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Who else is tired of all the "I'm tired of all the E.T. basing" threads?


KaeruYojimbo

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Many years ago, the internet decided that E.T. the Extra Terrestrial was the worst video game ever and created the myth that it was responsible not only for the downfall of Atari, but for the Great Video Game Crash™. The myth was embraced as gospel by gamers, many of whom were born after 1984. Before long those gamers began posting snarky videos, which they all incorrectly thought were quite novel, of themselves playing the game, repeatedly falling into pits and generally not knowing what on earth they were supposed to be doing.

 

Those videos infuriated fans of the game. "They haven't read the manual!" they cried. They rallied together and whenever they saw hatred for E.T. voiced, they responded in unison, "You must read the manual. Only when you read the manual will you understand the nuance of the game and see it for the work of genius that it is." It was the only explanation that made sense to them. No one who understood the game could possibly hate it.

 

And yet there are many among us who have read the manual. And the extra tip sheet that was provided because the manual didn't clarify things enough. And we still find the game a tedious, ill-conceived, poorly executed, obviously rushed and excruciatingly joyless experience.

 

Please stop telling us to read the manual and just let us dislike the game.

 

Thank you.

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Man, I tell ya, I wuz E.T. basing the other day, like really butt-wildly free E.T. basing, I mean Night of the Living E.T. Baseheads, and bro, I tell ya, I saw this damn E.T. like just levitate out of a hole. Made me lose ma sh!t. I've done a lot of hard stuff, but I don't think I'll ever E.T. base again.

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Yeah, the first thing I noticed was "E.T. basing". :lolblue:

I was reminded of the Bloodhound Gang's song, Mope. Here are the lyrics that I find applicable.

 

"Aw shit, here comes Pac-Man.
Hey Pac-Man, what's up?
Me you bitches! I'm high on crack! Wanna freebase?
No Pac-Man drugs are bad!"
Being serious though, I don't really care either way. If people want to make a thread about E.T. being the best game ever made, cool. That's their opinion. If they want to say it sucks, well, that's cool too. I haven't played it enough to care. I usually just read threads that I think will interest me, unless I'm bored, in which case, I'll join in any discussion I think might help me pass the time. You know, threads like this one. :P
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The problem with ET isn't that it was the worst game ever, it wasn't, not by a long shot. It was indeed not very fun, and suffered from several gameplay issues that make it an exercise in frustration. I found it mildly fun, but less than many of my other games. That wasn't the problem, and wasn't why ET is blamed.

 

The reason ET was so bad and became the posterchild for the video game crash wasn't because it was a terrible game, but because it was so overhyped, that even the best game ever couldn't have lived up to expectations, then Atari gave us a mediocre to poor game. Had another company released ET (with slightly different sprites and a different story and no movie license but identical gameplay) it wouldn't be talked about much, and certainly wouldn't be blamed for causing any crash.

 

ET along with Pac Man (which would be considered a mediocre Pac Man ripoff were it released by a different company under a different name) told us that even Atari had started peddling shovelware. That, I think, more than anything is what killed Atari back in the day.

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Yeah, the first thing I noticed was "E.T. basing". :lolblue:

 

Motherf-----.

And now it's too late to edit so this thing's going to the the E.T. basing thread forever.

 

Oh well. That's what I get for trying to be a smartass...

Edited by KaeruYojimbo
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ET. No, just no. I got it as a kid and expected something on the lines of adventure, rotla or superman. What I got was an ultralight adventure game, minus the adventure and filled with way more frustration. Is it beatable? Yes. Is it a great game? No. Good? No. Worst ever? Hell no. But I'd place it MUCH closer to the bottom than the top.

 

And for gods sake, no the damn manual is NOT a goddamned bible, nor will it make this crap pile of a game any better.

 

There seems to be a common misconception (not just on Atari, but ALL consoles) that the only possible reason people can 'not like' a game is because they don't understand it or they just suck at it. More open minded people might chalk it up to "you just don't like the genera" and both assumptions are simply not true.

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I seriously wonder what else can be possibly said about this game that has not already been said a million times before. Let us just agree to what ever theory each of us want to believe in and let the whole ET argument be put to sleep forever!

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To me it seems most of the atari games require reading the manual especially if they are not an arcade port. So I'm not sure why reading the manual is bad advice. Maybe I should play the game later today.

