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

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 49, running from November 28 - December 4. We logged 3156 minutes of eligible play, playing 77 games on a total of 13 systems.

Top 10:

1. Spy Hunter (Arcade) - 358

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 353

3. Stay Frosty 2: Stay Frostier (Atari 2600) - 275

4. Scramble (Atari 7800) - 257

5. Tomb Raider III (PlayStation) - 240

6. Nobunaga's Ambition (Genesis) - 206

7. Funky Fish (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 157

8. Top Rank Tennis (Game Boy) - 98

9. Crystals of Zong (C64) - 79

10. Brik (Atari 2600) - 76

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Spy Hunter (Arcade) - 358

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 353

3. Stay Frosty 2: Stay Frostier (Atari 2600) - 275

4. Scramble (Atari 7800) - 257

5. Funky Fish (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 157

6. Crystals of Zong (C64) - 79

7. Brik (Atari 2600) - 76

8. Asteroids (Atari 2600) - 70

9. D.K. VCS (Atari 2600) - 43

10. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 40

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1218)

2. Arcade (511)

3. Atari 7800 (391)

4. PlayStation (282)

5. Genesis (211)

6. Emerson Arcadia 2001 (159)

7. Game Boy (154)

8. C64 (79)

9. Atari 5200 (55)

10. VIC-20 (39)

Despite a massive showing from the Atari 2600 this week, the 1983 arcade game Spy Hunter just noses out in front of Kaboom to take the #1 spot on both individual charts.

We also gain two new entries into the 1000-minute club this week, as PlayStation's leaping lady Tomb Raider III and the Genesis's daring daimyo Nobunaga's Ambition join with 1194 and 1073 minutes respectively logged to date, making them #244 and #245 in the rolls.

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 7800 (from Prosystem VCS Console):

Pole Position II - 26 minutes

Scammer Brawler - 10 minutes

 

Scammer Brawler Screenshots

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600:

Firefighter: 6 min

Frogger II: 8 min

Kampf dem Steinfresser (aka Boom Bang, aka Crackpots): 7 min

 

Atari 7800:

Centipede: 5 min

Choplifter: 7 min

Ms Pac Man: 7 min

 

Did more testing of my new 7800, with more games and different controllers. Bought Choplifter off ebay for a reasonable price, and man, is it a hard version of that game.

 

Again, no time for my other, longer-term "projects"

[+Darrin9999]

Colecovision:

 

1. Bosconian: 25 min

2. Dragonfire - 80 min

3. Sir Lancelot - 110 min

 

 

Atari Jaguar:

 

1. Rebooteroids - 83 min

[carlsson]

C64:

Pitstop 1 - 2 min.

Smurfs [C.A.W & M. Brand] - 117 min.

Wonderland [Georg Rottensteiner] - 5 min.

Sometimes the games one ends up playing, were not the ones you expected to play. I got stuck in the very simple, unlicensed and home made Smurfs game, which follows the tradition of the similar Snoopy game, also a bit like a Hunchback or B.C.'s Quest in that you complete one screen at a time, mostly moving forwards. I played until level 10, but have no idea how to solve that room - perhaps it is a bugged version or not supposed to be solvable. I observed there are a handful of similarly unlicensed Smurf games on the C64, thus I had to specify the names of the programmers to keep them apart.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (December 5th through 11th)...

 

Emerson Arcadia 2001:

Funky Fish - 152 min. in 4 sessions

Super Bug - 117 min.

Turpin/Turtles - 19 min. in 2 sessions

 

Online (non-eligible):

Google Santa Tracker - 17 min.

 

The only classic game system I played on this week was the Emerson Arcadia 2001. First I continued to play Funky Fish, and at the last attempt I actually used a cheat to complete the game, which means completing Round 7, after which Round 1 reappears. In Turtles, I didn't get that far... I think I reached Round 3 or 4. I can remember completing that game some years ago, and it's simply Game Over after Round 8. The round progression in Super Bug is a bit odd in that the rounds are called F, G, H, I... and so on through all the displayable characters, restarting at the beginning when the end of the character set gets reached.

 

Other than that, I played one game in Google Santa Tracker where you have to repeat dance moves by "coding" the required steps together and also repeating some steps, after which you can view a Javascript version of your code.

[BurritoBeans]

I only played one game that counts.

