What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2017 (Season 10)

[BillyHW]

w00t, finished Game Boy Donkey Kong!

 

(Super) Game Boy

 

Donkey Kong (1994, 1000 minutes). Fun game. Screenshots of the last stages and ending below.

 

 

 

 

 

[Eltigro]

Here are my times for the week. A little better than last week. Still had trouble finding time to play this week though, and when I did, I was often too tired to do much...

 

2600

Chopper Command (emulated) - 18 min (This was for the 2600 HSC. I didn't get to try more later to improve my score, so I had to go with what I got from that first short play session.)

 

TurboGrafx

Dragon Spirit (emulated) - 17 min (A pretty rough game. Frustrating because every time I get a third head on my dragon, I get hit within like three seconds and lose it.)

Legendary Axe - 29 min (I was looking at the TG-16 HSC and saw that there hadn't been much success with this one, so I gave it a straight play through (not using my point/extra man exploit) and got to the end of Zone 4 before getting a game over. Too bad your score disappears so quickly after your last death or my final score would have been a bit higher. Oh well.)

 

Playstation

Final Fantasy VII (emulated) - 166 min (Got a couple of more materia to spawn? give birth? and a little further in the story. I'm just after the rocket from Rockettown was launched into Meteor.)

 

And that's it for another week. Happy gaming all!

Edited March 27, 2017 by Eltigro

[BuckoBrand]

Ti99

 

Lemonade Stand 4 hours

Riding for the Brand 1 hour

Reading On 3 hours and a half

Beginning Grammar 2 hours

 

Heatwave BBS

 

BBS Baseball 1 hour

 

Macintosh

 

Lemmings 3 hours

[+wongojack]

This weekend was the Texas Pinball Festival which meant that I played A LOT of untracked pinball. And I really played a lot of different games there this year. I also got Mass Effect Andromeda on release day and played that for more than 20 hours. So a great week for games for me, but not a lot of tracked time.

 

Space Wars 21

 

I'm not sure this one has gotten a lot of tracked time. This was a reproduction of the classic mainframe game on loan to the Pinball Festival from the nearby National Video game museum. It was set up sort of like a 2 player arcade cabinet, but had keyboard style "buttons" that you used to turn thrust and shoot. It also had a keypad to select the game variation. I stood there and played this with my brother and another friend who always goes to pinfest with me. I'm wondering if anyone has ever tracked time for a video game made earlier than Space Wars?!

 

Arcade
Asteroids Deluxe 9
Baby Pac Man 20
Blue Print 12
Mad Planets 10
Space Duel 3
Tapper 8
Tron 3

 

These were all played on the actual machines which was really nice. I had never even heard of Blue Print or Mad Planets. Both were interesting if not forgotten arcade games.

 

Ambush (Williams EM) 6

Ambush was an old style electromechanical target shooting game with a Vietnam War theme. I'm not sure it really qualifies as a video game.

 

Gameboy Color

Game n Watch Gallery III 43

Here's all the pinball machines I got to play. I did not keep track of time on these
Aerosmith
Allied Spooksville (mirror n shaker) <-- this was interesting*
Attack From Mars
Back to the Future
Bally Airway 1933**
Bally Blue Ribbon 1933
Bally Fireball
Bally Gator EM***
Bally Pro Football EM
Bally Rocket III EM
Bally The Penant 1933
Bally Top Score EM
Batman '66
Black Knight
Bride of Pinbot
Bugs Bunny Birthday Ball
Centaur II
F14 Tomcat
Firepower
Flash Gordon
Ghostbusters
Gottlieb Abra Ca Dabra EM
Gottlieb Coronation EM
Gottlieb Flipper Pool EM
Gottlieb Hearts and Spades EM
Gottlieb Sinbad
Gottlieb World Champ EM
High Speed
Johny Mneumonic
Monopoly
Pinbot
Revenge from Mars
Ripley's BoN
Road Show (virtual)****
Sonic: Cherry Bell EM
Star Trek TNG
Star Wars Ep 1
Stargate (virtual)
T2
T2 (Virtual Pinball)
Waterworld
Williams Flash
Williams Yukon EM
Wizard Blocks (Pin2000 Hack)*****
World Cup '94
Wwf Royal Rumble
Xenon
Zaccaria Combat EM

