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

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (October 9th through 15th)...

 

Arcade:

Galaxian - 12 min.

Turtles- 20 min.

 

Commodore 64:

Trolls & Tribulations - 12 min.

 

MS-DOS:

Ms. Pac-Man - 114 min. in 3 sessions

 

Non-Eligible:

Stockstream - 216 min. in 8 sessions

Rubik's Cube - 9 min.

 

This week I managed to cut down on my time in Stockstream, but sadly, I also didn't do many votings there. I solved Rubik's Cube a few more time and dropped a "special" operation which should have been a shorter substitute for a combo of operations described in the booklet where I actually learned the solving strategy. Unfortunately, that special operation totally falls out of line with the other operations described in the book, so I replaced it by the described operations which are a bit longer, but easier to memorize. With that I'm now again able to solve the cube without using the book, and I'm now down to a solving time of 3-4 minutes.

 

I played another version of Ms. Pac-Man, the MS-DOS version. It's a bit tricky to setup so that it runs properly and in all its composite glory... you need DosBox with cycles=300, machine=cga and then press Alt-F11 to enable composite mode. Oh, you have to switch the game to composite too. WIth this combination, the game runs nicely. It does get pretty hard in later rounds because the monsters, when blue, speed up noticeably so that it's rather hard to catch them. In fact, the whole game speeds up greatly by that point, and I didn't manage to clear the banana level. The graphics are pretty basic for a MS-DOS game. They are colorful in composite mode, but the monsters and also the fruits are monochrome... seems llike they took the graphics from the Atari 8-bit version or even the Atari 2600.

 

I replayed Galaxian and Turtles in their original version. On Turtles, everything went smoothly and after a few failed attempts, I managed to clear the whole building (get to the roof).

 

Finally, I played "Trolls and Tribulations" on the C-64 which I haven't played since back in the day. On the surface, this looks like an easy jump and run with obstacles, however, the gaps and mazes are laid out so that you have to think of a strategy how to get through to the exit.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 209 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 55,991

 

 

 

[zylon]

5200-

River Raid- 42min

 

C64-

River Raid- 50min (played for comparison to above)

 

5200/A8 port of this classic is better graphically and more vibrant colors used, but gameplay and difficulty is about the same across all 3. 5200 gets a slight edge in controls, as the original cx52 stick can function as a cruise control for your plane speed. But hey, it's just my opinion.

I also still think a C64 Kaboom! would've been nice.

Edited October 16, 2017 by zylon

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

Atari 2600:

Asteroid Fire [aka The Great Escape, etc.] - 3 min.

 

SNES:

The Hunt for Red October - 57 min.

Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme: Skiing & Snowboarding - 200 min.

Beat The Hunt for Red October, after beating Freeride mode in Tommy Moe's. That next-to-last course was one of the hardest gaming challenges I've ever overcome.

[Iwantgames:)]

Not quite as many games this week but I did get a new Vectrex game

 

 

Atari 2600 (Emulated)

 

Scramble - 15min

 

 

Odyssey 2/Videopac

 

Astrododge - 20min

 

 

Vectrex

 

Berzerk - 20min

Clean Sweep - 160min

Scramble - 45min

Web Wars - 20min

 

And not sure if this counts or not but I played a port of Cytadela (Win XP, Mac OS X, and Linux). The Original version was on Amiga 1200

 

Cytadela - 70min

 

[agb]

NES Tetris 25 minutes.

 

Atari 2600:

Phoenix 39 mins

Bowling 27 mins

Basketball 30 mins

Solar Fox 142 mins

Worm War 1 - 24 mins

Beam rider 4 mins

Laser Blast 15 mins

[+Darrin9999]

Neo Geo AES :

 

1. Gunlord - 123 min

2. Magical Drop 2 - 95 min

3. Puzzle Bobble - 45 min

4. Puzzle Bobble 2 - 88 min

5. Puzzle De Pon! R! - 143 min

6. Zed Blade - 77 min

 

Videopac+ G7400 :

 

1.Thunderball - 69 min

2. Frogger - 40 min

[Skippy B. Coyote]

The last couple of weeks I had gotten my household's gaming time for the week posted but wasn't able to do a proper writeup or take a picture due to a combination of real life distractions and feeling under the weather, so this week it's time to play catch up! Here's the pictures from my household for the past three weeks along with the times for this week and a (hopefully reasonably short) writeup covering all three weeks.