So you skipped over the part where I said I'd read the manual? No, I get it. Looking back I see that the last couple of sentences should have been written differently or just left out.

 

Without being facetious (or with markedly less facetiouness anyway) here's the point I wanted to make. Years ago someone called E.T. the worst video game ever. Said that it caused the video game crash and that Atari buried millions of copies in the desert. The last part is sort of true, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to hear (or read) it parroted over and over by people who have never played the game or know what the video game crash was. We're all sick of it, but you can't go to a video game website withouy stumbling onto some post about it by someone who thinks this is new information.

 

A few years ago a new kind of E.T. post started appearing. The "It's a great game, but you need to read the manual" post. As if at no time in the last 35 years did it occur to anyone to read the manual, and all the haters are just ignorant. Some of them are, yes, but a lot of them do actually know exactly how to play the game.

 

Sorry, this is getting long. Feel free to tl;dr it and move on with your day.

 

Is E.T. the worst game ever? No. Anyone who's ventured out of the shallow end of the 2600 game pool knows it's not even the worst game for the system. But it and Pac-Man are both high profile games that a lot of people bought. Since a lot of the truly terrible 2600 games are relatively obscure, E.T. is often the worst game someone has played.

 

E.T. is a complicated, unintuitive game and you need to read the manual to read it properly. Does reading the manual magically make it a good game? No. It makes it a crappy game you now know how to play properly.

Edited by KaeruYojimbo
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I get where you're coming from. I wish I could say there was a way to keep it from happening, but I don't think there is. This kind of thing happens on almost every forum. Sometimes it's a new member, who doesn't know any better, other times it's someone just trying to troll people. It's annoying, but it's going to happen. Sooner or later the offending thread will get pushed down, out of sight. Then someone else will probably make a new thread just like it. At some point, we've all posted something that has annoyed someone else. It's the internet, it's going to happen.

 

Recently, I called out another member in a thread for something they posted that annoyed me. At the time, I felt like it was the right thing to do, but shortly after, I felt horrible for it. I ended up sending him a PM to apologize for lashing out.

 

That's not the same thing, but it proves that we all get annoyed at times. Life's too short to dwell on it. ;)

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Please stop telling us to read the manual and just let us dislike the game.[/size]

 

Thank you.[/size]

It's fine to not like the game. I only have issues with people claiming it's the worst game ever, or that it caused the crash. Both those are easily disproven

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I don't even think ET is the worst game on the 2600, let alone the worst game of all time. When people say it's the worst of all time, it not only proves that they don't have much experience with video games, but that they haven't played a whole lot of the 2600 library.

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I'm with zzip. It's not whether it's great. It's whether it's really the worst.

 

Fun fact: just this week I had a coworker come to my office, see my autographed-by-HSW ET cart on my shelf, and ask, "isn't that supposed to be the worst game of all time?" *Sigh*

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It's just an dumb cliche, like "video games are addictive" and "Mortal Kombat saved the Genesis from Super Nintendo." I think it's annoying too, but it's one of those things that gets repeated enough times to be "true" in the culture. It happens in politics all the time, but that's a forbidden subject we dare not discuss here.

 

I made a thread about "classic gaming tropes" you can find in this forum, just a brain dump of lazy stuff I'm sick of reading and hearing about.

 

It was fun until some pedants came in to say "that's not what a trope is." If I could edit it, I would change it to "shit classic gamers say," but that would give the haters some satisfaction. :-D

 

It's how you can tell a real classic gamer from someone who is like, "ooh, pac-man, I had that on my Sega once."

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It's just an dumb cliche, like "video games are addictive" and "Mortal Kombat saved the Genesis from Super Nintendo." I think it's annoying too, but it's one of those things that gets repeated enough times to be "true" in the culture. It happens in politics all the time, but that's a forbidden subject we dare not discuss here.

Isn't "factoid" a word that used to be used to mean a bogus fact reported by the media so much that it's assumed to be true?

 

Probably fell out of favor when people started realizing that nearly every 'fact' reported by the media is partially or completely untrue :P

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Probably fell out of favor when people started realizing that nearly every 'fact' reported by the media is partially or completely untrue :P

On the local news here, their catchphrase is, "Getting the facts right". Is there a way to get the "FACTS" wrong? If it's a FACT, it has to be right. If it was wrong, it wouldn't be a FACT.

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