carlsson Posted January 3, 2023 Share Posted January 3, 2023 tl;dr: Play video games (from systems released between 1950 and 1999) and post your times! For the 16th consecutive season, we weekly log which video games we've played and for how long. I am compiling the weekly, yearly and sometimes in between stats. As always, everyone are welcome to contribute - both old-timers, previous participants returning to the tracker and newcomers. Post just one week if you want, post every week if you like. So what is this? The basic idea is to post what games you played during each week, and for how long. You don't have to time it down to the exact minute (though most of us do), any reasonable estimates are acceptable. Then, at the end of the week, the stats keeper (that's me) totals everything up and we find out which games and platforms are seeing the most action. Each week, we have top 10 lists for consoles/computers and for individual games. We also have a separate top 10 list for games released on platforms that predate the US release of the NES (i.e. roughly the tail end of 1985). That way, arcade-style vintage gaming doesn't get totally lost in the shuffle of RPGs, collectathons, and other games that take 10+ hours to complete. However, our all-time #1 game by a huge margin is Kaboom! with Solar Fox in a strong second place. Both are for the Atari 2600, which holds up very well against the slightly newer stuff!Guidelines: 1. Be sure to list the system, the name of the game, and the length of time you play. Please note if the game has any alternate titles by which it's better known (i.e. Air Sea Battle vs. Target Fun). If you list multiple games, please group them by platform. If you play on a backwards-compatible system, e.g. Atari 2600 games on the 7800 or SMS games on the Genesis, the game should be listed under the older platform's name. Note that we track video games here. While you are welcome to post your times on e.g. pinball games, board games, card games etc, those will not be counted. Of course if you play a video game simulating a pinball game or a board game, it counts. One of the few exceptions to this rule is the arcade game Baby Pac-Man (and a few more from the same publisher) which consists of a video game part and a pinball game part. 2. Each week runs Monday through Sunday (at midnight), though exceptions may occur around New Year. Try to post your times no later than night to Tuesday in your local timezone. I will generally wait until late Tuesday evening Central European Time before compiling the stats. If you post after stats have been posted, your times will be counted for the next week. Feel free to indicate in your post which dates your times relate to. 3. Playing on actual vintage hardware is preferred, although emulators are certainly allowed. In some cases (homebrews in development, rare arcade games) the may be no alternative to using an emulator. 4. Our cutoff year is 2000. That is, eligible consoles and computers have to have been released (somewhere in the world) before 2000. This includes Dreamcast and Nintendo 64, but excludes the most recent systems like PlayStation 2, XBox, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, et al. The same goes for computers: we count Windows 95/98 games, but not XP; Mac OS 9, but not OS X; and so on. However there is hope for those of you who are stuck in the 21th century gaming! For the 6th season in a row, we will have a Modern gameplay tracker that covers everything the Classic gameplay tracker doesn't, i.e. anything from 2000 or newer goes into the other tracker. The format is identical, the stats are quite similar except for of course there is no point narrowing out pre-NES systems released 25 years after the NES itself was released. 5. Arcade games up to A.D. 2000 are permitted. So are emulated compilations of arcade games for modern systems, as long as they're not rewritten or otherwise massively "updated" versions. Generally speaking, arcade collections played on systems released before year 2000 tend to be recreated code, while newer collections tend to emulate the original ROMs. Thus it sometimes can be hard to tell when to list games separately and when to group them. For instance, if you play 45 minutes of Robotron via Midway Arcade Treasures for the XBox, those 45 minutes are counted towards the arcade game, but if you played it on the Nintendo 64, it is counted as a N64 game rather than arcade. 