October 2nd





October 9th





October 16th





Ineligible
Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions (Nintendo 3DS) - 5 minutes
StreetPass Mii Plaza (Nintendo 3DS) - 10 minutes

Atari 2600
Adventure - 35 minutes
Breakout - 20 minutes
Kangaroo - 8 minutes
Super Football - 200 minutes
Venture - 23 minutes
Warlords - 26 minutes

Atari 7800
Asteroids - 44 minutes
Centipede - 6 minutes
Dig Dug - 7 minutes
Joust - 9 minutes
Ms. Pac-Man - 40 minutes
Scramble (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 135 minutes
Xevious - 25 minutes

PC-DOS
The Ultimate Doom - 138 minutes

PlayStation
Silent Hill - 56 minutes


Total Play Time This Week
787 minutes (13 hours 7 minutes) [772 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Atari 2600: 312 minutes
Atari 7800: 266 minutes
PC-DOS: 138 minutes
PlayStation: 56 minutes
Nintendo 3DS: 15 minutes



Going back 3 weeks to the end of September and beginning of October, my summer fling with Nintendo's Wii and 3DS was starting to wind down. I did play quite a bit of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, with a determination to finally finish the game this time around, and I was still bringing my 3DS with just about everywhere I went. It wasn't long though before the Atari 7800 High Score Club drew me back in with a Centipede competition, being that Centipede is my favorite game on the 7800, so I decided to fire up my Atari 7800 emulator on the Wii and join in. That quickly led to me getting completely distracted from everything else I was playing that week and emulating a bunch of Atari 7800 games. I did manage to at least continue playing through The Ultimate Doom on the Wii a bit here and there, but other than that it was a mostly 7800 centric week for me once I started playing Centipede. For this misses' gaming time that week she wrapped up her game of Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition with all the special weapons she wanted to unlock then played a bit of emulated Atari 7800 Donkey Kong and Ms. pac-Man with me.

Moving on to the week before this past one, after seeing that I was active in the Atari 7800 High Score Club once more, one of my buddies here on AtariAge made me an offer too good to refuse on a composite video modded real Atari 7800 system with a whole bunch of mint condition games (which he literally opened brand new boxes of and sold me the loose carts out of the boxes for dirt cheap) so I could start playing HSC games on real hardware again. Getting the 7800 in the mail really renewed my interest in Atari gaming so almost all I played that week was Atari 2600 and 7800. The spousal unit was pretty excited to have an Atari 7800 in the house again too so she ended up playing a bunch of Asteroids, Dig Dig, and Joust as well. We also played a bit of Haunted House together on the 2600 when she wanted to play something Halloween themed but didn't really want to dedicate the time to starting survival horror game just yet. All in all it was a great week for Atari around here!

Finally, getting around to this past week, it was another good week for Atari gaming with a wide variety of Atari 2600 and 7800 games being played. The misses did finally get around to starting a game of Silent Hill on the Playstation, but other than that (and a bit of time spent returning to The Ultimate Doom on my part) it was another mostly Atari filled week for us; especially once she got a Sega Genesis to Atari 7800 controller adapter in the mail. Surprisingly (considering that I'm not much of a sports guy) my favorite game of this past week was one I had never played before until I stumbled on a copy in a local game store last week: Super Football.

