What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2018 (Season 11)

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600:

Colony 7 - 170 minutes

Missile Command - 60 minutes

Raft Rider - 100 minutes

Spacemaster X-7 - 29 minutes

Yars' Revenge - 5 minutes

 

EVIDENCE OF THE WEEK: Raft Rider gameplay footage, presented for 2600 NEW HSC Season 7, Silver Medal Tournament Finals

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (August 20th through 26th) on classic games:

 

Atari 7800:

Baby Pac-Man - 33 min.

Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest - 94 min.

Serpentine - 81 min. in 2 sessions

 

This week I played 3 Atari 7800 games. I replayed Baby Pac-Man because its author is currently stuck, so the pinball portion will probably take another while to complete. Then I played another game by the same author, Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest (AKA Bently Bear, AKA Crystal Quest), using continues until the end of the 8th round where the first boss appears. Finally I also replayed Serpentine where I managed to beat the 20th and last level (which in this version is identical to one of the previous levels).

[Eltigro]

Not much from me this week...

 

Jaguar

Tempest 2000 - 25 min (Played some for the Jaguar HSC. Got a couple decent scores, I guess. Hard to tell what's good. It's about middle of the pack so far from what I've seen in the HSC, but I'll play more this week and see if I can get better.)

 

Playstation

Castlevania SotN - 11 min (Playing as Richter... never really played it very far using him. Jumping is harder and the lack of items and other things will make it more of a challenge. Just beat the first bosses (Slogra and Gabbon or whatever). His whip is more powerful than Alucard's swords at this point, but I'm sure the swords later in the game outpace the whip. We'll see what happens.)

[agb]

Times for the week are:

All Atari 2600

For the 2018 summer Activision Quest

Ice Hockey. 20 minutes. No patch. Getting close.

Kaboom. 29 minutes. No patch. Still struggling.

Oink! 42 minutes. No patch. Getting there.

Pitfall. 54 minutes. Patch earned. Lots of fun.

Spider Fighter. 27 minutes. Patch earned. Fun game.

Also

3D tic tac toe 13 minutes. First time playing. Interesting.

Solar Fox 198 minutes.

[Eltigro]

I got a label-less copy of 3-D Tic Tac Toe a while back. Included it as a "mystery game" when I sold a 2600. =)

 

Had two 2600s that I sold... the other one had a label-less copy of Chess with it as its mystery game.

[+wongojack]

A2600

3D Tic Tac Toe 2

Adventure 1

Amidar 1

Asteroids 1

Boxing 3

Chopper Command 2

Combat 1

Crystal Castles 5

Dodge 'em 2

Frogger 1

Haunted House 1

Midnight Magic 20

Millipede 2

PacMan 1

Pitfall 2

Skiing 2

Space Invaders 2

Spider Fighter 2

Surround 1

Venture 2

A7800

Asteroids 1

Karateka 1

Ms Pac Man 1

NES

Bionic Commando 2

Donkey Kong Jr 6

Super Mario Bros 5

Tecmo Bowl 4

Tetris 21

TMNT 4

 

A bunch of cleaning and testing of carts that I was prepping for sale. I ALSO finished my first ever game of 3d TTT this week.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 363 minutes

Hunchy 2 - 20 minutes

 

 

Kaboom! : 78,952

 

 

 

[+Cafeman]

I have been revisiting Dreamcast Crazy Taxi 2 the past few weeks. I estimate about 7 hours.

 

There are a few shortcuts that must be learned to do well, using the Crazy hop to jump over real estate (onto building roofs, over highways to reach another road,etc). I think I understand the Around Apple map well enough now to try for a Crazy License score, so far I've reached $10k but that's it.

[cimerians]

Atari

Space Invaders 8

Venture 10

C64

Big Mac 15

Conan 8

ColecoVision

Dragon fire 8

Mame

Changes 7

Jungle Hunt 8

Edited August 27, 2018 by cimerians

[+thegoldenband]

My lone time for the week (dating from last Monday):

 

Game Gear:

Chessmaster - 705 min.

Beat Infinite difficulty with the Black pieces.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Apologies for my lateness, I was out of the house all morning and afternoon having a howling good time at the Minnesota State Fair!