6. You don't just have to post a bare list of times -- comments, stories, images, gripes, and helpful hints are always encouraged! If you're struggling with a level, got a new high score, or have some thoughts about what's great or what stinks about a particular game...well, that's the kind of stuff that makes this fun to read.How to make the statskeeper's life easier: - If you post a big list of games, please consider alphabetizing them first (after grouping them by platform, which also is helpful to alphabetize). - Posting your times in minutes, rather than hours + minutes, makes things a little simpler. - Even if you don't know the exact time, it's better to post a specific number and say it's an estimate. If you say you posted a bunch of games for "between 20 minutes and an hour", I'll just average everything out to 40 minutes, but it's much better to have a sense of which games you played more and which ones you played less. - If you only post game titles without any indication of how long you played each game, I will assume 5 minutes regardless of how long you may actually have played them. Surely you can play a game for far less - down to a single minute - and specifically mention that, and I'll use that number instead. - If there's room for confusion or ambiguity, please address that in advance so I don't have to research it myself. Non-US releases, homebrews in progress, alternate titles, and expanded re-releases can get especially tricky. That about covers it. If you want a taste of our numbers, you can check some of the latest stats at the end of 2021. One more thought: If you haven't participated before, or if you did and got busy with other things, consider taking part in 2023! You may find that it has some interesting side effects -- I've found that keeping a log dramatically changes how I think about my own gaming, and mostly for the better. P.S. Past years of the tracker: 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 The first week of the season covers January 2 - 8, with possible catch-up for times not previously posted. Then we go week by week until the last week, which according to the calendar will run until December 31, 2023 but more about that later. 3 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hwlngmad Posted January 4, 2023 Share Posted January 4, 2023 Today's (1/4/2023) totals were: Game Boy 1) Gear Works - 25 minutes 2) Jeep Jamboree - 20 minutes 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hwlngmad Posted January 5, 2023 Share Posted January 5, 2023 Today's (1/5/2023) totals were: Game Boy 1) Race Days - 10 minutes 2) Power Mission - 20 minutes 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+jgkspsx Posted January 6, 2023 Share Posted January 6, 2023 It might be a good idea to specify the canonical list of system titles in the original post so that you have to do leas cleanup, @carlsson. I was surprised to see what systems were prefixed with “Sega” and what weren’t in the year end report. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted January 6, 2023 Author Share Posted January 6, 2023 (edited) I don't have editing permissions, but yes here is a list of the systems known in the tracker. There are a few inconsistencies like why Dreamcast, Genesis and Game Gear are unique enough with the Sega prefix, and why none of the Nintendo systems have a prefix while all of the Atari systems do. Of course it is easy for me to change those in Excel, if we strive for orthogonality. Spoiler 3DO ABC-80 Acorn Archimedes Acorn Electron Adventurevision Amiga Amiga AGA/ECS Amiga CD32 Amstrad CPC Amstrad CPC Plus Apple II Apple Iigs Apple Lisa Apple Pippin Arcade Atari 2600 Atari 5200 Atari 7800 Atari 8-bit Atari Jaguar Atari Jaguar CD Atari Lynx Atari ST Atari Video Pinball BBC Micro BBS Door Games Bally Astrocade COMX-35 COSMAC ELF CP/M Casio PV-1000 CoCo 1 & 2 CoCo 3 ColecoVision Commodore 16 & Plus/4 Commodore 64 Commodore CBM-II Commodore PET Compucolor 8001 Compucolor II Cougar Boy/Mega Duck Creativision Cromemco Dazzler DEC Alpha DEC PDP-1 DEC PDP-11 DEC PDP-8 Dragon 32 Dreamcast Emerson Arcadia 2001 Epoch Super Cassette Vision FM Towns FM Towns Marty Fairchild Channel F Famicom Disk System Fujitsu FM-77 AV Gamate Game & Watch Game Boy Game Boy Color Game Gear Game.com Genesis Handheld/Tabletop IBM PC jr Intellivision Intellivision ECS Interton VC-4000/APVS 1292 Jupiter Ace Linux (supposedly 1990's Linux distros!) MSX MSX2 Mac OS Classic Mattel Aquarius Memotech MTX-512 Microbee 32 Microvision N64 NEC PC-6001 NEC