*Spooksville was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was an upright cabinet with a mirror putting the playfield into your straight field of view. You control the action with 2 joysticks that allow you to move the playfield about an inch or two forward or backward. The flippers are controlled with top mounted buttons on the two sticks. This was something you'd only see at a festival like this. I wish it had been more fun.

**Several collectors brought out restored machines from the 30s that were actually working and you could play them. These mostly consisted of games of chance where you attempt to shoot a ball and get it to fall (plinko/pachinko) style into a hole worth a point value. These are more fun than they should have been and had some posted details of their restoration.

***I tracked EM machines with their manufacturer name. Sometimes these tables have such generic names that you have to add more detail to identify them. Just like last year, there were some great EM machines there in truly amazing condition.

****There were a bunch of upright virtual machines from VPCabs at the show. These were pretty great for virtual pinball and their compact size was very appealing. I played some virtualized tables and some Pinball FX2 on there. They also played arcade games.

*****I saw more new machines from small companies this year, but there were also quite a few home grown machines. Sort of the pinball world's version of a game hack. There was a hack of the Pinball 2000 series of games that wasn't that much fun to play, but the same guys had a Doom pinball machine that I believe is one of a kind. There were also a couple of Buffy the Vampire Slayer machines there that is a professionally produced machine, but I guess it was a really limited run. Probably the funniest of these was a guy who hacked up an old Bally machine and turned it into a Steve Zissou machine similar to (but not exactly like) the one featured in the movie "The Life Aquatic."

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for the past week (March 20th through 26th)...

 

Arcade:

Bank Panic - 20 min.

Carnival - 28 min.

Millipede - 277 min. in 2 sessions

 

Atari 2600:

Crossbow - 82 min. in 3 sessions

 

Atari 7800:

Crossbow - 12 min.

 

Atari 8-bit:

Missile Command - 5 min.

 

Commodore 64:

Kill the alien - 18 min.

 

Online (non-eligible):

Busted Brakes - 23 min.

 

I started off the week playing "Kill the alien" on the Commodore 64, a contest entry game where you shoot various aliens from various space shooter games (Space Invaders, Galaxian etc.). Then I played and finished both the Atari 2600 and 7800 versions of Crossbow. The 7800 version only took me 12 minutes to finish since it's pretty similar to the arcade version which I finished last week.

 

Then I replayed some arcade favorits of mine... Bank Panic, Carnival and Millipede, the last one of which I played for far too long, using the starting score option until I got to the maximum starting score of 300,000.

 

Then I tried to play the Atari 8-bit version of Missile Command, but I didn't get the emulation to work properly for this one, as well as for the Atari 8-bit version of Crossbow which doesn't count as having been played at all because I didn't manage to leave the title screen there.

 

FInally, I tried an online game called "Busted Brakes" which is a horizontal driving game similar to "Bump'n'Jump", "Zippy Race" or "Munch Mobile" where you have to drive forward while collecting and avoiding various things, and you can't ever stop.

[Opry99er]

To add:

 

Intellivision:

 

Snafu (40 minutes)

 

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Tunnels of Doom (330 minutes)

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Though life wasn't the easiest this past week, the gaming continued on.