 

NES:

Crystalis - 1100 minutes

 

It's probably not exactly 1100 but whatever, all I know is I put a ton of time into the game - not exactly 20 hours but really close anyways. I've had a box and manual and all that stuff for the longest time but just got a cart for $5 on Wednesday when I popped by work after school - figured I'd get it eventually, and I did just that. Kinda silly, but I remember when I was little we would go to my grandparents on my dads side all the time - the adults would watch the Pittsburgh Steelers game, and my brothers/a few cousins/I would go into a room next to the kitchen where we'd play their one game system (a NES) for hours. Crystalis, apart from Ninja Gaiden which my cousin Dan could speedrun and Super Mario Bros. 3 which we all loved, was one of their only games so I think I ran through it twice or so. I remembered it being a bit of confusion, and I remember why now - it's all really linear with events, you have to kind-of go in a certain order/path to get through the thing. Still, it's a ton of fun to have a game I used to play while in elementary school again and I'm happy with that.

Edited December 11, 2016 by BurritoBeans

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 230 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 76,992

 

 

[zylon]

5200-

 

Berzerk- 35min

 

TG16-

 

Tatsujin- 10min (while hacking emulators into old xbox)

 

not eligible, but damn fun:

 

360-

Zombie Strippers Ate My Brains- 45min (FPS featuring zombie strippers in Vegas)

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

Atari 2600:

Airlock - 12 min.

NES:

Crackout - 3 min.

Genesis:

Zoop - 9 min.

Game Boy:

Top Rank Tennis - 200 min.

Won some matches (and lost a few too) in Top Rank Tennis, beat Airlock on the hardest difficulty...and played enough Zoop to remind myself of why I hate it.

[+wongojack]

Arcade

Spy Hunter 4

 

2600

Spider Fighter 161

 

Gameboy Color

Game and Watch Gallery III 35

Little Mermaid II Pinball Frenzy 25

 

I kept up with Spider Fighter after Atarian7 noticed it on my list from last week. Left difficulty A is much harder. I usually get bored with the default, and if the game is too easy for me, that is saying something. Despite owning the original cart, I played it on the Flashback portable, my MAME cab, and on my laptop with a Legacy Engineer USB joystick. I guess next week maybe I'll get the actual cart out.

 

Little Mermaid Pinball is a game I bid on because I was also bidding on other auctions from the same seller. It is a solid pinball game and does a nice job playing a variety of songs from the movies. There are LM1 & LM2 themed tables.

 

Those 4 mins of Spy Hunter were on the GBA port of the arcade game. It is mostly faithful to the arcade version but does not include the music which really makes you feel ripped off.

[Nutsy Doodleheimer]

Didn't play much this week as I have been busy working. 75 hours the week before last and 83 hours this past week.

 

Arcade/Mame

 

Mario Bros: 45 Minutes

[Skippy B. Coyote]

A lot of variety around here this week as I continued to explore the Atari 7800 game library, while the misses put our Harmony cart to good use enjoying some Atari 2600 homebrews in between Tomb Raider III sessions.




Arcade
Frogger (played on Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced for Game Boy Advance) - 9 minutes
Scramble (played on Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced for Game Boy Advance) - 9 minutes

Atari 2600
Berzerk - 10 minutes

D.K. VCS - 29 minutes

Frogger - 21 minutes

The Official Frogger (Starpath Supercharger) - 9 minutes

Pole Position - 31 minutes

Scramble - 60 minutes

Sentinel - 27 minutes

Space Invaders Arcade - 13 minutes

Space Invaders Deluxe - 3 minutes

Space Rocks - 36 minutes

Atari 7800 (emulated on Nintendo Wii)
Asteroids - 16 minutes

Beef Drop - 18 minutes

b*nQ - 9 minutes

Centipede - 7 minutes

Crack'ed - 17 minutes

Commando - 15 minutes

Donkey Kong - 12 minutes

Donkey Kong Junior - 28 minutes

Fatal Run - 15 minutes

Frenzy! - 32 minutes

Froggie - 22 minutes

Ikari Warriors - 32 minutes

Jinks - 39 minutes

Klax - 13 minutes

Motor Psycho - 14 minutes

Pole Position II - 39 minutes

Rampage - 20 minutes

Robotron 2084 - 24 minutes

Scramble - 147 minutes

Space Invaders - 38 minutes

Water Ski - 4 minutes

Xevious - 16 minutes

Game Boy
All-Star Baseball 99 - 70 minutes

Tetris - 20 minutes

NES (emulated on Nintendo Wii)
Rad Racer - 11 minutes

Rampage - 6 minutes

Smash T.V. - 8 minutes

 

PlayStation

Tomb Raider III - 399 minutes

 

Sega Master System (emulated on Nintendo Wii)

