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

[+wongojack]

/\ Were the pinball tables you played released before 2000? Do we track pinball time on real tables?

 

Edit - I'm on a new page and pointed up to the previous post, but there is no previous post! (at least not above this one)

 

I was asking the previous poster which Pinball tables he played and if we track time when playing actual classic pinball tables.

[+wongojack]

Videos of the week:

 

5) 7800 Crazy Brix

 

 

 

I really like ball and paddle games, but there is something about Crazy Brix that just doesn't do it for me. It is too slow or too repetitive or just too blah. That video didn't do anything to make me want to try it again either. Were you playing with the keyboard?

[carlsson]

No, we don't track real pinball games.

[oyamafamily]

I really like ball and paddle games, but there is something about Crazy Brix that just doesn't do it for me. It is too slow or too repetitive or just too blah. That video didn't do anything to make me want to try it again either. Were you playing with the keyboard?

Yes, I played this homebrew with my keyboard. Normally I use the keyboard to play games on emulators.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 7, running from February 8 - 14. We logged 3,976 minutes of eligible play, playing 62 games on a total of 13 systems.

Top 10:

1. Final Fantasy V (SNES) - 562

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 403

3. Centipede (Atari 2600) - 218

4. Blue Marlin (NES/Famicom) - 210

5. Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES/Famicom) - 210

6. Lemans (C64) - 203

7. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 167

8. Q*Bert's Qubes (Arcade) - 162

9. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis) - 151

10. Mario Bros. (NES/Famicom) - 120

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 403

2. Centipede (Atari 2600) - 218

3. Lemans (C64) - 203

4. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 167

5. Q*Bert's Qubes (Arcade) - 162

6. Bowling [aka PBA Bowling] (Intellivision) - 95

7. Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh (C64) - 93

8. Jr. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 7800) - 88

9. K.C. Munchkin (Atari 7800) - 83

10. Tapper (ColecoVision) - 45

10. World Championship Baseball (Intellivision) - 45

Top 10 systems:

1. NES/Famicom (751)

2. Atari 2600 (634)

3. SNES (562)

4. Game.com (447)

5. Atari 7800 (429)

6. C64 (415)

7. Intellivision (215)

8. Arcade (195)

9. Genesis (151)

10. Atari 5200 (67)

Our #1 game this week sent me on a wild goose chase, as an old entry from 2010 seemed to indicate it had been played once back then. Turns out -- as I suspected -- that it was a mislabeled entry for Final Fantasy IV aka II. So, here for the first time is this week's champion, Final Fantasy V: it wasn't released here, but this week it rules the roost.

...or one roost at least, as VCS Kaboom takes the pre-NES title, while the NES sneaks away with the system crown, making for a different #1 platform on all three charts. Cool!

[Opry99er]

Could FF V actually be FF3 on the SNES which WAS released here??

 

 

 

Also, very cool about the system split on all three boards. Don't think I have seen that before.

Edited February 18, 2016 by Opry99er

[+thegoldenband]

Could FF V actually be FF3 on the SNES which WAS released here??

Nope, that's Final Fantasy VI (which is #3 in the US). The fifth game never made it out in English, at least not until the re-issue/compilation era on other platforms.

 

Also, very cool about the system split on all three boards. Don't think I have seen that before.

It's happened on occasion, and is always nice to see. Best of all is when our top 10 games have ten different platforms represented!

[Opry99er]

First post for this week:

 

 

Intellivision:

 

AD&D Cloudy Mountain (25 minutes)

Bowling (28 minutes)

Burgertime (40 minutes)

Copter Command (20 minutes)

NightStalker (20 minutes)

 

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Barrage (45 minutes)

TI Invaders (30 minutes)

 

 

NES:

 

Blue Marlin (360 minutes)

Edited February 20, 2016 by Opry99er

[Skippy B. Coyote]

/\ Were the pinball tables you played released before 2000? Do we track pinball time on real tables?