 

 

 

Ineligible

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (GameCube) - 184 minutes

Atari 2600

Chopper Command - 151 minutes

Crystal Castles - 20 minutes

Q*Bert - 55 minutes

Quadrun - 106 minutes

Scramble - 10 minutes

Game Boy Color

Pac-Man: Special Color Edition - 10 minutes

PlayStation

Doom - 300 minutes

Sega Genesis

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - 294 minutes

Total Play Time This Week
1,130 minutes (18 hours 50 minutes) [946 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week

Atari 2600: 342 minutes

PlayStation: 300 minutes

Sega Genesis: 294 minutes

GameCube: 184 minutes

Game Boy Color: 10 minutes

This was another one of those weeks where my gaming time was largely dictated by my medical situation, namely the frequency with which the thyroiditis that I've been dealing with for the last two months decided to start acting up. Some days were better than others, but all things considered I think I still managed to get in a pretty decent amount of gaming time this week. I spent a fair bit of time playing Chopper Command and Quadrun for the Atari 2600 High Score Club, but I also got around to finishing up The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on the GameCube. I'm not sure if it was a really hard game or if I'm just not all that great at hack 'n slash games, but after 15 or 20 failed attempts on the second to last mission I ended up having to bump the difficulty level down from Normal to Easy to finish the game; and even then it was no cakewalk. Still, in spite of the difficulty level it was a really enjoyable game and I'll be looking forward to playing through the sequel The Return of the King at some point.

The only other game that I played any substantial amount of time of this week was Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis, which my wife and I ended up doing two more play throughs of together trading off the controller between zones. We were really bound and determined to finish the game with all 7 chaos emeralds this week, since that's something neither of us have ever been able to do and the misses is a pretty big fan of the early Sonic games on the Genesis, but alas in spite of our best efforts the most chaos emeralds we were ever able to get in a single play through was 6 out of 7. The special stage that really tripped us up every time was #4, and the rest of them (even the final one) didn't seem nearly as difficult as that one. Even though we weren't able to finish the game with all the chaos emeralds on either attempt we still had a lot of fun playing through Sonic 2 again a couple times, and if nothing else it was a great way to spend some time together and take our minds off all the not-so-good stuff that's been going on in our lives lately.

As far as the misses' gaming time goes for this past week, she divided the vast majority of it between finishing up and beating the Doom II portion of Doom on the PlayStation on Ultra Violence difficulty and doing the two co-op play throughs of Sonic 2 with me. She also got in about an hour of Q*Bert on the Atari 2600 (one of her favorite games on the system) and set household record high scores on both B and A difficulty settings, but that was pretty much it for her this week. Looking ahead to next week I did receive a couple GameCube games I had been wanting as "get well soon" gifts from a friend this week, so I imagine I'll be spending a good bit of time playing them next week, and I think that later today the misses is just about to start in on the copy of Alien Resurrection for the PlayStation that she picked up last week. She sure has been on one heck of a sci-fi first-person shooter kick lately.

In any case, I that hope you've all had a great week and—until next time—happy gaming to you and yours!

Edited March 27, 2017 by Jin

[Opry99er]

I guess a system pic would be appropriate here... and a pic of a BBS screen at 1200 BAUD.

 

 

 

[BurritoBeans]

Agh, almost forgot to post again

 

SNES:

The Lawnmower Man - 2000 minutes

 

Well, it was pretty much just Lawnmower Man. This time though, it's in school - I have a Multimedia class turned to "Film Class" where we just either do nothing or watch movies and are planning to have one project involving the whole high school, so in all the downtime I have I decided to take the Retro Duo Portable with me and Lawnmower Man sat in the top. Being that my partner for the game, Andrew, and I are both in that class alongside two seniors and the teacher, we decided we'd just hook it into a computer monitor via a Composite to VGA adapter and we brought controllers to play - it's been pretty fun. Best bit is, the teacher doesn't care at all - he's fairly young and grew up with NES/SNES so he likes to sit down with the RDP and play some of his old games when we're not messing with it.

 

So, for gameplay, not a ton happened - we mainly just practiced the speedrun over and over and over and over and over. I may bring in a capture device so we can record the run, but I'm worried about input lag if I have to run into the capture device and then out (that's how all my cards work anyways) as the RDP seems a bit slower than the actual SNES input-wise and adding in that capture card in the line may screw us up on some of the tricks due to delay on the controllers. Past that though, it's just having fun I guess - the only stage we have issues with now is the driving stage, but that's because if the game feels like being a dick to you then you lose all your lives and have to play it safe for the rest of the run.

