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

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Where is the thyroid located?

It's in the neck, right below the Adam's apple. It's also sandwiched up against your vocal cords, making the main risk of a thyroidectomy the possibility of losing your voice if the surgeon's hand twitches and they nick your vocal cords. That's probably my biggest worry about it at this point.

[BuckoBrand]

Atari

 

Astroids *I am not good at this game 20 minutes

Worm War I. 1 hour

 

TI-99

 

Computer Math Games6 1.5 hours

Alpiner 2 hours

 

 

Apple

 

Oregon Trail 3 hours

[Opry99er]

Buck also played about 8 hours of MineCraft... but I told him it doesn't count.

[BurritoBeans]

Well, there's barely any variety from me this week compared to last - only three games.

 

Arcade:

Splatterhouse - 1750 minutes

 

Game.com

Centipede - 100 minutes

 

Nintendo 64:

GoldenEye 007 - 600 minutes

 

So, pretty much I decided to sit down with one of my all-time favorites this week (Splatterhouse) which I honestly haven't put good time into at all this year apart from last week - I like the game enough that I own a board of it and pretty much all the variants anyways. So, the big issue was that last weeks time on Splatterhouse was more screwing around, showing off, etc. and I didn't actually give a serious run to the thing - stuff like dancing around in-front of the mirrors and running bits without touching any enemies. So, this week I picked it back up seriously... well first thing first, I'm a good bit out of practice on some of the bosses - I must've forgot all the Jennifer patterns as I found myself losing a few lives on her, and Captain Mozzarella got to be an annoyance, as I finally got a game over there for the first time in maybe two years. Still, it didn't take a ton to get back what I used to know, so I've got the game running mostly solid again.

 

Goldeneye took 2nd for playtime from me this week, and it was good fun. Pretty much, I tried running the thing on Agent as fast as possible a few times (the best was like 35-45ish minutes, not that great but not horrible) and then for a good 200 minutes or so of the time a few friends and I sat down and played multiplayer... I haven't done that in years anyways, so that was a lot of fun. One thing about Goleneye I've always loved is watching the speedruns - Goose was a bit of a troll but a really nice guy to meet in the past/I love his streams, and if you don't mind hearing some guy go nuts then go look up Ryan Lockwood Streets 112 as it shows you how excited these guys get over this stuff. Still, I'm nowhere near the level of people like Rayan Isran, Marc Rützou, Ryan White, etc. so while I can get speedy on some levels, I'm nowhere near that good.

 

Finally, Game.com shows up for some more Centipede on the go - I can't say I've taken too much of a liking to Game.com Centipede, but I can say that it's the one reason that I come back to the system over and over. Right now I'm just beating high scores - I always sucked at Arcade Centipede, but I'm getting a little better on Game.com. I'd love to be able to clear more than like five boards on the arcade machine without having to drop a bunch of credits in, but that'll be a while anyways - if we get the multicade working properly, that may be a new goal of mine is to practice trackball centipede.

 

So, that's the week - three games and a good bit of fun. I'm going to stick with Splatterhouse for a while and retire Lawnmower Man to the sideline - expect to see time, I'm not giving up on it yet and I want to keep improving, but I need something else as I'm starting to get frustrated with where I'm at. Past that, maybe I'll work on the trackball a bit myself in the multicade? Now that I've got my mind on it, I'd love to see it work - Centipede would be good fun - and it's right there anyways. The thing is running off an Ultimarc interface anyways, it doesn't seem too hard and I remember we at least set up the connections so just a bit of configuration and I think I can get it after school or work one of these days.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 18, running from May 1 - 7. We logged 7920 minutes of eligible play, playing 89 games on a total of 18 systems.

Top 10:

1. Splatterhouse (Arcade) - 1750

2. GoldenEye 007 (N64) - 600

3. St. Nick (TI-99/4A) - 360

4. Puzzle Bobble (WonderSwan) - 246

5. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 218

6. Smurfs Rescue in Gargamel's Castle (Atari 2600) - 204

7. Defender (Atari 2600) - 190

7. Double Dragon (Atari 7800) - 190

9. Popeye (Atari 2600) - 188

10. Oregon Trail, The (Apple II) - 180

Pre-NES top 10:

1. St. Nick (TI-99/4A) - 360

2. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 218

3. Smurfs Rescue in Gargamel's Castle (Atari 2600) - 204

4. Defender (Atari 2600) - 190

4. Double Dragon (Atari 7800) - 190

6. Popeye (Atari 2600) - 188

7. Oregon Trail, The (Apple II) - 180

8. Donkey Kong PK (Atari 7800) - 178

9. Card Sharks (C64) - 175

10. Q*Bert's Qubes (Arcade) - 157

Top 10 systems:

