Breakout (played on Atari Anniversary Advance for Game Boy Advance) - 4 minutes

Game Boy
Alien 3 - 31 minutes
Arcade Classics: Super Breakout & Battlezone - 14 minutes
Boggle Plus - 26 minutes
Gremlins 2: The New Batch - 104 minutes
Mortal Kombat II - 6 minutes
Solar Striker - 37 minutes
Space Invaders - 36 minutes

Game Boy Color
Aliens: Thanatos Encounter - 250 minutes
Frogger - 10 minutes
Hexcite: The Shapes of Victory - 56 minutes
Monopoly - 114 minutes
Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition - 17 minutes
Pong: The Next Level - 36 minutes
Super Breakout - 10 minutes

PlayStation
Alien Trilogy - 41 minutes
Dino Crisis - 365 minutes
Jet Moto - 135 minutes


Total Play Time This Week
1,342 minutes (22 hours 22 minutes) [1,342 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
PlayStation: 541 minutes
Game Boy Color: 493 minutes
Game Boy: 254 minutes
Arcade: 54 minutes



This week marks the third week in a row that 100% of my household's video game play time has been tracker eligible, and a very good week it was! Last week I was planning on playing something other than the Game Boy / Color this time around due to my disappointment over my long awaited backlit and biverted Game Boy being impossible to see in bright or natural light, but that situation was quickly (mostly) remedied. After a little tinkering I realized that I could make it playable both indoors and outside under bright light by turning the polarization film behind the screen 90° back to it's original orientation and removing the bivert chip (turning it into a regular old backlit Game Boy with no bivert), so I decided to keep it. Unfortunately I didn't realize that a couple of the traces running from the flex connector socket had been cut to allow the bivert chip to do it's thing, so when I removed the bivert chip that cut off the video signal to the screen and now I'll have to wait until the beginning of next month when I'll have the funds to buy a soldering iron to repair the cut traces before I can play it again. That's alright though, if I can just be patient for a week then I'll finally have a backlit Game Boy that works just as well indoors and out; and that definitely got me excited to play some more Game Boy / Color games.

To keep this post reasonably short I'll link to the write ups I did on most of the Game Boy / Color games I played this week here in the Games Beaten in 2016 thread for those interested in reading about them, and use my space in this thread to mention one other gaming related event this week that got me super excited. After most of a year of having a dead battery in my Game Boy Advance SP I was finally able to get a new one that held a charge properly this week! I had ordered 3 different GBA SP batteries off both eBay and Amazon over the last year, but they all seemed to be old stock that had been sitting in a warehouse for the past decade and none of them ever held a charge for more than half an hour to an hour at most. But, as luck would have it, this week I happened upon a company called KMD that is currently producing brand new batteries for the GBA SP! I ordered one through Lukie Games and was very pleased when it arrived in the mail and had the production date of April 2016 stamped on it. After installing it in my SP and letting it spend a few hours on the charger it's been working great, and I'm utterly thrilled to be able to play my GBA SP again without having to be tethered to the wall! The lesson learned from all this: If you're going to buy a replacement battery for your GBA SP then make sure you get one produced recently that has the manufacturing date stamped on it. Most of those cheapo Chinese batteries floating all over eBay and Amazon have been sitting in warehouses for 10 years or more and won't hold a charge for long, so pay a little more for a battery from a reputable manufacturer like KMD that you know was produced recently.

To wrap things up for the week, the misses spent a fair bit of time with her system of choice—the PlayStation—and ended up fully playing through Dino Crisis two more times (for a grand total of 4 times over the last month) to see all the different endings and unlock infinite Grenade Launcher; putting it to use on her last play through. She also logged a little time in Alien Trilogy, since last week marked the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of the movie Aliens and playing some Aliens games in addition to watching all 5 of the Alien movies again (which we did together over the course of the week) seemed like a pretty good way to celebrate. Lastly, I was really pleased to have gotten the chance to share one of my favorite PlayStation games from back in the day with the misses this week when I stumbled on a copy of Jet Moto for $2 at a local game store. While she's not generally a big fan of racing games she did have a some fun with this one and we ended up playing it together for a couple hours. I had forgotten just how difficult the single player tournament mode was, but I think it's still a great game nevertheless and I was really happy to be able to share it with my better half.

 

Well, I think that about covers it for this week! I hope you're all surviving the summer heat alright and happy gaming to you and yours!

[+thegoldenband]

Not too much from me this week:

 

NES:

Action 52 - 235 min.

Game Boy:

Qbillion - 121 min.

[+wongojack]

Just more "modern" gaming for me this week. I played a ton of Hands Of Fate on XOne, and I also played a bunch more of Beyond: Two Souls on PS3. I REALLY like Beyond.

 

I pulled out a PS3 compilation disk that had When Vikings Attack, Fat Princess, Tokyo Jungle, and Sound Shapes. The highlight of that collection was easily Sound Shapes which is a pretty cool excuse to listen to your PS3 beep and boop playing music while you jump on platforms.

[BurritoBeans]

It was mostly modern games for me, but I got a little bit of time in.