 

So yeah, nothing crazy to write about - just working on the run. I'm bringing my Genesis into class as we can't work on the project due to half of the class (the seniors) being out, so the teacher wanted to play Genesis as he said he always thought they looked cool when he was in grade school but never got to play one, so I've got the system, CD, 32X, some games, and controllers set up in his room - it's good fun.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 12, running from March 20 - 26. We logged 8499 minutes of eligible play, playing 58 games on a total of 20 systems.

Top 10:

1. Lawnmower Man, The (SNES) - 2000

2. Donkey Kong (Game Boy) - 1000

3. Chopper Command (Atari 2600) - 628

4. Never-Lander (TI-99/4A) - 360

5. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 356

6. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 330

7. Doom (PlayStation) - 300

8. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis) - 294

9. Millipede (Arcade) - 277

10. PGA Golf (BBS Door Games) - 240

10. Lemonade Stand (TI-99/4A) - 240

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Chopper Command (Atari 2600) - 628

2. Never-Lander (TI-99/4A) - 360

3. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 356

4. Tunnels of Doom [Quest of the King] (TI-99/4A) - 330

5. Millipede (Arcade) - 277

6. Lemonade Stand (TI-99/4A) - 240

6. Reading On (TI-99/4A) - 210

8. Getaway (Atari 8-bit) - 127

9. Quadrun (Atari 2600) - 121

10. Copter Command (Intellivision) - 120

10. Beginning Grammar (TI-99/4A) - 120

Top 10 systems:

1. SNES (2000)

2. TI-99/4A (1380)

3. Atari 2600 (1338)

4. Game Boy (1000)

5. BBS Door Games (550)

6. PlayStation (466)

7. Arcade (411)

8. Genesis (294)

9. Intellivision (220)

10. Atari 8-bit (208)

Week 12 finally breaks through to the all-time Top 10, landing at #9 with one minute shy of 8.5 kilominutes. And the charge is led by Jobe, the Lawnmower Man, who's not only this week's #1 game, but has now unceremoniously broken into the 10000-minute club with 10,276 minutes logged to date.

Obviously our #2 game, Donkey Kong for Game Boy, is now part of the 1000-minute club, with 1348 minutes logged to date. And so is our #3 game Chopper Command (1503 min. logged), as well as Snafu for Intellivision (1094 min.) and Q*Bert for Atari 2600 (1019 min.).

Put 'em all together and you get members #271-274 of the 1000-minute club, which is starting to get very crowded!

[+thegoldenband]

BTW some more notes:

 

- I've opted to exclude BBS door games from the pre-NES category, since they're sort of platform-independent and don't quite fit anywhere, so I'd rather err on the side of exclusion. Let me know if I'm sorely mistaken in that judgment.

 

- wongojack, I believe the game you played is the 1977 Cinematronics arcade game Space Wars. BillyHW logged the original PDP-1 version of SpaceWar! some time back [EDIT: November 2015 to be precise], albeit in emulation, and I think that may be the oldest one in the books. I should have gone to Brookhaven Labs and played Tennis for Two when I had the chance!

 

(Agreed that Ambush doesn't qualify for the tracker, BTW, though it looks pretty cool.)

[Opry99er]

Cool!! Great week!

 

I agree on the BBS games... They are kind of a wonky category.

[carlsson]

Besides, very few people were using modems before 1985. I know there were a few MUD's in the first half of the 80's but I think the type of activity really took off in the late 80's, early 90's right before WWW became popular.

[+wongojack]

BTW some more notes:

 

 

- wongojack, I believe the game you played is the 1977 Cinematronics arcade game Space Wars. BillyHW logged the original PDP-1 version of SpaceWar! some time back [EDIT: November 2015 to be precise], albeit in emulation, and I think that may be the oldest one in the books. I should have gone to Brookhaven Labs and played Tennis for Two when I had the chance!