PC-8001 NEC PC-8801 NEC PC-9801 NES/Famicom Neo Geo AES/MVS Neo Geo CD Neo Geo Pocket Color Odyssey^2 Odyssey^3 / Philips G-7400 Oric-1 & Atmos PC DOS PC Windows 95/98 PC-FX Philips CD-i PlayStation Pong RCA Studio II SAM Coupé SG-1000 SNES Sega 32X Sega 32X CD Sega CD Sega Master System Sega Saturn Sharp MZ-700 Sharp MZ-80K Sharp X1 Sharp X68000 Sinclair ZX 80 Sinclair ZX 81 Sinclair ZX Spectrum Sord M5 Spectravideo SVI-328 Super A'Can SuperGrafx TG-16/PC Engine TG-CD/PC Engine CD TI-99/4A TRS-80 MC-10 TRS-80 Model I/III Telmac 1800 Thomson MO5 Tiger R-Zone Tiger/Sega Pocket Arcade Tomy Tutor Toshiba Visicom VG 5000 VIC-20 Vectrex Virtual Boy Vtech Laser 500 Watara SuperVision WonderSwan Edited January 6, 2023 by carlsson 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wongojack Posted January 6, 2023 Share Posted January 6, 2023 Looking forward to another year 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarian7 Posted January 7, 2023 Share Posted January 7, 2023 3 hours ago, carlsson said: orthogonality Now there's a word I have to look for in the dictionary. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted January 7, 2023 Author Share Posted January 7, 2023 Perhaps I'm misusing it, due to not being a native speaker. I meant like-formed properties, e.g. in a CPU where every addressing mode can be applied to nearly every instruction, or like here - if some Sega systems are prefixed by Sega, perhaps all of them should be. Amiga and VIC-20 also were Commodore computers. Mac OS is as much a product from Apple as the Lisa was. Note that I already renamed C64 into Commodore 64. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+jgkspsx Posted January 7, 2023 Share Posted January 7, 2023 I don’t have a preference about whether to prefix systems with manufacturer or not, but I feel bad about making you correct my system names after all this time! I think it would be nice to standardize one way or another as this list seems somewhat arbitrary. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Pendleton Posted January 8, 2023 Share Posted January 8, 2023 I finally played Kyuukyoku Tiger II and Twin Cobra II and I kind of hate them. Not much else to say Arcade Hishouzame - 74 Kyuukyoku Tiger II - 27 Out Zone - 133 Slap Fight - 34 Tatsujin Ou - 115 Twin Cobra II - 8 Windows 95/98 Total Annihilation + The Core Contingency + Battle Tactics - 25 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oyamafamily Posted January 8, 2023 Share Posted January 8, 2023 ATARI 2600: BOOM! - 90 minutes ATARI 8-BIT: Seaquest - 60 minutes NES / FAMICOM: Bomberman - 180 minutes 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted January 8, 2023 Author Share Posted January 8, 2023 Atari 8-bit: Trailblazer - 26 min. New PB in this last round of HSC'22. I've mainly played the C64 version before and while the game pretty much is the same, I'm missing the witty level titles plus that I find the background music better on the C64. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarian7 Posted January 8, 2023 Share Posted January 8, 2023 Atari 2600 Boom! - 3 minutes Conquest of Mars - 8 minutes Hunchy II - 13 minutes Kaboom! - 145 minutes Mr. Yo-Yo - 20 minutes Solar Fox - 161 minutes I got another PR on Solar Fox : 4,374,200 points Rack 207 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kurt_Woloch Posted January 8, 2023 Share Posted January 8, 2023 Here are my times for this past week (January 2nd through 8th, 2023): Commodore 64: Miner 2049'er - 8 min. TI-99/4A: The mine - 305 min. in 8 sessions Miner 2049'er - 20 min. This week I mainly continued to play "The mine" on the TI-99. I've meanwhile somewhat overcome the gameplay issues described last week, and now the main limiting factor are the mistakes I make while playing, so I don't even reach the screens that are the most broken ones. The sessions mostly only consist of one game which might take up to 56 minues already. I also played Miner 2049'er, which is obviously the game that inspired "The mine". I first tried the TI-99/4A and then the Commodore 64 version. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wayler Posted January 8, 2023 Share Posted January 8, 2023 SNES Jaki Crush - 145 min Block Kuzushi - 40 min Finally was able to test my christmas presents and got hooked on demon pinball. The Breakout clone was enjoyable as well. I also had a mystery lot of 9 SFC cartridges that I just tested to see if they worked. 5/9 got a black screen, so I've got some opening and cleaning to do. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prosystemsearch Posted January 8, 2023 Share Posted January 8, 2023 (edited) Here are my times for the retro games I've played: Atari 2600: Fast Food- 3 minutes Vanguard- 9 minutes Ms. Pacman- 3 minutes Jr. Pacman- 7 1/2 minutes Fast Eddie- 2 1/2 minutes Demon Attack- 3 minutes Dig Dug- 2 1/2 minutes Crazy Climber- 11 minutes Spiderman- 2 minutes Millipede- 4 minutes Tapper- 8 minutes Time Pilot- 10 minutes Tunnel Runner- 3 1/2 minutes NES: Big Nose the Caveman (Unlicensed)- 5 1/2 minutes Arkanoid- 7 minutes Choplifter- 4 minutes Bubble Bath Babes- 6 minutes MD-DOS PC: Doom II Samsara 0.3 mod via Zandronum-15 minutes Edited January 8, 2023 by Prosystemsearch 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 My times for the week: Game Boy: Blodia - 25 min. Kenyū Densetsu YAIBA - 86 min. McDonaldland - 17 min. Painter Momopie - 17 min. Panel Action Bingo - 231 min. Soldam - 12 min. NES: Hoops - 80 min. Beat Panel Action Bingo, and made progress in Blodia and Hoops. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheGameCollector Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 This week I played: Suikoden II for Playstation - 1,885 minutes Progress: I started a new game where I chose not to import Suikoden save data so I could take a look at the differences. I ended up with over 80 characters so far and just defeated Luca Blight. There's still a ways to go, but I am confident I can still get the rest of the characters this time around (minus McDohl obviously due to not importing the save data). 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wongojack Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 No classic time for me in the first week. Still working on finishing some modern games 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onlyinajeep Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 (edited) Amstrad CPC New Zealand Story - 11 min Atari ST New Zealand Story - 15 min Color Computer 2 Slay the Nereis - 25 min Color Computer 3 CoCoBan - 27 min Commodore 16 The Hell - 32 min The Hell 2 - 3 min Emerson Arcadia 3D Bowling - 6 min Jupiter Ace (via MiSTer) Astrian Descent - 23 min NES 10-Yard Fight - 129 min Solar Jetman - 87 min Edited January 9, 2023 by onlyinajeep 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarian7 Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 1 hour ago, onlyinajeep said: 10-Yard Fight - 129 min Is that a football game? 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onlyinajeep Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 24 minutes ago, Atarian7 said: Is that a football game? Yeah, it's a wacky port of the arcade game of the same name by Irem/Taito. I never played it before on the NES, I was a bit taken aback when, after an interception, that I was able to play defense 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keir Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 This is my first time contributing to the tracker! I don't know the exact times so I estimated for each one, rounded to nearest 5 minute increment. Week of 1/2/23 - 1/8/23 Atari 2600 Conquest of Mars - 10 Mr. Yo-Yo - 10 Seaquest - 20 Star Castle - 10 Atari 8-bit Caverns of Mars - 5 Miner 2049er - 20 Pitstop - 5 Genesis Chiki Chiki Boys - 10 Golden Axe - 15 Megapanel - 15 Total time = 120 minutes 5 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skippy B. Coyote Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 No retro gaming for me in the first week of the new year, but I did finish up my 68 hour playthrough of Ōkami HD on the Switch for the modern tracker! Will I finally get back to the Atari 2600 High Score Club before the season ends? Who knows, but I will be playing whatever sounds fun next week 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hwlngmad Posted January 9, 2023 Share Posted January 9, 2023 1 hour ago, Atarian7 said: Is that a football game? 1 hour ago, onlyinajeep said: Yeah, it's a wacky port of the arcade game of the same name by Irem/Taito. I never played it before on the NES, I was a bit taken aback when, after an interception, that I was able to play defense Honestly, it is a pretty darn good football and (dare I say) the best outside of the Tecmo games for football on the NES. One could do a helluva lot worse on the NES for football, that's for sure. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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