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Popular Games You Are Not Crazy About


sandmountainslim

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I would suspect many of us have personal favorites on the VCS (and other systems too) which are nowhere near being in the top 10. Top 10 lists are very mainstream, conventional, ordinary, and "safe".

True. One of my favorite 2600 games is Tutankham which wouldn't make anyone top 10 list. Heck, it probably wouldn't make most peoples top 50.

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What are some near universally popular VCS games that do little or nothing for you?

There are two that fit neatly into that category with me and they are

 

Pitfall Just falling into a bunch of holes like ET gets scorned for doing while running around with no music or real sounds. Boring game.

 

Yar's Revenge My least favorite space shooter. Shooting sideways at walls (yawn) Excuse me while I play Space Jockey instead.

 

 

I didn't find the gameplay interesting either, back in the day, but I have done a 180 degree turnaround. Since these titles are frequently mentioned, here is how I found they are both fun:

 

Pitfall - Trying to get a perfect score of 114,000 is what makes this game genius. I did it in 2015 for the first time, but I've tried it many times over the years. You can even do it and have many seconds left over , if you play at that level of memorization and skill, not falling or touching rolling logs, both of which reduce your score.

 

Yars Revenge - you have to play Option 6, Ultimate Yars. Preferably with difficulty-switch on "A". It's a much more complex game than other options.

 

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I didn't care much for any adventure game back in the day. Superman was weird and flickery. Adventure seemed cool but I always purchased newer games over it. Raiders was incomprehensible. E.T. was kind of boring to me then. I guess I did enjoy Haunted House though. But I do enjoy them all more now as an adult.

 

I didn't like 2600 Asteroids then or now. It didn't seem close enough to the coin-op to me. More like popping balloons. The asteroids' vertical movement was more of typical 2600 watering down of gameplay, to me, and I wouldn't have it.

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Adventure. I never understood the love for it.

 

I actually bought Freeway back in the day and returned it the very same day. I think it was the complete lack of horizontal movement that did it (I was thinking it was a more difficult Frogger). I then picked up Phoenix instead which was fantastic.

 

At the time it was one of the better games. Take a look at the first 1980 Atari catalog, when Adventure first appears. Those were the options when we got our Atari for Xmas (along with Space Invaders, Backgammon, and a couple other games). Adventure was the first game that us kids bought with our money.

 

Activision, the first third party game company, had just gotten its start in 1980 and only had 6 games (and Freeway wasn't one of them, it's from 1981). Imagic, the second third party game company, didn't exist yet.

 

Likewise Phoenix was another couple of years away, it's from 1982.

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Maybe it was one of those "you had to be there" games? Way back when I was just starting out in retrogaming and I got my first Atari 2600 15-some years ago, one of the first games I wanted to get was Adventure because I keep hearing how amazing and epic it was, how it was a proto-Zelda, how it was an all-time classic, etc. etc., and then being disappointed when I saw how small a game it really is. Even on the hardest difficulty it can be blown through in 5-10 minutes depending on item/dragon placement.

 

I've come to appreciate and enjoy it anyway, and in the context of other games that were around in 1980, I can see why it was popular. It offered a relatively open world and a sense of exploration that no other console games really had at the time (except maybe Superman), and it doubtlessly stoked a lot of kids' imaginations. Decades of nostalgia built it up into something bigger than it really is. But, I think it's a good game in its own right.

 

I can still to this day enjoy a few playthroughs of Adventure. I was there way back and have always loved it. Maybe more today where I rarely have time for something like Elder Scrolls Oblivion. 5 or 10 minutes to completion is good enough for me every once in a while.

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I can still to this day enjoy a few playthroughs of Adventure. I was there way back and have always loved it. Maybe more today where I rarely have time for something like Elder Scrolls Oblivion. 5 or 10 minutes to completion is good enough for me every once in a while.

That's kind of why I enjoy it. It still feels like an adventure or quest game but I don't have to sink hours upon hours into it. It's like a really arcadey adventure game.