 

(Agreed that Ambush doesn't qualify for the tracker, BTW, though it looks pretty cool.)

Yep, you are right about the version of Space Wars I played. That is it exactly. The cab was pristine too.

[Opry99er]

So far:

 

BBS Door Game (The Hidden Reef/Heatwave)

 

Slot Machine (40 minutes)

Werewolves and Wanderers (480 minutes)

 

TI-99/4A:

 

Return to Pirate's Isle (120 minutes)

 

 

DOS:

 

Adventure (90 minutes)

Zork (60 minutes)

 

 

 

Almost ALL text adventures for me thus far.

 

 

In preparation for the new text adventure I am writing, I spent a TON of time playing a BBS Door game called 'Werewolves and Wanderers' on The Hidden Reef BBS. I somehow stumbled on the original, simplistic BASIC code in an old book while doing some internet searches on Zork and such.

 

Anyway, the BBS version is more in depth and complex, but still simple by Zork standards. I am currently writing a sequel to this game which has 36 cells instead of the original 19, and the room descriptions are far more detailed.

 

During my playthroughs, I wanted to reach every possible outcome in the game, and I wanted to try and get as high of a score as I could in one go 'round, and as low as I could in another.

 

Essentially, I wanted to explore the entire code set.

 

Looking forward to completing my new game and then converting it to run on the BBS.

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Quadrun: 12 minutes

 

Interesting game. Need time to practice, which I don't have. SAD!

[karokoenig]

Add 15 more minutes to Quadrun, please.

[Opry99er]

To add:

 

BBS Door Games (The Hidden Reef/Heatwave)

 

Troll's Lair (40 minutes)

 

 

TI-99/4A:

 

A-MAZE-ING (15 minutes)

Centipede (50 minutes)

Crazy Lines (5 minutes)

The Count (30 minutes)

Henhouse (45 minutes)

Major Tom (40 minutes)

Ms. Pac Man (15 minutes)

Mouse in a Maze (20 minutes)

Pac Man (10 minutes)

Parsec (25 minutes)

Pole Position (40 minutes)

Sinking Ships (25 minutes)

Star Trek S.O.S. (35 minutes)

TI Aliens (5 minutes)

TI Trek (360 minutes)

ZeroZap (10 minutes)

 

 

 

Falling back in love with a bunch of my lesser-played TI games... playing a bunch of games in small sessions...

 

TI-Trek with speech enhancement is sooooooooo good.... wow....

 

The boy has been hard at it too. He will be on shortly.

Edited April 2, 2017 by Opry99er

[BuckoBrand]

Macintosh-

 

Train Engineer 1 hour

Sim city 2000 2 hours

Lemmings 1 hour

 

 

Ti99-

 

Dragon Mix 40 minutes

Alpiner 20 minutes

Centipede 30 minutes

Beginning Grammar 2 hours

Parsec 20 minutes

Lemonade Stand 2 hours and a half

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600 - Quadrun - 215 minutes

This week I got more familiar with Quadrun and then I focused more on this game for 2600 NEW HSC Season 6. My best score is 72,390 points.

 

EVIDENCE OF THE WEEK:

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Getaway - 49 min.

Kaverns of Kfest - 26 min.

Interton VC-4000:

Circus - 3 min.

Crazy Crab - 4 min.

Leapfrog - 6 min.

Munch and Crunch - 6 min.

Musical Games - 4 min.

Winter Sports - 4 min.

As seen elsewhere, I completed an A/V mod on my VC-4000 which prompted me to play a few games to see that it was working and how it looked like. The Atari 8-bit times of course are due to its HSC.