 

Edit - I'm on a new page and pointed up to the previous post, but there is no previous post! (at least not above this one)

 

I was asking the previous poster which Pinball tables he played and if we track time when playing actual classic pinball tables.

As others mentioned, the tracker doesn't log pinball machine play times due to pinball being a partly mechanical and not strictly "video" based game. But, if you're curious, the machines I played last week were The Lord of the Rings, The Addams Family, and the recently released Game of Thrones.

 

Of the three the only one I had played before was The Lord of the Rings, and it's definitely my all time favorite pinball machine. I've gotten so close to destroying the ring and winning the game on several occasions, but I've never quite been able to pull it off. Practice makes perfect I suppose, but even if I never beat it I still love playing it. There's a huge variety of goals and interesting targets to shoot for on the table, four different multiball modes, and I really dig all the authentic movie music and voice acting clips programmed into the machine.

 

Both The Addams Family and Game of Thrones were completely new to me, but I definitely liked The Addams Family the best of the two. The mechanics and table layout were well designed and it was pretty straightforward figuring out what to shoot for, and neat little touches like the hand coming up out of the table and grabbing the ball to capture it for one of the multiball modes were really cool. The Game of Thrones on the other hand was an absolute drain monster that seriously punishes you for missing any ramp shots with some very aggressive bumper placement, and the table has some built in strobe lightning that kicks in and totally blinds you at various points. The bar owner told me that they actually toned down the strobe lightning on the table due to lots of player complaints, but it was still so blinding that the machine really should have had an epilepsy warning on it. I'm not kidding about that either! The Game of Thrones will just wreck your eyes like no other pinball machine I've ever played lol

 

Now I just have to hunt down a Bram Stoker's Dracula machine at some point, since that's my favorite machine from The Pinball Arcade video game and I still haven't had the chance to play the real physical machine yet.

[Atarian7]

What about Baby Pac-man? It's half video game , half pinball.

 

I probably won't be playing it any time soon but just wondering.

 

 

[Nutsy Doodleheimer]

Did some Genesis gaming this week as I am hosting the Genesis/Mega Drive High Score Club.

 

Sega Genesis:

 

Sonic the Hedgehog: 90 Minutes

 

Columns: 10 Minutes

 

Streets of Rage: 70 Minutes

 

Atari 2600:

 

Pac-Man: 15 Minutes

 

Intellivision:

 

Bowling: 25 Minutes

[carlsson]

MSX:

Knightmare - 12 min.

Malaika Prehistoric Quest - 21 min.

Salamander - 10 min.

PC DOS:

Mario & Luigi - 10 min.

Stunts / 4D Sports - 77 min.

For the first time, I got to stage 2-1 in Malaika, after a very strange boss battle at the end of the previous stage. In the midst of this jump and run game, suddenly a lizard looking alien in a space ship arrives, and your goal is to smash him on the head three times before you are hit by his ship. If you succeed, you move onto the next stage. Actually I saw this game being played at our expo a couple of weeks ago, by someone who had advanced very far into the game. Everytime I see someone else playing my games much further than I've ever managed myself, I keep wondering if they're still playing the same game or somehow have managed to hack the game. This happens every now and then, and is refreshing as I get to know there is something remarkably different coming along later in the game if I'm persistent.

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Pac Man: 62 min

 

PC (DOS)

Historyline 1914-18: 100 min

 

We're playing game 6A of Pac Man this week in the High Score Club, which is actually rather fun and much less predictable than the default game. So yeah... Pac Man. Good game.

 

And along comes another session of Historyline. I replayed one of the early maps and recorded it, to discuss some tactical details with the guys from Virtual Dimension (a german language retro channel on youtube).

 

Hopefully, next week will be more varied on my side. I have a couple of recent flea market finds which are waiting for a cleaning and a round of testplay.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week:

 

Arcade:

Q*Bert - 29 min. in 2 sessions

Q*Bert's Qubes - 47 min. in 2 sessions

Space Invaders Part II - 8 min.