 

Atari 2600:

Sky Jinks - 30 minutes

 

Super NES:

Super Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars - 140 minutes

 

Yeah. Just two systems, but oh well. Sky Jinks got played more because I felt like seeing how low I could get my time to be and to try the other stuff, it's pretty alright stuff. Super Mario RPG also got played because I felt like playing something different - I fogot how it's a pretty solid and fun RPG - I think I'll be giving it a playthough for next week. So yeah, that's pretty much it - short 'n sweet this time around.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 30, running from July 18 - 24. We logged 5746 minutes of eligible play, playing 124 games on a total of 19 systems.

Top 10:

1. Dino Crisis (PlayStation) - 365

2. Grand Prix (Atari 2600) - 311

3. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 297

4. Aliens: Thanatos Encounter (Game Boy Color) - 250

5. Wizard's Doom (TI-99/4A) - 245

6. Action 52 (NES/Famicom) - 235

7. Toy Bizarre (C64) - 205

8. Castle of Dr. Brain (PC (DOS)) - 181

9. Stunts / 4D Sports (PC (DOS)) - 172

10. Sky Jinks (Atari 2600) - 154

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Grand Prix (Atari 2600) - 311

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 297

3. Wizard's Doom (TI-99/4A) - 245

4. Toy Bizarre (C64) - 205

5. Sky Jinks (Atari 2600) - 154

6. Mario Bros. (Atari 7800) - 142

7. Jedi Gauntlet (TI-99/4A) - 125

8. Mouse Trap (ColecoVision) - 95

9. Megamania (Atari 2600) - 82

10. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 75

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1107)

2. TI-99/4A (847)

3. PlayStation (541)

4. Game Boy Color (493)

5. Arcade (431)

6. Game Boy (375)

7. PC (DOS) (353)

8. NES/Famicom (318)

9. C64 (254)

10. Genesis (195)

I believe this is the most games we've ever seen in a single week! 124 different titles grace our charts, with Dino Crisis emerging as #1 in a well-balanced field, while Kaboom and its host system crown the other two charts.

Meanwhile two members of the Top 10 also reach the 1000-minute mark: Wizard's Doom, with 1190 minutes, and Stunts / 4D Sports, with 1141 minutes. Starting to get crowded at the top, with 222 members now enrolled in that four-digit club.

[Opry99er]

124 is A LOT of games... Too cool.

[carlsson]

The memory is good, but short! As late as last year, we topped more than 200 games in a week.

I haven't kept track of number per games this year, so possibly this is our highest count so far in 2016.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/247463-what-have-you-actually-played-tracker-for-2016-season-9/page-9?do=findComment&comment=3457380

 

On the other hand, perhaps Thegoldenband tries to eridicate the memory of updating 213 entries, of which 115 (54%) were BurritoBeans going through the majority of the NEC PC-9801 library. While I didn't try to look it up, it most likely is so that BurritoBeans has the record for individual playing the most number of games in a single week, even if many were only 1-5 minutes each.

Edited July 28, 2016 by carlsson

[+thegoldenband]

The memory is good, but short! As late as last year, we topped more than 200 games in a week.

I haven't kept track of number per games this year, so possibly this is our highest count so far in 2016.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/247463-what-have-you-actually-played-tracker-for-2016-season-9/page-9?do=findComment&comment=3457380

 

On the other hand, perhaps Thegoldenband tries to eridicate the memory of updating 213 entries, of which 115 (54%) were BurritoBeans going through the majority of the NEC PC-9801 library. While I didn't try to look it up, it most likely is so that BurritoBeans has the record for individual playing the most number of games in a single week, even if many were only 1-5 minutes each.

 

Ah, good catch -- you're quite right! I used the search pattern "eligible play, playing 1" in my records to find weeks with 100+ games, but

(1) I didn't even consider that there'd be a 200+ game week in there (indeed, how soon we forget!),

(2) I overlooked that I evidently changed over to the phrasing "eligible playtime, playing" for 2015, and

(3) it wouldn't have mattered anyway since I used a different phrasing the week we broke the record ("eligible playtime, playing a jaw-dropping") and that wouldn't show up on my search pattern (which I guess is a testament to the value of doing things the same way every week?).

 

So, this past week is just #3 in the all-time standings, from what I can tell: Week 42 in 2015 is #1 with 213 games, and Week 43 of 2015 is #2 with 183 games.

 

BTW BurritoBeans's big week was actually super-easy to input since they were all new games, so I just had to do a couple quick search-and-replaces for formatting and could paste them straight into my spreadsheet.

[carlsson]

In 2015 our numbers were minimum 20 games, maximum 213 games, on average 64.73 games per week.

 

So far during 2016, our numbers are minimum 31 games, maximum 124 games, on average 80.76 games per week.

Or put in other words: What used to be a really busy week three years ago, today is the average.

 

This tracker just grows and grows. I think the least we could do is to crowdfund a nice cake for Thegoldenband.

 

1. 213 games (Week 42, 2015)

2. 183 games (Week 43, 2015)

3. 151 games (Week 1, 2010) <- the only really old number I reasonably well could deduct

4. 124 games (Week 30, 2016)

5. 121 games (Week 15, 2016)

6. 114 games (Week 9, 2016)

7. 113 games (Week 28, 2015)

Edited July 28, 2016 by carlsson