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Ever play a game from the original days of game design and think "Well, that had never been done before, so I guess they figured it wasn't a good fit for a video game." I'm thinking of titles like 3d Tic Tac Toe, Basic Programming, or Roulette on the Intellivision. It was almost like these releases needed to happen so that the world would know that we didn't really need to experiment in that exact direction.

 

Adventure and Superman were experiments in the same vain. They basically birthed the Action/Adventure genre and kicked off the whole concept of what "home" gaming was going to be on a console. They are almost proto for every console game out there and they deserve credit as the bold experiments that they are.

 

However, all of that does not really make them very much fun to play today. I have had some fun with Adventure (and Superman) as an adult, and I've also enjoyed the homebrew spinoffs, but there isn't really that much there to come back to.

 

 

That's kind of why I enjoy it. It still feels like an adventure or quest game but I don't have to sink hours upon hours into it. It's like a really arcadey adventure game.

 

Yep - first action adventure game

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That's kind of why I enjoy it. It still feels like an adventure or quest game but I don't have to sink hours upon hours into it. It's like a really arcadey adventure game.

 

I like it for the same reason. I can complete an entire game of Adventure in less time than it takes to finish the tutorial level of a modern game.

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True. One of my favorite 2600 games is Tutankham which wouldn't make anyone top 10 list. Heck, it probably wouldn't make most peoples top 50.

 

It's #2 on my list. Yeah, not many people seem to like it. I think it appeared on 7 people's top 10 (in that Top 100 thread). At least you're not the only one.

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True. One of my favorite 2600 games is Tutankham which wouldn't make anyone top 10 list. Heck, it probably wouldn't make most peoples top 50.

It's #2 on my list. Yeah, not many people seem to like it. I think it appeared on 7 people's top 10 (in that Top 100 thread). At least you're not the only one.

You guys aren't alone. Tutankham easily makes my top 50 list! Really is a great game in its own right. :)

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True. One of my favorite 2600 games is Tutankham which wouldn't make anyone top 10 list. Heck, it probably wouldn't make most peoples top 50.

Thanks to your inspiration, I fired up Tutankham tonight, for what must be the first time in close to 10 years. Truthfully, it's one of those games I just sort of forgot about; it never grabbed me before and nobody talks about it much, so it dropped off my radar. But I'm glad I dug it out and made myself figure out how to play it because it really is a neat game. :) (The cartridge even has a price sticker from a game shop up north--now closed--that Jen and I used to hit up back when we were in college...memories!) If I could even make a Top 50, Tutanhkam would almost certainly qualify.

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Tutankham is best played with the manual as it has descriptions of all the teasures. I always thought this added some depth to the game.

 

Yeah, that was a nice touch. I liked how each treasure was unique with it's own sprite and there was a variety of different enemies (although they were basically all the same with just 3 speed types). When I was a kid, I was amazed at its 4 unique levels. It was the first 2600 game I had played that had more than 2.

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I would suspect many of us have personal favorites on the VCS (and other systems too) which are nowhere near being in the top 10. Top 10 lists are very mainstream, conventional, ordinary, and "safe".

 

It's interesting that the conventional and mainstream nature of personal top 10s has come up in this thread today. Often it's just because many people haven't had the opportunity to play other games in any great depth.

 

Over in the Top 100 games sticky thread, I just yesterday tried to remedy this trend with a statistical approach that takes rarity into account when ranking top 10 lists. I calculated an alternative top 100 which uses the data to "guess" what the best games actually are, assuming that a lot of voters haven't played many of the rarer games.

 

I'd be interested to hear what AtariAge users think of my methodology, and how they find my adjusted top 100 list compared to the 'vanilla' list :dunce:

 

My least favourite popular game would be Atlantis - I just can't grok a twitch game where I can't move. I feel claustrophobic and impotent playing it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Felt I needed to add Pitfall! II and Jr. Pac-Man to the list.

 

Amazing 2600 games on a technical level, but almost no joy (for me) to play. Jr. is way too damned tough for its own good and not a fan of the scrolling maze. Pitfall! II is just way too tedious and repetitive. Actually like the original better now that I've had a chance to really sit down and play both recently.

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