1. Arcade (2030)

2. Atari 2600 (1121)

3. Atari 7800 (912)

4. TI-99/4A (640)

5. N64 (600)

6. Emerson Arcadia 2001 (475)

7. TG-16/PC Engine (455)

8. SNES (331)

9. Bally Astrocade (300)

10. WonderSwan (263)

In previous years, Week 18 would've been among our all-time top weeks; nowadays, it just misses the Top 10. But the numbers are still strong, and leading the phalanx is Splatterhouse, whose 1750 minutes would've instantly put it into the 1000-minute club even if it didn't already have 233 minutes in the bank (for a total of 1983 minutes logged to date).

So Splatterhouse claims spot #282, and it's joined by three more games -- Tomb Raider for PlayStation (1068 min.), Smurfs Rescue in Gargamel's Castle for Atari 2600 (1023 min.), and GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 (1011 min.) -- in spots #283-285.

But the big shock is: no Kaboom on the charts! Will our perennial paddle performer make a comeback next week? Stay tuned...

[Iwantgames:)]

Yay Wonderswan made the top 10 lol, I don't know if I'll get much gaming in this week tho

[Iwantgames:)]

Big times this week lol

 

Sega CD

 

Soul Star - 25min

 

And that's all folks!

[karokoenig]

Atari 2600

Chase the Chuckwagon: 10 min

Crystal Castles: 8 min

Frogger: 8 min

Galaxian: 5 min

Masters of the Universe: 3 min

Moon Patrol: 7 min

 

Some of the 2600 playtime was done with a few kids visiting us. Was kind of fun watching a 5 year old try to handle a joystick :-).

 

NES

Megaman 2: 15 min

 

One more Robot Master. Two left before I go after Dr Wiley. Slow progress.

 

PC (DOS)

Historyline: 120 min

 

A german-language retro channel on youtube re-started their Lets Play of Historyline after a longer hiatus. Inspired by that, I played through the map they're currently playing. No idea why I keep returning to this game.

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Chase The Chuckwagon - 25 minutes

Crystal Castles - 35 minutes

 

COLECOVISION:

Carnival - 24 minutes

Gorf - 58 minutes

Keystone Kapers - 12 minutes

Pepper II - 154 minutes

Q*Bert - 134 minutes

Threshold - 30 minutes

Tutankham - 8 minutes

Zaxxon - 100 minutes

 

This week I played VCS games only for 2600 NEW HSC Season 6, Week 16.

The rest of playtime was done with ColecoVision games, played with COLEM Emulator. For this platform I started with games which I know more (Popular Arcade and Activision games), and I tried Pepper II by Exidy.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Caverns of Khafka - 5 min.

Spelunker - 48 min.

Tree Surgeon - 16 min.

Atari 8-bit HSC all the way. Neither of the three games will remain on my hotlist of games to play.

[oyamafamily]

TO ADD: Atari 2600 - Chase The Chuckwagon - 84 minutes

Took me more attempts and resets to improve my score in my last effort for 2600 NEW HSC.

 

EVIDENCES OF THE WEEK:

 

1) 2600 Chase The Chuck Wagon - 1903 points

 

2) ColecoVision Gorf - 22,400 points on Skill 1 (Cadet Starting Level)

 

3) ColecoVision Q*Bert - 301,695 points on Skill 2 (4 starting lives - 1 in action and 3 in reserve)

 

4) ColecoVision Pepper II - 2,320,900 points on Skill 1 (5 starting lives and easy mode)

Edited May 14, 2017 by oyamafamily

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (May 8th through 14th)...

 

Arcade:

Jr. Pac-Man - 40 min. in 3 sessions

 

Atari 2600:

Tapper - 11 min.

 

Online (non-eligible):

Reach the core - 197 min. in 2 sessions

 

I started out the week by continuing to play "Reach the core", which proved longer than I initially thought it would be. I learned that by leaving the game alone, it basically plays itself and you reach about the same depth you get when you actively steer it, it's only collecting less blocks and gems. And then I learned that the 1st level really has no end... it displays the end of the shaft, but the shaft really doesn't end.