 

Atari 2600:

Mangia - 27 min.

Megamania - 35 min. in 2 sessions

Seaquest - 134 min. in 2 sessions

Yellow Submarine (hack of Bermuda Triangle) - 42 min.

 

Online (non-eligible):

Track Racing (Facebook) - 9 min.

 

TI-99:

Ambulance - 52 min.

Munch Man - 25 min.

Shanghai - 25 min.

 

I started out the week with playing some more Q*bert's Qubes, finally getting over 300,000 points again. On Q*bert, however, I didn't quite find the right groove... at the first session, I only got through the start of Level 5, and at 2nd one I failed at the start of Level 4.

 

Then I looked for Yellow Submarine games. Apart from a pretty lame game on the Beatles website, I found an Atari 2600 game which actually is a hack of Bermuda Triangle with changed graphics. After that, I remembered another submarine game, Seaquest, so I went on playing that, barely surpassing 100,000 points after many attempts.

 

As for further Atari games, I also played Mangia, in which I managed to reach Round 4, and Megamania where I managed to get over the typical Activision patch score of 35,000 points.

 

Then I played Track Racing on Facebook, which is a multiplayer racing game, but it's rather confusing... you're supposed to pass checkpoints, but you don't know in which order to pass them.

 

Then I replayed some TI-99 games, Ambulance (where I passed 10,000 points, but nothing special happens there), Shanghai and Munch Man, which is the TI version of Pac-Man. Here you have a maze that changes color with every round, and the enemies change their shape. Though the game is pretty fast, the enemies don't go for you as aggressively as the monsters in Pac-Man do. Generally, the yellow enemy seems to be the most aggressive one. But to compensate, you get extra lives every 10,000 points. This version has been done in the typical TI style with changing enemies, as it has been done in TI Invaders, and in fact, some of the enemies also appear in Parsec or TI Invaders.

 

Speaking of TI Invaders, finally I played "Space Invaders Part II", one of the arcade sequels to Space Invaders, after recently listening to a tape I recorded back in the summer of 1980 of this game's sounds in the arcade. But it wasn't quite the version I remember... when I labeled the tape back in 1988, I actually called it "Super Space Invaders" (but this name was given to a later sequel in the 90's), but it could also have been called "Deluxe Space Invaders" or "Space Invaders Deluxe". As far as I remember, the game was in color (real on-screen color, no overlay), the enemies had different shapes than those in the original Space Invaders, and the scores had been multiplied by 10, so instead of 10, 20, 30... points you got 100, 200, 300... and the game stopped and ended on reaching 999,900 points. I think I remember some players who were able to achieve that. Also, I think between the normal levels which basically played like in the original Space Invaders, there were bonus rounds where you had either multiple UFO's at once crossing the screen coming down from the top, or one UFO started at the top, reached one end of the screen, descended one row and flew the other way, and so forth until you hit it... maybe also both types of bonus rounds were present, or a combination of them. Can someone of you remember a Space Invaders variant that was roughly like I described it? It must have already been out in the summer of 1980 because that's when I recorded the tape.

 

Oh, as for Baby Pac Man, I think this would be eligible since I played it myself for a long time before, and as far as I remember, it was recorded for the Top 10.

[carlsson]

Kurt, did you check out Gamebase64?

 

Parky and the Yellow Submarine: http://gamebase64.com/game.php?id=5570

Yellow Submarine: http://gamebase64.com/game.php?id=9071

 

Bah, curiosity got the better of me, and despite I don't understand more than single words of German...

 

C64:

Yellow Submarine (the latter of the two games above) - 30 min.

 

Anyone who speaks German and can answer the odd questions in part 3 of the game likely will perform better.

 

Edit: With a bit of help from Google Translate, I got 11151 points and the title "Matrose".

