Excluding Pac-Man and ET, which is the worst game?

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1 hour ago, davyK said:

Many of their games look good because of this - the game designs avoid having to multiplex sprites on the same scanlines for example and their better games , when you look at them, have their game display "banded" to avoid that type of requirement. Look at Pitfall - the action is really only happening in two bands of the screen on the non-rope screens for example.

 

And their early titles especially had very simplistic and repetitive gameplay,  simplistic even by 2600 standards.   Skyjinks-  just a slalom game..   Barnstorming, just fly through the barns and avoid the windmills.   I don't think we noticed at the time because they consistently wowed us with the visuals.    But when I bought the Activision Anthology for Windows in the 90s it struck me "I don't remember these games being so boring!"        Of course the later titles got more complex-   Pitfall / Pitfall II and so on.

 

1 hour ago, davyK said:

I quite liked Vanguard though I didn't play the arcade game. The boss was a let down until I realised the longer you wait until you fire the more points you get. It was 8K but was more to do with the number of levels it had I'm guessing. But that port was clever at restricting where the action happened on-screen with screen boundaries/landscapes on the hori levels. The 2600 is better at vertical games because of the scanline limitations of the hardware.

I'd put 2600 Vanguard in the Defender category-  pretty good use of the 2600 hardware with some annoying alterations.   Although Vanguard is probably closer to the arcade in spirit than Defender is.    I don't remember how difficult the boss fight is on the 2600,  but in the arcade you had to wait until the holes in the two gates that guarded the boss aligned while you were constantly being fired upon and laughed it (the game had extensive speech synthesis).   It was quite nerve wracking!

[Mr Oni]

God I hate the mention of Et as a bad game. I was 8 when it came out and we got it for christmas and played the F out of it. Sure it had annoying parts to it but it was still a good game. And pac man was fun to play too. We didn't think it was a bad game and Mrs pacman was way better. I hate how the internet rewrote the history of part of my childhood. THe video game crash is a terrible name for what happened in 83. Video games didnt go anywhere people were just playing them on Commodore 64s and Atari computers. The nes is a pos in terms of quality and if it had never come around you just would have had people playing games on computers no big deal.

[Zonie]

On 10/17/2023 at 11:18 AM, Bakasama said:

I'm kind of surprised that nobody thought about making a color hack to get a black background.

Me too... Someone will probably read this now and either show one that has been done like Pac Man or do it. I actually played space war a lot. I loved the Cinematronics arcade game.

11 hours ago, Mr Oni said:

God I hate the mention of Et as a bad game. I was 8 when it came out and we got it for christmas and played the F out of it. Sure it had annoying parts to it but it was still a good game. And pac man was fun to play too. We didn't think it was a bad game and Mrs pacman was way better. I hate how the internet rewrote the history of part of my childhood. THe video game crash is a terrible name for what happened in 83. Video games didnt go anywhere people were just playing them on Commodore 64s and Atari computers. The nes is a pos in terms of quality and if it had never come around you just would have had people playing games on computers no big deal.

Bingo. Once I had the C64, I never looked at consoles again until I came across a 7800 in 1993-ish at a yard sale with a pile of games including Galaga, so had to buy it. Even played with a friends NES in the late 80's and was meh...

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12 hours ago, Mr Oni said:

Video games didnt go anywhere people were just playing them on Commodore 64s and Atari computers. The nes is a pos in terms of quality and if it had never come around you just would have had people playing games on computers no big deal.

Only a small percentage of the players made the jump to computers, that's why it was a crash.   It didn't help that computers facilitated piracy.    Many of the people who picked up NES never owned a computer.

 

[Laner]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Only a small percentage of the players made the jump to computers, that's why it was a crash.   It didn't help that computers facilitated piracy.    Many of the people who picked up NES never owned a computer.

 

 

I would argue it was a significant percentage that made the jump. The 2600 sold roughly 30M units in it's lifetime; other contemporary consoles account for another ~7M units. 

 

The Commodore 64/128 alone sold ~22M units. You also had the Atari 8-bits, the CoCo line, the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Ti 99-4/a, etc. that account for many million more.  In very broad strokes, you have roughly (+/- 10%) the same number of 8-bit home computers and pre-NES consoles sold. 

Obviously there are a lot of other factors at play that make a 1:1 comparison impossible - 8-bit computers used for tasks other than gaming, both consoles and computers purchased as a response to the current fad but never really used, 2600s and 8-bit computers purchased *after* the introduction of the NES, etc. And simply the fact that we lack hard sales numbers in many cases.

Anyway - did everyone who owned a pre-crash console move to a home computer? No. But I think there is enough evidence to indicate that more than a "small percentage" made the jump from consoles to home computers as their primary gaming devices prior to the NES.

Edited October 19, 2023 by Laner

[NE146]

I probably would have loved to but I was only in middle school / high school when the 2600/5200 faded away and when the Famicom/NES eventually showed up at retail. So my personal income = a big fat ZERO  And no way my parents would know where to start to buy a computer at the time. 

[Bakasama]

5 hours ago, Zonie said:

Me too... Someone will probably read this now and either show one that has been done like Pac Man or do it. I actually played space war a lot. I loved the Cinematronics arcade game.

Somebody did make a hack, although it based on game that inspired the Cinematronics game.

 

 https://www.atariage.com/hack_page.php?SystemID=2600&SoftwareHackID=195

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1 hour ago, Laner said:

The Commodore 64/128 alone sold ~22M units. You also had the Atari 8-bits, the CoCo line, the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Ti 99-4/a, etc. that account for many million more.  In very broad strokes, you have roughly (+/- 10%) the same number of 8-bit home computers and pre-NES consoles sold. 