 

Then I did a quick replay of "Tapper" on the Atari 2600 and "Jr. Pac-Man" in its original arcade version, where I managed to reach Level 2.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 276 minutes

Crystal Castles - 82 minutes

Chase The Chuck Wagon - 248 minutes

 

 

Kaboom! High score of the week: 135,830

 

 

[BurritoBeans]

Arcade:

Cabal - 200 minutes

Marble Madness - 20 minutes

Missile Command - 60 minutes

 

Nintendo 64:

Goldeneye 007 - 1200 minutes

Perfect Dark - 150 minutes

 

Super Nintendo:

The Lawnmower Man - 150 minutes

 

If I played anything else, well, I don't remember all too well.

 

Goldeneye takes over Lawnmower Man for the most playtime on one game straight - out of the 20 hours that I played on it, ten were from one session - the longest I think I had on Lawnmower Man was like seven or eight. Pretty much, I said "Screw it, I want to try and get a world record pace run on at least one level" - I picked Dam Agent as I know I can get one minute for the total time easily and it's the most tied WR at the moment with like 100+ people. Dump like twenty hours in, and the best I could do is 0:56 - not too bad but nothing great. I think part of my issue is my control scheme - my joystick is more reliable than my C buttons and there's no way in hell I'm doing D-Pad strafing so I stick with 1.1 or 2.2, but my thumb gets killed after a few hours. My options are either to buy a new N64 controller that wasn't abused back when my brothers and I were little (ehh, I already have six...), maybe fix up the C buttons and learn 1.2 like 99% of the GE community, or just suck up the pain.

 

Perfect Dark was brought out as I felt like it - I ran through the game fairly quickly but not too quick anyways, then spent some time screwing around with random features. It's good fun, and I don't have anything else really to say about it.

 

The three arcade titles were all due to me wanting to break in the trackball on the thing - we got a bunch of stuff from ultimarc anyways and one of said stuff-s was a trackball. Dad didn't even know if he had it working but eh, just plug it into the I-PAC board and the thing worked right there as a mouse. Cabal got the most playtime as it isn't too hard to just pick up and screw around with - I never got past 1-3 but I did have good fun playing it anyways. Marble Madness got brought up in a conversation with BillyHW so I played two serious games then failed hard - by serious, I mean still failed but not as hard. The first game I got to the 2nd board and then ran out of time due to not flicking the ball hard enough and taking a few bad turns, then the 2nd I made it 3/4ths of the way through the 3rd board before running out of time - it's good fun, but I suck at the game. Missile Command got a bit of playtime as I just remembered it existed, and I was surprised with it. Usually on the Atari I'll get like two or three boards then fail - I just suck at it. In the arcade version though, having the ball and all, I made it nine boards in before losing all my cities - I really outperformed my expectations anyways, and that was cool.

 

So, next week will be a lot of Goldeneye. If I can get a 00:53 pace Dam Agent and clear it, I'll be happy with myself and then maybe chase a few more of the common WRs before I move on to attempting some of the harder stuff - I just have to remember to take time off of it and play other games. While I'm at it, maybe I'll look at buying a nice capture card... I want to record Lawnmower Man but my current device is ass and adds like half a second of input delay, so I refused to even try it on GE today - I was thinking of just getting a cheap-ish DVD recorder or something like that, but honestly having something I could stick into my PC and capture video with a low latency may be nicer and add the ability to do stuff like streaming if I really felt like it.

[zylon]

via Xbox 360:

 

Doom II- 45min

1943- 38min

Gunsmoke- 5min (have to say I enjoyed the NES port far better than this arcade release)

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

Atari 2600:

Lord of the Rings: Journey to Rivendell - 92 min.

 

Genesis:

S.S. Lucifer: Man Overboard! - 4 min.

SNES:

International Tennis Tour - 375 min.

I focused mainly on making progress in International Tennis Tour, but I did find time to beat Journey to Rivendell on both difficulty settings. Thoughts on that, plus Sküljagger and Nuts & Milk, here.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

A good video game is like lubricant: No matter how tough life gets, there's

.

 

 

 

Atari 2600

Adventure - 20 minutes

Chase the Chuckwagon - 97 minutes

Crystal Castles - 17 minutes

Jr. Pac-Man - 26 minutes

Venture - 49 minutes

Atari 7800

Asteroids - 78 minutes

Donkey Kong (emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 6 minutes

Donkey Kong Junior - 68 minutes

Donkey Kong PK - 106 minutes

Double Dragon - 31 minutes

Food Fight - 90 minutes

Ninja Golf - 132 minutes

Pac-Man Collection! - 216 minutes

Pole Position II - 18 minutes

ColecoVision (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)

Donkey Kong - 3 minutes

Donkey Kong Junior - 5 minutes

Game Boy

Double Dragon - 11 minutes

Game Boy Color

Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition - 23 minutes

NES (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)