Edited February 21, 2016 by carlsson

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Pac-Man - 10 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Arkanoid - 40 minutes

 

Astro Blaster - 40 minutes

 

Bleach Pac-Man [hack of Jr. Pac-Man] - 215 minutes

 

Caterpillar / Cat-Man [hack of Pac-Man] - 27 minutes

 

Failsafe - 44 minutes

 

Water Ski - 10 minutes

 

Worm! - 60 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4AXTF5UdXw

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 135 minutes

Pac-man - 183 minutes

Centipede - 10 minutes

 

 

Kaboom! High score of the week: 28,419

 

 

[jfitzenr]

SNES

Final Fantasy V: 804 Minutes

 

NES

Adventure of Lolo - ~45 minutes

 

Gameboy

Ultima Runes of Virtue - ~35 Minutes

 

 

Ugh. Being sick and not being able to sleep is a great combination for grinding out old games!

 

To be clear, yes this is indeed Final Fantasy V... I'm currently playing a translated rom of it simply out of convenience but it was translated and released on the Playstation in 99 I believe. Double checking... it says the Anthology release wasn't until 2002 so it was never officially released in English until 2002. If that disqualifies it go ahead and take it off the rankings, but I'm playing a translated version of the original from 92.

 

Anyway, if anybody likes grindy RPGs and fun class systems to take advantage of I can't recommend it enough. As I said one of my least favorites overall of the main FF series but the Job system is great. It's not quite Disgaea, but it's a system that really encourages trying to explore/exploit the way the class system works.. that alone makes it a lot of fun. Holds a lot of nostalgia for me too since trying to play Final Fantasy V when it was first translated was probably my first experience as a kid with emulation and blew my mind... a Final Fantasy game that we didn't get... and now I can play it???

 

 

Beat the optional bosses too. Great stuff.

 

This week I'm diving back in to thinning out my collection, so that means I have to do some "testing" of older stuff which means... next week will probably be pretty Colecovision heavy! If my expansion module #2 still works, I think I'm going to have to log some time on Pitstop!...

Edited February 22, 2016 by jfitzenr

[jfitzenr]

Both The Addams Family and Game of Thrones were completely new to me, but I definitely liked The Addams Family the best of the two...

 

I'm not a hardcore pins guy but I've always loved the Addams Family pin. Best pinball memories of my youth are probably that one and the 90s Star Wars pin (I don't think I ever went to an arcade that DIDN'T have Addams Family!)

[+thegoldenband]

What about Baby Pac-man? It's half video game , half pinball.

 

Oh, as for Baby Pac Man, I think this would be eligible since I played it myself for a long time before, and as far as I remember, it was recorded for the Top 10.

Kurt's exactly right. It's an odd case but, since it's at least half video game, we count it.

 

To be clear, yes this is indeed Final Fantasy V... I'm currently playing a translated rom of it simply out of convenience but it was translated and released on the Playstation in 99 I believe. Double checking... it says the Anthology release wasn't until 2002 so it was never officially released in English until 2002. If that disqualifies it go ahead and take it off the rankings, but I'm playing a translated version of the original from 92.

Even if it were the PlayStation re-release it'd still be eligible, since the 2000 cutoff only applies to systems. Otherwise we'd be missing out on the last 16 years of homebrew! Translated ROMs are absolutely legit.

 

I need to play Final Fantasy V one of these days. In the whole franchise I've only really played Final Fantasy (the original), Final Fantasy IV (aka II in the US), and Mystic Quest, and the last time I really played any of them was an emulation playthrough of the first game back around 2001 or so, just for kicks (I'd already beat it on real hardware when it first came out). Despite its reputation, I'd like to complete the second game as well as the third before taking on V or VI.

 

Then again, all the fiddly item drops in FFIV kinda put me off the series -- it was the first time I thought to myself "Hey, this is designed to sell strategy guides, you jerks. I'm not going to replay a battle dozens of times just to get some super-secret item."

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

NES:

Action 52 - 175 min.

Marvel's X-Men - 99 min.