That number is disputed,  Wikipedia says between 12.5M and 17M.   This page https://commodore.international/2021/07/05/how-many-c64-and-c128-were-actually-sold/ says that only 3 million were sold by mid-1984 (that's during the crash).    By comparison, There were 2 million Colecovisions and 1 Million 5200s sold during that same timeframe.

 

Also the crash was North America only,  so ZX Spectrum was not a factor.   TI99-4/a was killed around this time.   CoCo was a minor player, and many Apple II's were put into classroom use.

 

1 hour ago, Laner said:

Anyway - did everyone who owned a pre-crash console move to a home computer? No. But I think there is enough evidence to indicate that more than a "small percentage" made the jump from consoles to home computers as their primary gaming devices prior to the NES.

The revenue from computer gaming sales didn't come close to making up from the lost console gaming sales.    Videogame revenue fell from $3.2 Billion in sales in 1982 to $100 million in 1985 according to wikipedia.  

 

in my experience, most of my peers dropped out of gaming altogether and moved onto other things and didn't come back until NES became popular. 

[Mr Oni]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

That number is disputed,  Wikipedia says between 12.5M and 17M.   This page https://commodore.international/2021/07/05/how-many-c64-and-c128-were-actually-sold/ says that only 3 million were sold by mid-1984 (that's during the crash).    By comparison, There were 2 million Colecovisions and 1 Million 5200s sold during that same timeframe.

 

Also the crash was North America only,  so ZX Spectrum was not a factor.   TI99-4/a was killed around this time.   CoCo was a minor player, and many Apple II's were put into classroom use.

 

The revenue from computer gaming sales didn't come close to making up from the lost console gaming sales.    Videogame revenue fell from $3.2 Billion in sales in 1982 to $100 million in 1985 according to wikipedia.  

 

in my experience, most of my peers dropped out of gaming altogether and moved onto other things and didn't come back until NES became popular. 

 

[Mr Oni]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

The revenue from computer gaming sales didn't come close to making up from the lost console gaming sales.    Videogame revenue fell from $3.2 Billion in sales in 1982 to $100 million in 1985 according to wikipedia.  

 

in my experience, most of my peers dropped out of gaming altogether and moved onto other things and didn't come back until NES became popular. 

That is your experience and fine. So revenue dropped ok several factors could be behind that including the fact that with a computer you could rip and share software.  Even with a big loss it does not mean gaming was dead.  Which is what they always claim about the Nes saving video gaming.  That did not happen gaming was alive and well. All you got was a monopolistic business model used by a company that produced junk hardware.

 

[Zonie]

7 hours ago, Bakasama said:

Somebody did make a hack, although it based on game that inspired the Cinematronics game.

 

 https://www.atariage.com/hack_page.php?SystemID=2600&SoftwareHackID=195

Thank you. PDP Space war is 100X better.

Now if we could only drop the "SSSHHHHHH" sound of the thrust and lower it to a "ROOOWWWRRRR" sound like the Cinematronics game, and make one of those an enterprise shape, it would be Perfect.

I may try this.

[CapitanClassic]

3 hours ago, Mr Oni said:

Even with a big loss it does not mean gaming was dead.  Which is what they always claim about the Nes saving video gaming.  That did not happen gaming was alive and well.

No, big losses absolutely mean gaming is dead. I keep hearing stories like this trying to rewrite history, that don’t seem to understand that Atari was the video game market in NA. It was 80% of the entire market, so if it died, the whole market died. 15 million 2600s were sold by 1982, but that market boom that every company was raking in cash in 1983 came to an end by 1986. Revenue for Activision, Atari’s chief rival dropped by 90%, as did most other companies making console games that weren’t already bankrupt.

 

The C64 had a home computer market share of 40% at its peak. It sold 8 million by 1988, with 1984 being its big year with over 3 million sold. So at most only half the 2600 moved onto the best selling 8-bit home computer (even including Atari 800s only bumps it 2 million or so, and a large percentage of Apple IIe sales were to schools)

 

Quote

One computer gaming executive stated that the Nintendo Entertainment System's enormous popularity – seven million sold in 1988, almost as many as the number of C64s sold in its first five years – had stopped the C64's growth.

The NES didn’t save video games, but it did make them popular again. Everyone wanted to play SMB1 at home. And rest assured it was dead or on life-support from 1983-1986. Sure, they were unscrupulous with their business practices, but their games created a genre shift in the type of games people wanted to buy.

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14 hours ago, Mr Oni said:

That is your experience and fine. So revenue dropped ok several factors could be behind that including the fact that with a computer you could rip and share software.  Even with a big loss it does not mean gaming was dead.  Which is what they always claim about the Nes saving video gaming.  That did not happen gaming was alive and well. All you got was a monopolistic business model used by a company that produced junk hardware.

Nobody is saying that crash meant gaming was dead.  Just like the Dot Com crash wasn't the end of the internet.    It was a time when the videogame market dramatically and unexpectiedly shrunk.     Many arcades closed, most videogame magazines folded,  many stores reduced the size of their videogame sections or removed them completely.

 

What Nintendo did was revive the console market.   The US videogame industry thought that was dead.   When people say NES saved gaming, they are talking consoles specifically 

[davyK]

@zzip The boss "fight" in 2600 Vanguard to is crashing disappointment. There's no barriers, gates etc. You just fire up the screen once and the boss is defeated!!  Shots come in from left and right and if you dodge them and delay firing as long you can you get more points.