Donkey Kong - 6 minutes

Donkey Kong Junior - 11 minutes

PlayStation

Tomb Raider - 53 minutes

Total Play Time This Week
1,066 minutes (17 hours 46 minutes) [1,066 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week

Atari 7800: 745 minutes

Atari 2600: 209 minutes

PlayStation: 53 minutes

Game Boy Color: 23 minutes

NES: 17 minutes

Game Boy: 11 minutes

ColecoVision: 8 minutes

If you've been following my little weekly write ups the last few weeks you may have already guessed that most of the gaming time in my household this week was done by the misses, since I underwent thyroid surgery last Thursday and wasn't in all that great shape for playing video games again until Saturday night. The surgery went very well and I'm healing just fine, but any time you get a major organ removed it does wipe you out for a good while and I did have a pretty rough time coming out of and recovering from the anesthesia for the first couple days. I brought my Game Boy Color along to the hospital when I went in for surgery with the hopes that it would give me something to do while I was laid up in the hospital recovering afterwards, but I was way too out of it to play anything for those first few days; as evidenced by the very low times logged for Double Dragon and Ms. Pac-Man. I gave it my best but everything looked all blurry and my brain was in a pretty heavy fog, so any real gaming had to wait a few days until I got out of the hospital and was back home.

Once I got back the first thing I did to relax was plunk down in front of the TV with Pac-Man Collection! on the Atari 7800 and play a few rounds of Ms. Pac-Man. It was a real relief to be back in the comfort of my own home and playing one of my favorite games again, even if the prescription pain meds that I was sent home weren't exactly helping me play to the best of my ability. Once I had rested up in my own bed for a night, the next day (Saturday) I decided it might help brighten my spirits and speed up my recovery to get a little light exercise in by getting out of the house for a bit on what was turning out to be a really beautiful, bright, and sunny early summer day. With that in mind the misses, our housemate, and I all took a trip to a couple local game stores together and wandered around for bit seeing if there was anything worth picking up. The misses found a good condition copy of her old favorite Atari 2600 game Adventure to bring home, and I happened upon a copy of Venture as well as Food Fight for the Atari 7800; which was pretty awesome since it's the game being played this round in the Atari 7800 High Score Club and I didn't have a copy of it yet. The real prize though was what I found at the last store we visited: An absolutely pristine condition copy of Ninja Golf for the Atari 7800 for a mere $7.50!

As you might well imagine I spent a whole lot of time playing Ninja Golf when I got back home, and managed to get in a few games of Food Fight and Venture as well. By that point the anesthesia drugs had worn off enough that I could actually play pretty competently, and set new HighScore.com world record scores in every game I played Saturday night and Sunday. As far as the spousal unit's gaming time this week went she ended up keeping the Atari 7800 warm and well loved in my absence, with plenty of time logged in Asteroids, Donkey Kong PK, Donkey Kong Junior, and Pac-Man Collection!. With all the time she's spent enjoying the Atari 7800 these past few weeks I think that if she doesn't seriously get back to her game of Tomb Raider pretty soon then her PlayStation might start getting jealous.

That should just about cover everything for this week! Play times for me will be sporadic for a while, since I've still got another week or so of rest and recovery ahead of me (which will likely involve taking up residence on the couch and driving everyone else in the household crazy by watching way too many episodes of PAW Patrol) before I can get back to doing all my normal every day things, but hopefully it'll go smoothly and after this past week at least I know the misses can always get some gaming time tracked and logged for our household until I'm back on my feet. Until then, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours!

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 19, running from May 8 - 14. We logged 4996 minutes of eligible play, playing 54 games on a total of 14 systems.

Top 10:

1. GoldenEye 007 (N64) - 1200

2. Chase the Chuckwagon (Atari 2600) - 464

3. International Tennis Tour (SNES) - 375

4. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 276

5. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 216

6. Cabal (Arcade) - 200

7. Pepper II (ColecoVision) - 154

8. Perfect Dark (N64) - 150

8. Lawnmower Man, The (SNES) - 150

10. Crystal Castles (Atari 2600) - 142

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Chase the Chuckwagon (Atari 2600) - 464

2. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 276

3. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 216

4. Pepper II (ColecoVision) - 154

5. Crystal Castles (Atari 2600) - 142

6. Q*bert (ColecoVision) - 134

7. Ninja Golf (Atari 7800) - 132

8. Donkey Kong PK (Atari 7800) - 106

9. Zaxxon (ColecoVision) - 100

10. Lord of the Rings: Journey to Rivendell (Atari 2600) - 92

Top 10 systems:

1. N64 (1350)

2. Atari 2600 (1103)

3. Atari 7800 (745)

4. ColecoVision (528)

5. SNES (525)

6. Arcade (363)

7. PC (DOS) (165)

8. Atari 8-bit (69)

9. PlayStation (53)

10. NES/Famicom (32)

A whole lot of GoldenEye! Kaboom is back! It's a party!