Milon's Secret Castle - 15 min.

Robowarrior - 205 min.

Game Boy:

Kung Fu Master - 15 min.

Nobunaga's Ambition - 426 min.

SNES:

Adventures of Mighty Max - 4 min.

Chuck Rock - 122 min.

Mr. Do! - 16 min.

Spectre - 10 min.

Beat Nobunaga's Ambition, Kung Fu Master, and Chuck Rock for the first time (though I beat the first two on lower difficulties last year), Robowarrior for the second time, and Marvel's X-Men for the third.

Nobunaga's Ambition was still a pushover on the equivalent of Medium, but Hard got tricky until I used starvation tactics to outwit the CPU (which is a fancy way of saying I started a fight, then kept running away until the computer ran out of food). Too bad they made such a hash of the game.

I also knocked off a few more minigames in Action 52, though what's left is mostly unplayable, the dregs of the dregs.

Otherwise, I tried getting somewhere with a few other games, to varying results. Those spinning balls in Spectre are the worst -- I don't remember them from the Mac version...

[+wongojack]

Here's what I've got for the week through February 21st

 

C64

Lemans 360 mins - new personal best 617,240!

I had been going for 500k in this one, and now that I've finally reached it, I will probably take a break for a while. There is nothing really special about this game. It is a pure arcade racer inspired by the arcade game Monaco GP. It's got that quality that convinces you that you can do better if you just try "one more time." I even started a thread for it here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/249430-post-your-lemans-high-score/?do=findComment&comment=3446769. I remember playing it as a kid from disk, but I've got the cart now, AND I've got a nice new pair of AtGames Atari paddles to use with it. Very fun.

 

2600

Centipede 15 mins

 

 

Untracked

Revenge From Mars Pinball 70 mins. I own this table, so I play it periodically. I still haven't finished all the game modes even though I've had it since about 2013. I guess I need to set some of the options to make it easier and finally witness the ending.

[Opry99er]

Final posting of the week:

 

 

NES:

 

Blue Marlin (185 additional minutes)

 

 

Intellivision:

 

Bowling (additional 40 minutes)

Pitfall (10 minutes)

Shark! Shark! (60 minutes)

Utopia (35 minutes)

 

 

TI-99/4A:

 

TI Invaders (additional 20 minutes)

 

 

Utopia is a monster.... I had no idea what I was getting myself into with this game. If playing two-player, this game could easily sap 10-15 hours a day...if I had the time, that is.

 

Bowling League and TI High score competition got some love, but Blue Marlin took the brunt of it this week. Between the boy and myself, we have been murdering that game.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Time for another week of handheld hijinks!

 

 

 

Ineligible

Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo DS) - 65 minutes

Brain Age (Nintendo DS) - 42 minutes

Call of Duty: Black Ops (Nintendo DS) - 294 minutes

Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 67 minutes

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) - 182 minutes

Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS) - 438 minutes

Mario Kart: Super Circuit (Game Boy Advance) - 19 minutes

Sonic Rush (Nintendo DS) - 14 minutes

Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Game Boy Advance) - 21 minutes

Arcade

Centipede - 15 minutes

Centipede (Played on Atari Anniversary Advance for Game Boy Advance) - 10 minutes

Frogger - 14 minutes

Millipede - 13 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man - 11 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man (Played on Namco Museum for Game Boy Advance) - 6 minutes

Pac-Man - 7 minutes

Time Pilot - 17 minutes

Game Boy

Kirby's Dream Land - 26 minutes

Game Boy Color

Monopoly - 146 minutes

Total Play Time This Week

1,407 minutes (23 hours 27 minutes) [265 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week