 

Of the sports games that I do like on the 2600, Super Football definitely jumped up to near the top of my list after only a few hours playing it, with the only complaint I could really make about the game being the need to keep a copy of the instruction manual (or a HTML copy downloaded from the AtariAge manual database in my case) sitting in your lap while playing to help you remember which numbers correspond to which offense and defense formation selections. I had all the defense plays memorized after about an hour but I think it would take me a good long while to memorize all the offense play options. That's alright though, since the graphics and gameplay were rock solid and the computer AI was surprisingly well crafted to provide an intelligent opponent with just the right level of challenge. I ended up playing four complete games of Super Football on Difficulty 2 over the course of the week and won 3 out of 4, twice with an absolute miracle of a play in the last 20 seconds of the game. I'm not really all that into football and even I loved this game, so I think any football fan with a 2600 should consider Super Football a "must own" game.

 

Looking ahead to next week, in an effort to acquire a few more Atari systems for my 2018 Atari Challenge coming up next year I just got an XEGS in the mail today and a good half a dozen games for it; so I imagine I'll probably be spending a fair bit of time enjoying the XEGS next week. I'm still on the hunt for a Jaguar and a Lynx II, but I am really happy to now have 3 of the 5 Atari systems that I plan to use for my little quest next year. The misses will no doubt continue her game of Silent Hill next week, and I sure would like to wrap up The Ultimate Doom in the not too distant future so I'll be trying to set aside some time to play Doom in addition to all of the new Atari stuff I've been ogling over. Well, I think that about takes care of everything for this week! Until next time, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours.

Edited October 17, 2017 by Jin

[BurritoBeans]

Man, I'm getting good at not posting times on time...

 

Arcade:

Beast Busters - 45 minutes

Beast Busters Second Nightmare - 100 minutes

 

NES:

Sweet Home - 63 minutes, 13 seconds

 

Well, three more games are out of the way. The staples of the week are about sixty feet from me at my desk here at work, the Beast Busters arcade machines. For the first, I got two friends and we ended up hogging the machine for a good few hours on Tuesday - nobody ever really lined up or asked if they could have a round so I guess it was alright, people have been really liking the odd Japanese rhythm games anyways so those take the attention off of these machines which are usually at least played for half the day. It's not a long game by any means and it's simple - just shoot stuff including zombies, zombie dogs, zombie bats, and other stuff. Luckily this machine was free play, as while I only needed the equivalent of one quarter for a full run my friends needed about fifteen each.

 

Beast Busters Second Nightmare I got through alongside a friend in the span of a while more, as neither of us had actually got past the first level before and I really liked to get hit by things. This game, after playing so much House of the Dead that I can run 2 and 3 without being hit, seems almost like a cheaper House of the Dead - I can't say that too well though as that's every 3D zombie rail shooter nowadays to me. One nice bonus to this game is that the guns have the pump on the bottom meaning that when you need to reload you can still aim at whatever and just take a little time to rack it before getting back to the shoot-y stuff. In the end, I'm glad I finally ran through this one and that it was free play as if it wasn't I think I'd have run out of coins.

 

The last game was Sweet Home, coming in with a speedrun hence the odd time - the issue is, it's an RPG and that means luck is a thing and random encounters are a pain in the ass. I didn't have too much trouble - I know the game inside and out, know what to get when, where to go, etc. - but I think I could've shaved off a few minutes if I would've been a bit luckier.

 

So yeah, three more games down. Next week I want to play some more stuff, but not sure what - some dudes I talk with on Discord are all playing Silent Hill so I may run that alongside Resident Evil? Eh, I'll figure it out.

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 41, running from October 9 - 15. We logged 3288 minutes of eligible play, playing 59 games on a total of 15 systems.