[Eltigro]

I've been playing a lot of old school type games, but not old games. I was almost through Shantae and the The Pirate's Curse when I started up Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap. The latter is a remake of a Master System game, but I don't think it qualifies for the tracker, so I haven't been timing it.

 

As far as this week's results, the fact that Lawnmower Man only got 150 minutes is almost as surprising as Kaboom not being in the top ten the other week. lol

[+davidcalgary29]

A8:

 

Hans Kloss -- 165 amazing minutes

Kult -- 60 minutes

Dwie Wieze -- how in the hell do you play this game?? 10 minutes

Magia -- felled by my utter lack of Polish -- 10 minutes

Caveman -- ugh. 5 interminable minutes

 

Dreamcast:

 

Samba de Arthritis: 1 hour with the kiddies, followed by naproxen.

[karokoenig]

NES

Megaman 2: 80 min

 

Made good progress more than halfway through the Wiley Castle, then had to stop playing. Such a disappointment that there are no more passwords once you have all robot masters defeated. I really don't like to leave the NES on overnight. After all, it's 30-year-old tech, and I don't want to burn down my apartment :-).

 

Let's hope I can find the time to play through the rest of the game in one sitting soon. Now that I've come this far, I really want to beat that sucker.

 

Yeah, I know... it's the easiest of all Megaman games, and I'm even playing on normal. Many gamers would look at my efforts with mild amusement. But I'm not much of a platformer guy. Not really good at it, but it's fun.

[Iwantgames:)]

My game times for the week. Finally tried out the CoCo3 I got months ago lol. And dusted off the ol' DOS machine

 

Coco 1/2

 

Chuckie Egg - 30min

 

Poltergeist - 10min

 

 

Coco 3

 

Space Intruders - 20min

 

 

DOS

 

Blake Stone - 45min

 

 

Sega CD

 

Tomcat Alley - 10min

 

 

Wonderswan

 

Puzzle Bobble - 10min

[carlsson]

Amiga OCS:

Premier Manager 1 - 739 min.

Atari 8-bit:

Spelunker - 56 min.

I gave one of the HSC games another try, more than doubled my highscore but realized I'm too far from the top players to really put much time into it.

Then I got an urge to play football again. I am using some sort of make-shift power supply for the Amiga 1200, and it caused the computer to die randomly.

I was almost about to repurpose an old PC AT power supply, when I checked the wires and resoldered the -12V wire. It seems to have made it a bit more stable, though with the 68030 card installed it still behaves odd. Either the expansion card is bad, or the power supply doesn't always deliver enough power. After removing the 68030 card though, it seems to be rather stable.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (May 15th through 21st):

 

Arcade:

Pitfall II - 130 min. in 2 sessions

 

Online (non-eligible):

Bit Heroes - 217 min. in 2 sessions

Yellow - 2 min.

 

Inspired by a thread on Atariage asking if we knew there was an arcade version of Pitfall II, I played this game this week. After a while I found out how to operate the continue feature, but it only works until you reach the last level. I managed to beat that one as well by switching to infinite lives, however, but in that case it hangs on the closing where it adds the number of lives to the score.

 

Then I tried a game called "Bit Heroes" on Kongregate which basically has three main levels of play. On the upper level, you equip your player and form a party with two other members, join a guild etc. Then it's off to dungeons where you and your party try to clear the dungeon by battling every enemy and collecting everything to be found. On meeting with an enemy, the game changes to the battle screen where there's turn-based action, and on each turn you can select between different moves which inflict different kinds of damages on the enemy. Though the game comes in a 16-bit look and 8-bit sound, it's pretty complex, and there are dozens of enemies and items to explore.

 

FInally, yellow is a kind of puzzle game where you have to paint each screen yellow, but the gameplay mechanics change pretty radically with each level.

Edited May 21, 2017 by Kurt_Woloch

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Lead - 45 minutes

Oystron - 56 minutes

Wall Jump Ninja - 25 minutes

 

ATARI 5200:

Xevious - 3 minutes

 

ATARI 7800:

Food Fight - 15 minutes

 

COLECOVISION:

Bump 'N' Jump - 85 minutes

Centipede - 60 minutes

Pepper II - 185 minutes