What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2023 (Season 16)

[Hwlngmad]

Today's (1/9/2023) totals:

 

Game Boy

1) Panel Action Bingo - 20 minutes

 

NES

1) Isolated Warrior - 10 minutes

[agb]

Atari 2600

Demon Attack 7

Dodge’em 9

Laser Blast 18

Ms. Pac-Man 5

Seaquest HSC 29

Solar Fox 168

Taz 6

 

Great score Atarian7 My PB is around 8.4 mil. Getting close. 
 

 

[+jgkspsx]

Lots of variety this week for me.

 

Arcade:

1942 - 13 minutes

Gravitar - 25 minutes

Lunar Lander - 30 minutes

Tempest - 10 minutes

Vulgus - 20 minutes

Warlords - 5 minutes

 

Atari 2600:

Boom! - 30 minutes

Mr Yo Yo - 75 minutes

Star Castle Arcade Edition - 20 minutes

 

Genesis:

Atomic Runner - 30 minutes

Burning Force - 20 minutes

 

Handheld/Tabletop:

Radio Shack Blast Off Pinball v1 - 20 minutes

Still very highly recommended.

Tiger Stix Meeba - 25 minutes

Finally got further in this. I'm convinced mine is not working right now that I understand how you are supposed to play it. I'll have to risk disassembling it and trying to clean the contacts.

Tomytronic Slimline Speedway - 25 minutes

Picked this up cheap. It's very difficult but very fun! Tomy really had a great run there.

 

Lynx:

Awesome Golf - 63 minutes

Dracula: The Undead - 42 minutes

 

NES:

Alwa's Awakening: The 8-bit Edition - 105 minutes

Family Pinball - 65 minutes

The original version of Rock'n Ball is different enough to deserve to be treated separately. Tough game in every mode.

 

Supervision:

Block Buster - 10 minutes

Imagine if Tetris's rotation mechanic was horrible. That's this game.

Cross High - 10 minutes

A completely broken clone of Konami's Motocross Maniacs.

Crystball - 10 minutes

Very good Breakout game.

Grand Prix - 25 minutes

This is hard. 4th place is the best I've done.

Hero Kid - 10 minutes

It's amazing how close this is to Wonder Boy in terms of mechanics and how far it is in fun factor.

Honey Bee - 5 minutes

It's hard to call shmups the specialty of the Supervision, but it's undeniable that most of them range from fun to really quite good. This Twinbee clone is just a lot of fun.

Olympic Trials - 5 minutes

Pretty fun but I worry about breaking the console.

Soccer Champion - 15 minutes

The slowest soccer game ever. Ended the practice mode tied 0-0.

Tennis Pro '92 - 20 minutes

Not half bad, but way too hard to return the CPU's serves.

[Hwlngmad]

Today's (1/10/2023) total:

 

TI99/4a

1) Football - 10 minutes

2) Zero Zap - 20 minutes

[carlsson]

Here's the summary for Week 01, running from January 2 - 8. We logged 5688 minutes of eligible play, playing 99 games on a total of 22 systems.

 

Top 10:

 

1. Suikoden II (PlayStation) - 1885 min.
2. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 329 min. (#1)
3. Mine, The (TI-99/4A) - 305 min. (#2)
4. Panel Action Bingo (Game Boy) - 251 min.
5. Bomberman (NES/Famicom) - 180 min.
6. Jaki Crush (SNES) - 145 min.
6. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 145 min.
8. Out Zone (Arcade) - 133 min. (#2)
9. 10 Yard Fight (NES/Famicom) - 129 min.
10. Boom! (Atari 2600) - 123 min.

 

Pre-NES top 10:

 

1. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 329 min. (PN#1)
2. Mine, The (TI-99/4A) - 305 min. (PN#2)
3. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 145 min.
4. Boom! (Atari 2600) - 123 min.
5. Mr. Yo Yo (Atari 2600) - 105 min. (PN#5)
6. Seaquest (Atari 8-bit) - 60 min.
7. Seaquest (Atari 2600) - 49 min.
8. Hell, The (Commodore 16 & Plus/4) - 32 min.
9. Lunar Lander (Arcade) - 30 min.
9. Star Castle Arcade (Atari 2600) - 30 min.

 

Top 10 systems:

 

1. PlayStation - 1885 min. (#3)
2. Atari 2600 - 926 min. (#1)
3. NES/Famicom - 679 min. (#7)
4. Arcade - 494 min. (#2)
5. Game Boy - 483 min. (#8)
6. TI-99/4A - 355 min. (#4)
7. SNES - 185 min. (#5)
8. Atari 8-bit - 116 min. (#6)
9. Watara SuperVision - 110 min.
10. Atari Lynx - 105 min.

 

The year starts with 30+ hours into Suikoden II, which of course puts it into first place, ahead of the pre-NES duo Solar Fox and The Mine. Despite being the only game played on its system, Suikoden II also shoots the PlayStation to the top on the systems list.

 

Out Zone (Arcade) starts this season's expansion of the 1000 Minute Club by becoming member #516 at a total of 1047 min.

 

For those following the number of the double beast, the Atari 2600 is now a mere 216 minutes away from 666,666 which surely will happen next week.

[Hwlngmad]

Today's (1/11/2023) totals:

 

NES/Famicom

1) Contra Force - 10 minutes

2) Crash N The Boy's: Street Challenge - 20 minutes

3) Softball Tengoku - 5 minutes

 

TI99/4a

1) Zero Zap - 30 minutes

[Hwlngmad]

Today's (1/12/2023) totals:

 

NES/Famicom

1) Hayauchi Super Igo - 15 minutes

2) Nekketsu! Street Basketball All-Out Dunk Heroes - 10 minutes

[Eltigro]

I'm gonna try my best to be a regular in this thread again.  I don't think I participated much last year.  It was a crazy year for me.  Hopefully 2023 will a little more normal.

[Steven Pendleton]

Shameless advertising for my Mega Drive and Genesis high score club, which needs more people:

 

Go play Slap Fight and then submit your scores! Don't worry if you are such complete garbage that the first enemy kills you (provided you didn't shoot anything prior to that, that will actually trigger one of the game's very many secrets!) or don't know how to play, as I know everything and will teach you!

[Keir]

4 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Shameless advertising for my Mega Drive and Genesis high score club, which needs more people

I'm interested, but I looked at the schedule for the year and the only game I own is Zero Wing and I don't really want to do emulation (especially not for shooters). Sorry!

[Steven Pendleton]

4 minutes ago, Keir said:

I'm interested, but I looked at the schedule for the year and the only game I own is Zero Wing and I don't really want to do emulation (especially not for shooters). Sorry!

Yeah I hate emulators too, so I don't blame you. Feel free to stop by just for Zero Wing if you want!

[Keir]

22 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Feel free to stop by just for Zero Wing if you want!

Will do!

[+jgkspsx]

Steven, what is the final game lineup?

 

The early proposal was:

January - Slap Fight
February - Slap Fight MD
March - Thunder Force III or Gleylancer* or Zero Wing*
April - Koutetsu Teikoku or Battle Mania
May - Grenada
June - Kuuga or Crying
July - Twinkle Tale or Darius Extra Version
August - Aero Blasters or Darius II
September - Same! Same! Same!
October - Tatsujin or V-V
November - Eliminate Down
December - Kyuukyoku Tiger

 

I have Thunder Force III, Gleylancer reissue, Zero Wing reissue, Granada, Darius Extra Version, Fire Shark (is that okay?), Darius II, Truxton reissue, and Eliminate Down repro. Hopefully the US versions will work for this?

 

Everything else I will have to resort to an SD cart for. I sure hope Slap Fight, Kyuukyoku Tiger, and V-V are in the queue for Retrobit Toaplan reissues. Heck, throw Wardner in there and we're good to go. 

[Hwlngmad]

Today's (1/13/2023) totals:

 

TI99/4a

1) Zero Zap - 20 minutes

2) Hunt the Wumpus - 25 minutes

[Steven Pendleton]

6 hours ago, jgkspsx said:

Steven, what is the final game lineup?

 

The early proposal was:

January - Slap Fight
February - Slap Fight MD
March - Thunder Force III or Gleylancer* or Zero Wing*
April - Koutetsu Teikoku or Battle Mania
May - Grenada
June - Kuuga or Crying
July - Twinkle Tale or Darius Extra Version
August - Aero Blasters or Darius II
September - Same! Same! Same!
October - Tatsujin or V-V
November - Eliminate Down
December - Kyuukyoku Tiger

 

I have Thunder Force III, Gleylancer reissue, Zero Wing reissue, Granada, Darius Extra Version, Fire Shark (is that okay?), Darius II, Truxton reissue, and Eliminate Down repro. Hopefully the US versions will work for this?

 

Everything else I will have to resort to an SD cart for. I sure hope Slap Fight, Kyuukyoku Tiger, and V-V are in the queue for Retrobit Toaplan reissues. Heck, throw Wardner in there and we're good to go. 

There isn't a finalized list as of yet. I am probably going to kick Thunder Force III and Gleylancer off and go with Zero Wing for March. None of those games are especially good for playing for score, but Gleylancer has broken/infinite scoring and Thunder Force III... yeah. Your score in that one is basically determined by whether you died or not. Zero Wing is the best of those, I think.

 

From there, I think we will collectively decide what to do on a per-month basis. For the US versions of Toaplan games, they are almost always noticeably easier than the Japanese versions, with the one known exception, Hellfire, being backwards, apparently. I'm probably just going to have players make note of what version they played and call it good, but the region of the game is determined by the region of the system, not the cartridge, in most cases. Zero Wing is one of the few that don't do this, and I think Kyuukyoku Tiger and Twin Cobra as well. If you have a Mega Sg or a ROM-loading cart that is capable of forcing region changes, you can do that to force the games to run in any region's mode, as the games themselves are not actually region locked.

 

Retro-Bit is fine; I have all of those carts and they seem identical to the original carts aside from the newly translated stuff for Zero Wing, and I will be playing my Retro-Bit Zero Wing. If you want to play on a bootleg, yeah, that should be fine as long as the ROM is identical to the real one. Hell, if you want to play MD Same! or MD Kyuukyoku Tiger on Switch or PS4, that's fine too. I might do that myself, especially since it would be easy to record a run on PS4 (at only half framerate, but better than nothing).

Edited January 14, 2023 by Steven Pendleton

[TheGameCollector]

This week I played:

 

Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus for Playstation - 158 minutes

Suikoden II for Playstation - 843 minutes

 

Progress:

Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus - I started a new game and made it through the vault with the scrabs.

 

Suikoden II - I finished the game with all characters possible in one playthrough (Valeria, Feather and Sigfried chosen, all optional flying squirrels recruited) and got the best ending.

It turns out not loading Suikoden save data has almost no bearing on the story and is only there for the optional McDohl sidequest where you get to meet the hero of the first game and let him join your group as desired. The McDohl sidequest is apparently the only way to fight the second caterpillar boss that transforms into the moth. Ellie also ended up completely disappearing from Banner Village and never came back, probably because without the McDohl sidequest unlocked, she has no use in the game other than asking you to stay at her family's inn when you first arrive there. Koh also never realizes that you're the character he is such a big fan of and never leaves the village.

[Steven Pendleton]

Played my Toaplan games and Tatsujin Ou. I may attempt to clear the game this year, but it's one of the hardest games ever made, and it's hard because it's very badly designed, but I will probably try anyway.

 

Arcade
Hishouzame - 12
Out Zone - 146
Rally Bike - 7
Slap Fight - 25
Tatsujin Ou - 30

[carlsson]

BBC Micro:
Skyhawk - 8 min.

 

Commodore 16/Plus4:
Skyhawk - 7 min.

 

Commodore 64:
Falcon Patrol - 18 min.
Falcon Patrol II - 7 min.

 

MSX:
Skyhawk - 4 min.

 

VIC-20:
Skyhawk - 26 min.

 

Since the A8 HSC is having a season break, I tried something else. Due to a discussion in the Intellivision section about if anyone could pick up and finish an older prototype of a game called Air Strike, it reminded me of Skyhawk and Falcon Patrol. The exact relationship between these two is a bit unclear to me, as the original (?) VIC-20 version of Skyhawk was released by Quicksilva and is credited to a K.F. Hubers on Mobygames, while the first game in the Falcon Patrol series was published by Virgin and most clearly is creted to Steve Lee, including an idol photo of him on the inlay. The subsequent Skyhawk games were released by Bug-Byte, and are said to have been based on Steve Lee's work.

 

Each of the five ports are different from the other. The VIC-20 version of course only has coarse scrolling, but has a good tradeoff in ability to steer and difficulty. The landscape looks to be European, and there are no roads on the ground. The C64 version called Falcon Patrol clearly shifts the scenery to Middle Eastern, plays slower but generally moves smoothly. It introduces the ability to not only change your altitude, but also angle in the air. I got the impression the ability to hit enemy fighters depends on that you're in the same angle as them, but not sure. It is the only version that has this added visual. Playable, but not as much fun as Skyhawk on the VIC.

 

Then I played Falcon Patrol II, which is Steve Lee's own sequel featuring helicopters of various kinds. It gives a completely different pace to the game, much slower and tactical. Some helicopters deploy land artillery which will fire at you, so thus you can shoot both forwards and diagonally. This game also came out for the ZX Spectrum, but I didn't bother downloading it.

 

I planned to get my BBC Micro running, but it only produces a low beep when I power it on, so something has broken since last time I used it, May 2018. Also the disk version I found for the MSX wouldn't boot in the emulator, only the tape version so I gave up on real hardware and from now on played the rest in emulation.

 

The BBC/Electron version of Skyhawk is said to be terrible, and I agree. None of the landscape details remains, only some hills and landing pads. Also enemies emerge out of the blue, no sign whatsoever on the radar display until they're right behind you which makes the radar quite useless. It says to have been made by Steven Lee (sic!) but I don't see why he would port his C64 game to the Beeb, three years later and give up so much detail.

 

The MSX version is a choppy story. The mere fact that the sky is yellow says something about the game. Possibly it is the one with the most generous scoring, but also the one I grew tired of the soonest.

 

Finally the C16 version, supposedly by D. Muir-Rolfe, based on an idea by Steve Lee uses the same graphics as the MSX version, down to the yellow sky. It scrolls more smoothly thanks to the TED chip has soft scrolling which the VDP doesn't, but on the other hand the C16 lacks hardware sprites which means enemy fighters are flickering to compensate for the screen scrolling. Also there is a continuous tone playing, pitch based on which altitude you are flying at. Quite annoying after a while, and eventually I gave up.

 

Out of those, I must say the original VIC-20 game is the clear winner, despite having the lowest resolution. The coarse scrolling doesn't matter that much once the speed is high, and it presents a simple yet exciting challenge.

 

As a side note, Skyhawk/Falcon Patrol apparently was on the German index known as BPjS (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften, nowadays BPjM). Games on this index are illegal to provide to minors in Germany, and also illegal to advertise. The index is divided into various lists of which some were available for adults and some banned in total. Apparently many war related games like Seafox, River Raid, Blue Max, Beach-Head, Raid on Bungeling Bay, 1942 and so on were put on this list, not to mention some more obvious ones like Castle Wolfenstein and Raid over Moscow.

 

[Prosystemsearch]

Here are my times:

Atari 2600:

Tapper- 8 minutes

Spiderman- 2 minutes

Vanguard- 6 minutes

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back- 9 minutes

Jungle hunt-5 minutes

 

Arcade:

Joust- 3 minutes

Robotron: 2084- 9 minutes

Satan's Hollow- 3 1/2 minutes

Smash TV- 6 minutes

Blaster- 5 minutes

Bubbles- 2 1/2 minutes

 

NES:

Abadox- 2 1/2 minutes

Burai Fighter- 3 minutes

Baby Boomer (unlicensed)- 2 1/2 minutes

Batman- 3 minutes

Caesar's Palace- 6 minutes

Choujin Sentai Jetman- 3 1/2 minutes

[agb]

Atari 2600

Flash Gordon 6

Seaquest 45

Solar Fox 51

[Wayler]

Most of my gaming this weekend was done by the purple box, but I didn't forget to squeeze in a couple of rounds of demon ball with a hint of shooty bangbang. Super Aleste humbled me, I barely got to Area 2.

 

SNES

Jaki Crush - 40 min
Super Aleste - 25 min

Edited January 15, 2023 by Wayler

[Kurt_Woloch]

Here are my times for this past week (January 9th through 15th, 2023) on classic systems...

 

Game Boy:

Alleyway - 4 min.

Deluxe Burger Time: 5 min.

Dr. Mario - 5 min.

Das Dschungelbuch (The Jungle Book) - 2 min.

Flipull - 2 min.

King of the Zoo - 5 min.

Qix - 2 min.

Pac-Man - 3 min.

Palamedes - 1 min.

Tetris - 3 min.

 

Handheld:

Super Brick Game 8-in-1 - 12 min.

 

TI-99/4A:

The mine - 85 min. in 2 sessions

 

This weekend I went through my collection of handhelds to see how well they still work. The Game Gear is completely dead (safe for the backlight), but both the Game Boy and the Game Boy Advance SP still work, so I also tried all of the cartridges I had for them. "Das Dschungelbuch" really carries the German title on the cartridge and is based on the movie "Jungle Book", also playing the music out of it. I only played each game for a few minutes, sometimes not even completing a single game. A dedicated handheld I also have is the "Super brick game 8-in-1" which contains 8 games, 4 of them being variants of Tetris. I still played "The mine" the longest, this time trying two different paths through the mine, with the result that with the two combined, I managed to solve most of the screens built into the game, but I didn't manage to roll the game (by getting to 100.000 points) yet.

 

[Atarian7]

Atari 2600

Hunchy 2 - 30 minutes

Kaboom! - 80 minutes

Seaquest - 76 minutes

Solar Fox - 284 minutes

 

 

[oyamafamily]

ATARI 8-BIT

Survivor (Synapse Software) - 60 minutes

[+thegoldenband]

My time for the week:

 

Game Boy:

Qblliion - 127 min.