Top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 209

2. Super Football (Atari 2600) - 200

2. Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme: Skiing & Snowboarding (SNES) - 200

4. Clean Sweep (Vectrex) - 160

5. Puzzle de Pon! R! (Neo Geo AES/MVS) - 143

6. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 142

7. Ultimate Doom, The (PC (DOS)) - 138

8. Scramble (Atari 7800) - 135

9. Gunlord (Neo Geo AES/MVS) - 123

10. Ms. Pac-Man (PC (DOS)) - 114

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 209

2. Super Football (Atari 2600) - 200

3. Clean Sweep (Vectrex) - 160

4. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 142

5. Scramble (Atari 7800) - 135

6. Fat Axl (Atari 7800) - 95

7. Thunderball! [aka Flipper Game] (Odyssey^2) - 69

8. Pac-Man (MSX) - 61

9. Alpha Roid (MSX) - 60

10. Centipede (Atari 7800) - 54

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (837)

2. Neo Geo AES/MVS (571)

3. Atari 7800 (409)

4. SNES (257)

5. PC (DOS) (252)

6. Vectrex (245)

7. Arcade (177)

8. MSX (139)

9. Odyssey^2 (129)

10. NES/Famicom (88)

Super Football is one of about 30 VCS games that, though they were released in North America, had never been seen before on the tracker...

...until this week, when it very nearly debuts at #1! But the two sports games chasing Kaboom this week can't quite catch it, ending up tied at #2 while our old bomb-dropper takes the top spot.

[carlsson]

Atari 2600:

Bowling - 2 min.

Barely a blip. I spent two minutes before getting to sleep to play a round of Bowling on my Atari Flashback Portable and got a decent score of 220 points. This is the least play time I've had since the end of September 2016, not counting weeks I've been entirely absent from eligible play.

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Asteroids - 108 minutes

Space Invaders - 64 minutes

These are 2 games which I won and chose as part of 2600 NEW High Score Club Season 6 - one for participating in all 32 weeks and another one for winning the Bonus Round. Both cartridges arrived last Monday (October 16th), and I had more fun with these legendary games.

And speaking on 2600 NEW HSC Season 6, I won the Gold Medal Tournament by winning 2 of 3 games in the finals - Moon Patrol and Gyruss (Snakeboy got sooo close to crack my score on Gyruss and win the medal therefore after he beat my score on Bump N Jump.)

 

ATARI 7800:

Scramble - 35 minutes

Played for 7800 High Score Club Season 2017-2018.

 

EVIDENCE OF THE WEEK: My 2600 cartridges which I won - Asteroids and Space Invaders. My prizes will be dedicated to JIN!

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this week (Red October 16th through 22nd)...

 

Arcade:

Burger Time - 55 min.

Super Burger Time - 84 min. in 2 sessions

 

MSX:

Burger TIme 355 min. in 10 sessions

Comic Bakery 8 min.

Pac-Man 30 min.

Q*Bert 2 min.

 

Non-Eligible:

Rubik's Cube 14 min. in 2 sessions

Stockstream: 273 min. in 10 sessions

 

I started an MSX streak by trying the MSX version of Pac-Man made by Namcot. They obviously set different priorities than Atari... The music is correctly transcribed, but played in a slightly different timbre, and the graphics look very close to the arcade, only adapted to the smaller screen and turned monochrome. There are also both intermissions present, and a surprise 3rd one appearing after the 10th screen.

 

After that I looked what other MSX games I could play and after some short sessions with Comic Bakery and Q*Bert finally settled with Burger Time, which I played pretty extensively. There are far more different screens than on the arcade original although they are somewhat simpler in structure. I counted at least 15 distinct screens. The AI of the enemies is different as well... while in the arcade they try to take every junction possible, in the MSX version the sausage always chases you horizontally, then vertically, while the pickle does the opposite, and I couldn't quite make out what the egg does. The animation is not as fluid as in the arcade, and you can only spray pepper while standing still, not while running, but you get used to this.

 

For a comparison, I also tried the arcade original of Burger Time as well as its successor, Super Burger Time (OK, the actual sequel was Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory, but I didn't ever see this one in an arcade back in the day). In Burger Time, I managed to finish all 6 screens, and I played through the whole of Super Burger Time with the help of Continues, which takes about half an hour.

 

Then I did two sessions at Rubik's Cube, and I'm getting better at it, solving it in under 3 minutes now again. And I played some Stockstream again as well, but not as extensively as in the last weeks.