[BurritoBeans]

Amiga:

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight - 130 minutes

 

Atari 2600:

Pitfall - 30 minutes

Reactor - 30 minutes

 

Game.com

Centipede - 30 minutes

Duke Nukem 3D - 30 minutes

 

SNES:

ActRaiser - 190 minutes

ActRaiser 2 - 270 minutes

The Lawnmower Man - 500 minutes

 

Well, a bit more variety this week, wouldn't you say? SNES gets the most playtime from me as I was carrying my RDP again - Lawnmower Man was the staple anyways. I was screwing around with the game, and ended up blasting through runs - I got one down to the 25 minute mark so I'm improving. Really though, there's no real breakthroughs being made on this - I've just been watching other runners (usually just PJ DiCesare since he has a really good run and I love his stuff) and using any tricks that I'm not running, alongside just practicing frustrating segments. For other SNES, I ended up running the ActRaiser games again - they're some of my favorites anyways. ActRaiser ended up being fairly smooth, but ActRaiser 2 was a bit of a mess. With 2, of course people know it for being a PITA as you either start on the wrong level and get screwed over or just get screwed by the enemies. Pretty much, I ended up not remembering anything from the past time I played so I ended up not remembering enemies and dying a bunch of times to the things. This got frustrating and I ended up quitting, then coming back two days later - it was fun in the end I guess.

 

Atari got a little bit of playtime with Pitfall and Reactor. Pretty much, these are just two games that I want to figure out but never do. Reactor was just confusing last time I played it as I never got that you had to use the walls and bounce the enemies, and Pitfall I could never really get more than a few treasures in. After half an hour on each, well eh, I got a bit? Reactor started to make more sense but I still don't get it and Pitfall I just figured out how to jump over stuff. Nothing exciting there.

 

The Amiga 1200 got brought out for Moonstone, probably the only Amiga game that I can remember by name if you asked me "What Amiga games are there?" apart from It Came From The Desert. I think I went over this one in a past post, but whatever - it's a little fighting game where you play as a Knight and have to fight monsters and other Knights, while building up your knight with treasure and better gear and holding off the other knights. Bit of a beat 'em up and RTS combo, really. The game is tough and pretty bloody for stuff around when it came out, but it's a lot of fun to play. There's a modern port for Windows if you're mildly interested which is a couple MB at most in size, so give it a shot - you may enjoy it.

 

Finally, Game.com got played. Game.com is something that I always make jokes about but never mess with that often, so I brought out two games that I knew were "alright" - DN3D and Centipede. Centipede I have no issue with at all - it's a lot of fun anyways, just in black and white with a screen that needs a frontlight and a bit of mild ghosting. I wouldn't say it's the best port of Centipede ever made, but it's certainly one of the better games for the system as it's the arcade classic. Duke Nukem 3D is the opposite, and is nothing like the original - it's more like a confusing slideshow. Movement is confusing, sound effects are dumb at best, shooting makes me wonder "How did I even hit them?" and the levels are just easy. But, it's Duke, and everyone likes Duke, right?

 

So yeah, playing more than just Lawnmower Man paid off - it was fun anyways. More Game.com to come for next week as I feel like it, alongside a bit of SNES - that's what I've got in my bag of camera and audio gear for Multimedia anyways for when I'm bored.

[carlsson]

Cool, so Moonstone is compatible with the 1200? I might give it a try in the future. We used to play this game to death at the computer club's Amiga 500, until the disks became corrupted and full of graphic errors. It also is one of the rarest and most desired games to collectors, even those who are not particularly into Amiga will want to obtain this game if the price is right.

[oyamafamily]

Add more 15 minutes of Quadrun (Atari 2600).

I got my new high score of 83,580 points.

 

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (March 27th through April 2nd)...

 

Arcade:

Millipede - 87 min.

 

Atari 2600:

Millipede - 665 min. in 3 sessions

 

The only game I played this week is Millipede. I played 3 sessions of the Atari 2600 version, and in each of them I tried to get from 0 to 300.000 points which I finally managed to do, but it took me about 4 hours in the first two sessions, although by the 2nd session I adopted a new strategy, so it only took me about 90 minutes in the 3rd session. After that I replayed the arcade version where I got to 300,000 points as well.