Hang-On - 4 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man - 6 minutes

OutRun - 15 minutes

Rampage - 17 minutes


Total Play Time This Week
1,390 minutes (23 hours 10 minutes) [1,390 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Atari 7800: 577 minutes
PlayStation: 399 minutes
Atari 2600: 239 minutes
Game Boy: 90 minutes

Sega Master System: 42 minutes

NES: 25 minutes

Arcade: 18 minutes

 

 

 

It was another week with 100% of my household's gaming time being tracker eligible, thanks to my continued interest in trying out every Atari 7800 game and doing a few Atari 7800 / NES / Sega Master System game comparisons while I was at it. I played way too many games this past week to discuss all of them, but the highlights were definitely the original production and homebrew Atari 7800 arcade ports. They were almost all fantastic, with the exception of the recent homebrew port of Frogger (titled "Froggie") which seemed to play slow and laggy on my Wii. The rest were awesome though, and I've been especially digging Pole Position II and Ikari Warriors. Speaking of Pole Position II, this week I did do a comparison between the premiere racing games on the 7800, NES, and Master System to see which system had the best racing game of the era. The games that I compared were Pole Position II on the Atari 7800, Rad Racer on the NES, and OutRun on the Master System. They were all great games in their own right, but ultimately there was no contest between OutRun on the Master system and it's competition. The graphics in OutRun were absolutely astounding for an 8-bit game, the music was very nice as well, and the game played wonderfully. My pick for the #2 spot did go to Pole Position II though, because while Rad Racer did have better graphics I still found Pole Position II to be much more approachable from a difficulty standpoint and thus a lot more fun to play.

 

The other game comparison I did this week was between the Atari 7800, NES, and Sega Master System versions of the classic arcade smash hit (all puns intended) Rampage. Oddly enough the results of this comparison were exactly the same as the results from the racing game comparison! The Master System won out with it's graphical excellence and arcade accuracy, the 7800 version came in second for it's inclusion of all 3 characters and enjoyable gameplay, and the NES once again found itself in last place in spite of it's nice graphics due to the absence of Ralph the Werewolf. When it comes to Rampage I always play as Ralph, so his omission from the NES version really butchered the game for me.

 

Lastly, the game I played the most of this week (aside from the full 162 game season of All-Star Baseball that I'm continuing to play through here and there on the Game Boy) was Scramble for the Atari 7800. It's still the game being played of the Atari 7800 High Score Club until this coming Wednesday, and I spent much of my gaming time over the past week practicing every day to try and take the #1 high score spot for the week. It ended up being a lot more grueling of a task than I had imagined it would be, to the extent that at one point after intensely focusing on the game for too long I actually started hallucinating some really strange optical illusions when I looked away from the screen (more info on that here). Ultimately all the effort was worth it though, because as of this morning I finally managed to take the #1 spot with a high score of 94,530. Who knows how long I'll stay in first place, since I don't doubt that a few of the other players participating in the HSC are capable of getting a higher score than mine with enough patience and perseverance, but it sure would feel good to be the week's winner just once if I can pull it off.

 

As far as the misses' gaming this week goes, it was fairly similar to last week. She played a ton of Tomb Raider III on the PlayStation and also spent a lot of time putting the Harmony Encore cartridge for our Atari 2600 to good use, playing various homebrew ports of some of her

favorite arcade games and trying a few new games as well. Neither of us were even aware that we could use the Harmony Encore cart to play Starpath Supercharger games until this week, and suffice it to say she loved the Starpath version of Frogger. Space Rocks, D.K. VCS, and Space Invaders Arcade continued to be big hits with the little lady, though she does find Space Invaders Arcade to be a bit too easy and can roll the score easily whenever she plays it. This week she also tried out Scramble and (much to my surprise) had a lot of fun with it, continuing to come back for "just one more game" until she was eventually able to beat every stage and complete the mission. She's not usually a big fan of horizontal or vertical scrolling spaceship shooters so I wasn't expecting her to really get into Scramble, but I guess watching me play the Atari 7800 version off and on all week got her curious about it. I'm really glad that she had such a good time with it too, since both the Atari 7800 and 2600 versions of Scramble are definitely some of my personal favorite homebrew releases as of late.

 

 

Well, I think that about wraps it up for this week! So far next week looks to be more of the same from my household, though with some of the things we have coming in the mail over the next week there may be quite a bit less time spent emulating a certain system and more time enjoying it with real original hardware.

Edited December 12, 2016 by Jin

[+davidcalgary29]

CV:

 

Junkwall, 1 hour

Bomb 'N Blast 20 minutes

[+thegoldenband]

CV:

 

Junkwall, 1 hour

Bomb 'N Blast 20 minutes

 

Good to see you back, David! Are those times from last week or should I wait to count them with the current week?