Nintendo DS: 1,102 minutes

Game Boy Color: 146 minutes

Arcade: 93 minutes

Game Boy Advance: 40 minutes

Game Boy: 26 minutes

I did manage to get in a little more tracker eligible playtime this week than last week, but once again the big standout system around my household this week was the Nintendo DS. Part of the reason behind that is that it was my birthday on Thursday and I ended up getting a few new DS games from the misses, including Animal Crossing: Wild World, Mario Kart DS, and Sonic Rush. Apparently at the time she picked them up for me she thought I would have had a DS of my own by now, but due to having to return the last two DS Lites I bought for defects I'm still stuck without a DS system of my own and had to borrow hers once again to enjoy the gifts. And enjoy them I did! I had forgotten just how incredibly fun and addictive Mario Kart DS was, having last played it a good decade or so ago when it first game out, and I know that once I really get into Animal Crossing it is going to consume my life for the foreseeable future.

With that in mind I've decided to just bite the bullet, stop messing around trying to find an older model new condition DS Lite without any defects on eBay (a nearly impossible task, if my history with them is any indication), and go out and pick myself up a regular sized white New Nintendo 3DS when I get paid on March 1st. I really wanted to wait to see if Nintendo ever released the black colored regular sized New 3DS in North America, but I do need a DS system of my own to play all my DS games on and I'm just tired of waiting. I suppose that if at some point they do release the black New 3DSs over here I can always pick one up then sell the white one after I transfer all my data over.

Anyway, as far as eligible gaming time this week goes I spent a fair bit of it taking turns playing arcade games with the misses. We played some old favorites together, my wife topped the previous household high score record in Frogger, and—after trying it for the first time—she got pretty into Time Pilot too. I also took some time to do a full play through of Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy one morning before breakfast this week, and much to my surprise (especially considering how groggy I was a the time), I managed to beat the whole game without ever dying even once! I had done it a couple times before, but it still felt really satisfying to pull off. Lastly, I also got in three games of Monopoly on the Game Boy Color. The first two didn't go so well, but by the end of the third one I had hotels on literally half the board (the entire bottom and left sides) and controlled all the railroads and utilities. It was a bit of a landslide victory lol

That's all the gaming news from around here for this week!

Edited February 22, 2016 by Jin

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 8, running from February 15 - 21. We logged 5259 minutes of eligible play, playing 63 games on a total of 13 systems.

Top 10:

1. Final Fantasy V (SNES) - 804

2. Blue Marlin (NES/Famicom) - 545

3. Nobunaga's Ambition (Game Boy) - 426

4. Lemans (C64) - 360

5. Pac-Man (Atari 2600) - 270

6. Bleach Pac-Man [hack] (Atari 7800) - 215

7. Robowarrior (NES/Famicom) - 205

8. Action 52 (NES/Famicom) - 175

9. Monopoly (Game Boy Color) - 146

10. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 135

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Lemans (C64) - 360

2. Pac-Man (Atari 2600) - 270

3. Bleach Pac-Man [hack] (Atari 7800) - 215

4. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 135

5. Seaquest (Atari 2600) - 134

6. Bowling [aka PBA Bowling] (Intellivision) - 93

7. Worm! (Atari 7800) - 60

7. Shark! Shark! (Intellivision) - 60

9. Ambulance (TI-99/4A) - 52

10. TI Invaders (TI-99/4A) - 50

Top 10 systems:

1. NES/Famicom (1084)

2. SNES (956)

3. Atari 2600 (668)

4. Game Boy (502)

5. Atari 7800 (436)

6. C64 (390)

7. Intellivision (303)

8. TI-99/4A (197)

9. PC (DOS) (187)

10. Arcade (177)

Another week with a different platform at the top of each chart! Final Fantasy V holds on to a second week at #1, but the SNES is pipped by the NES on the system chart, and the top pre-NES game is Lemans for C64.

But the big news, to me, is Kaboom at #10, just barely making the Top 10 with a margin of 1 minute over Seaquest. When was the last time it didn't -- maybe sometime in 2010?

Meanwhile the 1000-minute club gains three entrants this week, as Final Fantasy V, Lemans, and Seaquest earn spots #200-202 (with respective totals of 1366, 1101, and 1102 minutes logged to date).