Edited October 22, 2017 by Kurt_Woloch

[adamchevy]

Atari 2600

 

Chetiry 20 min

Circus Atari 30 min

Kaboom! 20 min

Tac Scan 20 min

Millipede TB hack 30 min

Edited October 22, 2017 by adamchevy

[+Ksarul]

I had some playtime again!

 

As usual, everything eligible for entry here in my house was on the TI-99/4A

 

Tutankham (Parker Brothers version): 45 minutes

Flappy Bird: 10 minutes

Titanium: 30 minutes

Sabre Wulf: 20 minutes

Jet Set Willy: 75 minutes (this was my youngest son's game time)

Squary: 60 minutes (this new game is a lot of fun to play, but I truly suck at it)

Knight Lore: 140 minutes

Alex Kidd on Miracle Island 20 minutes

 

That was it--but it is more play time than I've had in months, so I'm happy with it.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

EVIDENCE OF THE WEEK: My 2600 cartridges which I won - Asteroids and Space Invaders. My prizes will be dedicated to JIN!

20171022_143940.jpg

Aww, thank you Oyamafamily! Congratulations on your sweeping victory in the Atari 2600 HSC Season 6! You played amazingly well all year and I hope that I can give you some good friendly competition next season.

[+thegoldenband]

My times for the week:

 

NES:

3-D World Runner - 4 min.

Crossfire - 30 min.

Galg - 4 min.

Jajamaru Gekimaden: Maboroshi no Kinmajou - 209 min.

SNES:

Super Battleship - 32 min.

Super Final Match Tennis - 197 min.

Philips CD-i:

De Zaak van Sam - 144 min.

Beat a Dutch FMV game and a mediocre Famicom action RPG. Thoughts on those, plus The Hunt for Red October from last week, here.

Otherwise I won a couple matches in Super Final Match Tennis, got the first password (again) in Super Battleship, and couldn't get past the first stage in a Famicom run-'n-gun that was almost released in the US.

[agb]

Nes Tetris 32 minutes. Over 400,000

 

Intellivision using PlayStation disk:

Pinball 5 minutes

Space Battle 5 minutes

 

Atari 2600

Bowling 16 minutes. High score of 199

Solar Fox 157 minutes

Video Pinball 15 minutes

Stampede 14 minutes. New game for me.

Worm War 1 - 12 minutes

[BurritoBeans]

"Resident Evil and Silent Hill" riiight.

 

Commodore 64:

Project Firestart - 80 minutes

 

ZX Spectrum:

Go To Hell - 20 minutes

Soft & Cuddly - 55 minutes

 

Well, only one more week of old games with horror elements and I'm done.

 

This week consisted of some old computers, with the main one being the Commodore 64. I pulled out Project Firestart as I had ended up watching Alien and was reminded of the game - well, what can you say... it's like an Alien game without actually being Alien. It lives up to every generic bit that "Survival Horror" is alongside just being a nice action adventure title. I usually suck - I make a lot of bad moves over and over - but after a while of fiddling I was able to beat the game and that was cool.

 

The rest of the playtime that can count is on the ZX Spectrum with some old John George Jones games - again with the action adventures, but eh whatever they're fun enough. Go To Hell, being the earlier of the two, I played first - this is a simple game which takes all of 15 minutes to beat once you've played it once and know what to do. Pretty much all you do is run through a giant maze, save someone, and get the hell out of hell. All throughout there's little animations of people being being stabbed, sawed, having their heads cut off, etc. which is the entire "horror" element. It's not exactly that exciting of a game, but eh it at least keeps me entertained for ten minutes.

 

The other Spectrum title is Soft & Cuddly, also known as false advertising if you just went by the name. This is a big fetch quest in which you play as some dude who's mother was cut up into eight pieces (you're androids so it's not like she's dead) and you have to stitch her back together. This involves going through a series of screens (256, I think it was?) in which you find a fridge to reveal the location of body parts... I spent at least half the playtime thinking there were keys because the manual says so, turns out in the end Jones sent a letter out apologizing because that wasn't actually what you're supposed to do. I guess if you like really primitive cartoon gore it's good, but I thought it was just a bit bland like Go To Hell.