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 50, running from December 5 - 11. We logged 4045 minutes of eligible play, playing 73 games on a total of 15 systems.

Top 10:

1. Crystalis (NES/Famicom) - 1100
2. Tomb Raider III (PlayStation) - 399
3. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 230
4. Top Rank Tennis (Game Boy) - 200
5. Spider Fighter (Atari 2600) - 161
6. Funky Fish (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 152
7. Scramble (Atari 7800) - 147
8. Smurfs [C.A.W & M. Brand] (C64) - 117
8. Superbug (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 117
10. Sir Lancelot (ColecoVision) - 110

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 230
2. Spider Fighter (Atari 2600) - 161
3. Funky Fish (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 152
4. Scramble (Atari 7800) - 147
5. Smurfs [C.A.W & M. Brand] (C64) - 117
5. Superbug (Emerson Arcadia 2001) - 117
7. Sir Lancelot (ColecoVision) - 110
8. Dragonfire (ColecoVision) - 80
9. Pole Position II (Atari 7800) - 65
10. Scramble (Atari 2600) - 60

Top 10 systems:

1. NES/Famicom (1128)
2. Atari 2600 (663)
3. Atari 7800 (632)
4. PlayStation (399)
5. Game Boy (290)
6. Emerson Arcadia 2001 (288)
7. ColecoVision (215)
8. C64 (124)
9. Atari Jaguar (83)
10. Arcade (67)

Huh, I think a game joined the 1000-minute club this week (in spot #246 with 1454 minutes logged to date), but I can't quite figure out what it is. Any ideas?

Meanwhile, two straight weeks of top 10 appearances from the Emerson Arcadia 2001. It's the little console that could!

[+davidcalgary29]

Good to see you back, David! Are those times from last week or should I wait to count them with the current week?

Current week, please. I'll probably get more time in for 'Junkwall' if I can wrangle the CV away from the kids (who are monopolizing 'Elmo Peek-a-Boo). No times for them, as it's driving me crazy and I can't stand to be in the same room with it.

 

Edit: oops! Just saw the update.

[+thegoldenband]

No worries, I've updated the update!

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Defender - 5 minutes

Stay Frosty 2: Stay Frostier [Demo Version] - 10 minutes

Stay Frosty 2: Stay Frostier - 193 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Xmas Time - 2 minutes

 

Video of the week: Stay Frosty 2 Christmas Special Gameplay 2016 (161 minutes, with statistical tables presented below)

[carlsson]

C64:

B.C.'s Quest For Tires - 15 min.

IK+ - 5 min.

Mayhem in Monsterland - 25 min.

Mountain King - 10 min.

World Games - 20 min.

Yie Ar Kung-Fu - 15 min.

RCA Studio II:

Climber - 5 min.

Pinball - 5 min.

Most of the times were obtained during party gaming and thus are estimates, unlike otherwise where I keep exact track of time. It should be mentioned that the difference between terribly blocky graphics on the Studio II and the somewhat decent resolution graphics on the C64 are almost nullified when both are run on a 40" TV - on that size, everything looks blocky!

[oyamafamily]

TO ADD: Atari 2600 - Missile Command - 40 minutes

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (December 12th through 18th)...

 

Atari 2600:

Pizza Chef - 4 min.

 

Commodore 64:

Crystals of Zong - 32 min. in 2 sessions

 

Emerson Arcadia:

Turpin/Turtles - 49 min.

 

Online (non-eligible):

Feudalism - 260 min. in 2 sessions

 

On the Atari 2600, I briefly played the unfinished game "Pizza Chef" and then tried to disassemble it in order to see if there's a way it could be improved. If there is one, it's hard... currently there is definitely no way you can "score" so that the score display goes up. But the 4K of ROM are full, so in order to change something, something would have to be deleted... unless there's some data in it which doesn't make sense anyway.

 

Then I played "Crystals of Zong" on the C-64, but in the 2nd session, I reached the last round which is pretty hard.

 

On the Arcadia, I completed "Turtles" (again).

 

Finally, I played Feudalism on Kongregate, which is a mid-age conquering game a bit similar to "Defender of the crown", but there's more strategy involved in recruiting several types of army members, and you have to capture additional cities in order to be able to recruit more advanced members there.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 267 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 133,734

 

This is the first time I've broken 100k in the past month or so.

I've continued to play less to save up energy.

 

[zylon]

5200-

 

Gremlins- 35min

[+thegoldenband]

Not much from me this week:

Game Boy:
Top Rank Tennis - 42 min.

Sega Saturn:
World Series Baseball - 3 min.