Ineligible
Dead Space: Extraction (Nintendo Wii) - 439 minutes
Jurassic: The Hunted (Nintendo Wii) - 36 minutes
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (Nintendo Wii) - 492 minutes
StreetPass Mii Plaza (Nintendo 3DS) - 8 minutes
Wii Play (Nintendo Wii) - 128 minutes
WordJong Party (Nintendo Wii) - 580 minutes

PlayStation
Clock Tower - 186 minutes


Total Video Game Play Time This Week
1,869 minutes (31 hours 9 minutes) [186 minutes eligible]

Individual System Play Times This Week
Nintendo Wii: 1,675 minutes
PlayStation: 186 minutes
Nintendo 3DS: 8 minutes



All puns about the adorable little wolf plush that I brought home from the State Fair (who I named Shadow Dancer) aside, it was a great week for both summertime gaming and outdoor fun around here this past week. I started off the week by finishing my play through of Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition on Professional difficulty, which definitely offered a satisfyingly "professional" degree of challenge towards the end, then wound up playing through quite a few other Wii games thanks to some local GameStop pickups early in the week.

I spent a little time testing out Jurassic: The Hunted, which was a lot of fun in a goofy B-movie sort of way, but the new game that really captured my attention for most of the week was WordJong Party. It might sound like one of the Wii's countless shovelware titles but this little mashup of two of my favorite puzzle games, Shanghai and Scrabble, is surprisingly well made and the single player Battle Quest mode offers a great challenge with a perfect difficulty curve. I did spend a bit of time playing the various party modes as well, which were all fun, but the real selling point of the game for me was the Battle Quest mode; which I played through in it's entirety over the past week.

In addition to Resident Evil 4 and WordJong Party I also spent quite a bit of time playing two other Wii pickups from the past week, Wii Play and Dead Space: Extraction. Wii Play is a neat little compilation of minigames that came bundled with spare Wii remotes to teach new players the various functions of the Wii remote, and it was actually pretty darn fun and well worth the $0.99 that I paid for it complete in box. The Tank minigame in particular was a total homage to Combat on the Atari 2600, but with computer AI controlling the other tanks this time around and some neat new additions like land mines and destructible walls. Dead Space: Extraction was, well… I could probably go on for 2 pages about how amazing Dead Space: Extraction is on every conceivable level, but for the sake of brevity I'll just say "It's my all time favorite and likely the very best on-rails light gun shooter ever made on any system period, and any fan of the genre owes it to themselves to play this game." I think that covers it pretty well!

For the spousal unit's gaming time this past week there wasn't a whole lot, but she did play 3 hours or so of Clock Tower on the PlayStation. About half that time was spent beating the game and earning one of the 10(!) different endings, and the other half of her gaming time was spent starting a new game to play through it again. I got the impression that Clock Tower is a pretty short game though, so I don't think she'll have too much trouble playing through it a few more times to get some different endings. Looking ahead to next week I know she plans to play some more Clock Tower and maybe start a different game as well, but I'm not too sure what I'm going to play. I might end up getting back to Jurassic: The Hunted, playing Dead Space: Extraction again on a higher difficulty setting, or maybe starting a play through of the rather enormous 50+ hour long Ōkami for the Wii that I picked up earlier this week along with all the other Wii titles I've been playing.

In any case, I think it's fair to say that there's going to be a good bit of Wii gaming in my future next week! Until then, and as always, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours.

Edited August 28, 2018 by Jin

[+thegoldenband]

Here's the summary for Week 34, running from August 20 - 26. We logged 2919 minutes of eligible play, playing 55 games on a total of 12 systems.

Top 10:

1. Chessmaster, The (Game Gear) - 705

2. Crazy Taxi 2 (Dreamcast) - 420

3. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 392

4. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 198

5. Clock Tower (PlayStation) - 186

6. Colony 7 (Atari 2600) - 170

7. Raft Rider (Atari 2600) - 100

8. Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest (Atari 7800) - 94

9. Serpentine (Atari 7800) - 81

10. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 60

Pre-NES top 10:

1. Kaboom (Atari 2600) - 392

2. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 198

3. Colony 7 (Atari 2600) - 170

4. Raft Rider (Atari 2600) - 100

5. Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest (Atari 7800) - 94

6. Serpentine (Atari 7800) - 81

7. Missile Command (Atari 2600) - 60

8. Pitfall! (Atari 2600) - 56

9. Metagalactic Llamas (Atari 8-bit) - 45

10. Oink! (Atari 2600) - 42

Top 10 systems:

1. Atari 2600 (1202)

2. Game Gear (705)

3. Dreamcast (420)

4. Atari 7800 (211)

5. PlayStation (197)

6. Atari 8-bit (50)

7. NES/Famicom (42)

8. Atari Jaguar (25)

9. C64 (23)

10. Amiga (21)

We have a near-repeat of last week, as the Game Gear port of Chessmaster tops the individual charts while Kaboom and the Atari 2600 take the other two. This time, though, Crazy Taxi 2 interposes itself in the #2 spot and also leads the Dreamcast to a third-place finish on the system charts.

After two big weeks it's no surprise that Chessmaster also enters the 1000-minute club, with 1386 minutes logged that give it spot #338.

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 2600

Eggomania - 35 minutes

Missile Command - 63 minutes

Pac-Man - 10 minutes

 

EVIDENCE OF THE WEEK: My Eggomania gameplay footage, presented for 2600 NEW HSC Season 7 SIlver Medal Tournament, Tie-Break Round.

At the end of finals, there was a TIE between me and Scrabbler15. Scrabbler won Red Sea Crossing, I won Discus Event from the Activision Decathlon and BOTH rolled the score on Raft Rider. Lets wait the winner of Silver Medal Tournament.

 

[karokoenig]

Saba Videoplay

Cart 1: 2 min

Cart 2: 2 min

Cart 3: 2 min

Cart 4: 5 min

Cart 5: 2 min

Cart 7: 2 min

Cart 8: 2 min

 

Atari 2600

Atlantis: 3 min

Circus Atari: 5 min

Phoenix: 15 min

Schnapp die Apfeldiebe (Quelle hack of Plaque Attack): 5 min

Venture: 8 min

 

NES

Marble Madness: 8 min

 

Sega Master System

Olympic Gold: 15 min

 

Lots of hardware testing and a good relaxing round of Phoenix afterwards.

 

What can I say about the Saba Videoplay (Channel F for you Americans)? It's primitive alright, and I'm not yet sure how to choose game variants. None of my games has a manual with it. Sure it's more sophisticated than your average Pong, but in terms of fun gameplay, I'd go with Pong any day - or with an Interton VC4000. The Fairchild/Saba controllers are something to behold, though. And man, that thing is heavy. Feels like the circuits inside are made of bricks and concrete.

[carlsson]

Atari 8-bit:

Acrobat - 5 min.

Cellar Terror - 6 min.

Choplifter - 5 min.

Galactic Patrol - 8 min.

Hard Hat Mack - 3 min.

Inter Galleon Battle - 3 min.

Jawbreaker 1 - 4 min.

Jawbreaker 2 - 5 min.

Jawbreaker 4 - 8 min.

Kult - 92 min.

Lunar Leeper - 16 min.

Malpass the Asteroid Mines - 8 min.

Marauder - 17 min.

Marauder 2 - 8 min.

Night Mission Pinball - 65 min.

Pong [Mirage Software] - 14 min.

Threshold - 23 min.

We're having what is known as Hires Month in the Atari 8-bit HSC, which means we mainly play monochrome games in 320x200 resolution, those who are supposed to cause artifacts on NTSC TV sets when going through RF in order to produce colours that way. Some of those games were eliminated from the round after I had a brief play, but the majority remains for rest of September.

[Kurt_Woloch]

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

 

Colecovision:

Steamroller - 294 min. in 9 sessions

 

This week, I only played a single game, but I played it for about 5 hours and 9 sessions in total - Steamroller on the Colecovisoin. I haven't reached my goal of beating the typical Activision patch score of 35,000 points (has there been a patch for this game at all?), but I'm working on it. Several of the sessions only comprise a single game which typically lasts over 20 minutes.

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Kaboom! - 376 minutes

Hunchy 2 - 34 minutes

 

 

Kaboom! : 94,830

 

[Eltigro]

My times... pretty focused on one game this week...

 

Atari Jaguar

Tempest 2000 - 339 min (Playing this for the Jaguar HSC and I have never been this into this game before. I think I finally got the hang of using the d-pad for control. The game was pretty much made for a spinner, but I don't have one. By now I think I've gotten to the point where I would be worse with one. lol This is the first time I've had a sore thumb from playing in a while. My games are taking a little over 30 minutes from start to game over, which is way up from what I used to be capable of. I had a high score of 467445 a few days ago, and haven't been able to beat that since, so I may have topped out in my skill for a while. We'll see... there's still another week of Tempest in the HSC. On a semi related note, if I'm going to be playing this much Jaguar, I've gotta look into some issues I'm having with my system. Need to get some AV cables or something for cleaner output... you can see the interference in the screenshot..., probably need to get a new power supply as mine starts making a high pitched hum from the wall wart, and there's some audio issues that seem to resolve when I lift up the front of the console about an inch and let it drop back down. Sigh... Jags aren't cheap to replace anymore, so I may need to learn how to solder in the near future.)

 

 

Not sure where this one belongs, but I think it should probably be here since the arcade machine came out in the 80s... I played about 10 minutes of Dragon Spirit on the Namco Museum 50th Anniversary for the original XBox. Man that game is super hard. I remember the TurboGrafx version being a little more forgiving. I also played a negligible amount of Pac Man on the same disc, but without an actual joystick, I just can't do Pac Man games... I'll let you guys decide.

 

 

[agb]

Times for the week are:

NES Tetris 11 minutes

 

Atari for Activision Summrr Ostch Quest:

Barnstorming 42 mins. No patch

Ice Hockey 31 mins no patch. Tied score once.

Kaboom 6 mins. No patch

Keystone Kapers 31 mins. No patch

Oink 58 minutes. Got the patch. Fun game.

 

Also on Atari 2600:

Solar Fox 176 mins

3D tic tac toe 5 mins

[zylon]

Genesis-

Missile Command- 1hr 20min

Centipede- 10min

Robotron 2084- 5min

 

C64-

Mario Bros- 40min

Centipede- 30min

[+thegoldenband]

My time for the week:

Genesis:
Fatal Rewind - 198 min.

[Atarian7]

Times for the week are:

NES Tetris 11 minutes

 

Atari for Activision Summrr Ostch Quest:

Barnstorming 42 mins. No patch

Ice Hockey 31 mins no patch. Tied score once.

Kaboom 6 mins. No patch

Keystone Kapers 31 mins. No patch

Oink 58 minutes. Got the patch. Fun game.

 

Also on Atari 2600:

Solar Fox 176 mins

3D tic tac toe 5 mins

I'm surprised you didn't get Keystone Kapers. That was the first game I ever maxed out. One time I decided to play it to see if it got any faster after a certain point. It didn't and I ended up going to 1 million.

[Eltigro]

It's a pretty darn fun game. I haven't practiced it a whole lot, but when those shopping carts start going faster a few levels in, I start falling behind.

[agb]

I'm surprised you didn't get Keystone Kapers. That was the first game I ever maxed out. One time I decided to play it to see if it got any faster after a certain point. It didn't and I ended up going to 1 million.

I am not even close to s patch yet in keystone Kapers. I need 35000 and my high is 18500 or so. A million in keystone is amazing. I am close in hockey and barnstormers. Not close in kaboom. Tried all four again this morning and will continue to try later as today is last day.

[+wongojack]

C64
Avenger 25
Aztec Challenge 24
Beamrider 41
BluePrint 9
Congo Bongo 16
DragonsDen 45
Jumpman 18
Jumpman Jr 4
Pole Position 16
Tapper 20
Street Sports Basketball 16
Zaxxon (cart) 16
Zaxxon (disk) 29

 

This week I chose to play my C64 cart collection. Playing the C64 like a cart machine is interesting, but ultimately a worse experience than playing games from disk. Of course, it has the benefit of not needing any load time (or virtually none), but many of the games are watered down versions of their disk-based brethren. Congo Bongo is missing levels and so is Tapper. The cart version of Zaxxon might have made you happy if you were coming from the Atari 2600 version, but the disk version is sooo much better in terms of gameplay that it almost makes one think of cart-Zaxxon as some kind of demo. OTOH Dragonsden was a unique multi-stage game that kept me wanting to play "one more round." I'd never encountered this game back in the heyday, so it was a pleasant discovery. I felt similarly about Avenger. The unmistakable Space Invaders clone played fast and fun with multiple difficulty settings. It wasn't spectacular, but was above average.

 

I'm working on selling a big C64 lot, so I got out a monitor, disk drive, and an SD2IEC that I want to sell. That led me to play some disk based games. The original Jumpman is still impressive to me today. I couldn't ever remember finishing the Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced stages before, but I easily made it through "Beginner" over the weekend. I also like Jumpman Jr, but with all the options and little touches they put into the original Jumpman, it makes you wonder which one is the sequel. I like this game format so much, I think I may finally give Wizard and Ultimate Wizard some time in the coming week.