 

So yeah, I have one week and a few days of this left before I give up the "only old horror games" bit - I'm thinking of getting the Beast Busters RPG out on the Neo Geo Pocket (I know, not really "horror" when you get down to it but hey it's related to a horror series) and then I'm going to try to find four or five more titles to finish off the month with. If I don't do any of that I won't be surprised, I got about 20 games from a Humble Bundle that I didn't think I actually received plus the Borderlands games and all their DLC so I may just do BB at this point and call it, who knows.

[Iwantgames:)]

 

This week I obtained a Game Gear from the flea market so I play tested all the games of course Then I finished VR Troopers and Sonic Chaos. Then I tried out a couple Sega CD homebrews under emulation as I don’t know the first thing about burning Sega CD games lol. Also put a little time in on my Vectrex and played some emulated 2600 on my lunch break one day

 

Atari 2600

 

Scramble (Emulated) – 20min

Game Gear

 

Defenders of Oasis – 5min

Desert Speedtrap – 10min

Joe Montana Football – 5min

Legend of Illusion – 10min

Pac-Man – 35min

Poker Face Paul’s Solitaire – 5min

Sonic Drift 2 – 15min

Sonic The Hedgehog 2 – 25min

Sonic The Hedgehog Chaos – 130min

World Series Baseball – 5min

VR Troopers – 45min

Sega CD

 

First Invasion (Emulated) – 20min

Game & Watch: Octopus (Emulated) - 35min

 

 

Vectrex

 

Armor Attack – 10min

Scramble – 10min

 

 

Also put in another 135min on Cytadela before realizing that every mission becomes longer and more and more frustratingly maze like and no in level saving so I doubt Ill return to it. I just dont have the time to put hours straight into a game without saving and I dont like to leave the laptop running constantly to keep the game open.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 299 minutes

 

 

High score of the week: 93,868

 

 

 

[Skippy B. Coyote]

My sincere apologies for being so late with this week's post! Yesterday morning I suffered a total hardware failure of my Android tablet, which is my only modern computing device, and ended up losing almost everything on it since I didn't have cloud backups enabled. With that in mind this week's play times are mostly estimations from memory but they should be pretty close to what was played around my house this week. A proper writeup and picture will be coming tomorrow or the next day when I can get my computing hardware situation sorted out, but for now I'm posting from an ancient laptop:

 

 

Ineligible
Cursed Mountain (Nintendo Wii) - 692 minutes

Atari 2600
Adventure - 22 minutes
Warlords - 17 minutes

Atari 7800
Asteroids - 25 minutes
Centipede - 32 minutes
Choplifter! - 6 minutes
Dig Dug - 23 minutes
Food Fight - 30 minutes
Robotron 2084 (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 13 minutes
Scramble (Emulated on Nintendo Wii) - 19 minutes

Atari 8-Bit Computer
Missile Command - 94 minutes
Pac-Man - 121 minutes
Pole Position - 9 minutes

PC-DOS
The Ultimate Doom - 106 minutes

PlayStation
Silent Hill - 47 minutes

Edited October 24, 2017 by Jin

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Whoops! The misses had a friend over this weekend and I forgot to add the times for a couple of the games they played:

 

 

Atari 8-Bit Computer (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)

Blue Max - 10 minutes

 

ColecoVision (Emulated on Nintendo Wii)

Montezuma's Revenge - 20 minutes

Zaxxon - 7 minutes

[+Darrin9999]

Odyssey 2 :

 

1. Forbidden Lands - 182 min

2. Thunderball - 45 min

 

Atari Jaguar:

 

1. Raiden - 30 min

[+thegoldenband]

Times this week will be a bit delayed, but are coming soon -- either tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest.