/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7455314]

is E.T. bad?

[Anonymous No.7455427]

I'd say it's more a of a cult classic

[Anonymous No.7455445]

>>7455314
Why don't you go fall in a pit for 30 minutes and find out?

[Anonymous No.7455470]

>>7455427
>cult classic

"cult classic" in a dubious term. The game itself sold millions of copies, back upon release. The game generally gets pegged for destroying the console market in North America. Though, I would like to think that ET was the final straw for home consoles in the retail market. ET apparently was notorious for making retailers by overstocks of cartridges like Pac-Man, ET and others. This lead to overstock and unsold inventory. And old rumors about Atari burying thousands of ET carts in the desert.

[Anonymous No.7455501]

Cult classic because it's so bad it's good, sneed

[Anonymous No.7455512]

>>7455470
It's so bad it's good, sneed

[Anonymous No.7455580]

>>7455445
Agreed, It's exceptionally bad even for 2600's low standard

[Anonymous No.7455610]

>>7455470
>And old rumors about Atari burying thousands of ET carts in the desert.

This was true though

[Anonymous No.7455647]

>>7455610
>This was true though

It was true. But it wasn't just ET cartridges.

[Anonymous No.7455675]

>>7455314
Not really, it's on par with other 2600 games. If you want a superior experience apply this patch: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/207249-fixing-et-the-extra-terrestrial/

Also, if you read the manual it helped. It's nowhere near as bad as people let on and it didn't cause the crash, that's revisionist history. They printed too many as the 2600 was dying anyway.

[Anonymous No.7456056]

>>7455675

ET did definitely not cause the crash.
It was just the little cocktail umbrella on to of the pile of shit the mass of low quality games had become.
Though making more carts of it than consoles sold at that point probably helped.

[Anonymous No.7456069]

>>7455314
Why hasn't a team of dedicated homebrewers come up with an indie game that really captures the magic of the movie? I could see a nice point and click adventure. It's a shame.

[Anonymous No.7456120]

>>7455314
it's above the average atari 2600 game but that's not saying much
it was very innovative though, and with >>7455675 it's probably good but I've never actually tried it

[Anonymous No.7456154]

>>7455314

It's one of the best 2600 games, despite its stupidly bad reputation. The reputation is there for three reasons:
1) It's an Atari 2600 game, so it's crude and awkward because of how limited the console is. People today have trouble understanding how any game on such a weak console could be good. Really, it's arguable that no game on the console is very good. I had a 2600 as a kid and loved it, but still, once we got our NES I barely ever looked back, though I remained distantly fond of the Atari. Obviously even the best game on this console could become an easy target. That's been true since 1990 if not earlier.
2) Jumping on the bandwagon of the "games buried in the desert" myth (or historical fact, or whatever the hell it is) gives unusually stupid children a large amount of pleasure. For a while now, AVGN championing this as the worst game ever (just because he needs a target for his schtick, and Jekyll & Hyde for NES isn't famous enough to hang the plot of your movie on) has strongly contributed to the fad of celebrating the alleged supernatural power of this game's low quality.
3) The game is somewhat obtuse. It has unusual mechanics that can be hard to understand if you don't read the manual, and it has a few bugs, including one that causes you to repeatedly and frustratingly fall into pits if you are somehow so extraordinarily stupid that you can't find the simple and easily applied workaround that reliably neutralizes this bug. So the good qualities of the game are easy to ignore if you don't really care about it and just want to briefly and superficially enjoy a funny story about gaming history.

If any Atari 2600 game is good, then this one is good. It's not THE best, but it's up there. The question of whether any Atari 2600 game is good is worth addressing but is outside the scope of this thread.

[Anonymous No.7456156]

>>7455314
It's one of the better 2600 games if we're being real here. It's certainly better than 2600 games like "Atari Video Cube", "Flag Capture", "Bugs", "Karate", etc.

[Anonymous No.7456217]

>>7455470
>>7455610
>>7455647
They even managed to dig a few up a few years ago. There some YouTube vid about it.

[Anonymous No.7456272]

>>7456069
Put in all that work for a Hollywood C&D? What for?

[Anonymous No.7456285]

>>7456154
Wasn't this game also 80 bucks at launch simply to gouge people on their hype for it?

[Anonymous No.7456442]

>>7456154
>somehow so extraordinarily stupid

I really don't think of assuming that a figure that is supposed to be walking upright on the ground but simply cannot be displayed this way because hardware limitations would only fall into holes if his bottom part touches them.
Not exactly stupid to be confudes that if ANY part of the sprite touches the hole that we should imagine on the "ground" you fall in.

[Anonymous No.7456557]

https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-et-appreciation.html

[Anonymous No.7456572]

If you play it right it's pretty creative. Also, the Indiana Jones game is similar

[Anonymous No.7457990]

>>7456056
>ET did definitely not cause the crash.
No, but it became the poster child (game?) of the 2600's biggest problem which DID cause the crash - an overabundance of shitty shovelware.

[Anonymous No.7458093]

>>7456572
which is one of the reasons people hated it so much at the time - the standard of the time was mindless "shoot the thing until it dies"-style arcade-like gameplay.
Anything more was considered weird.

[Anonymous No.7458123]

>zoomer tranny watches JewTube vid about shit game
>has to post thread on it like all the previous zoomer cunts

z-z-z-z-zoooooooom

[Anonymous No.7458124]

>>7455314
Virtually everything on the 2600 is bad. Missile command is the only good game.

[Anonymous No.7458150]

>>7456154

What definitely IS extraordinary stupid is to start up the game without looking up what to do and then complain about not knowing what to do.
ET is one of those games where manual is required.

[Anonymous No.7458437]

It's not buggy or broken, the game plays fine if you read the manual first. It's just not fun. Nobody wants to play an arcade version of graphical adventure games.

[Anonymous No.7458460]

>>7457990
No that's just another meme, created by Nintendo to appease retailers and so they would have an excuse to treat third parties like shit. Every console ever made is filled with shovelware. The crash happened because the fad of "games on your tv" died once people got sick of playing the 5 minute long, single screen, 1 button games that were more or less all the 2600 could do.
This left retailers with a ton of dead stock that no one wanted, and they stopped carrying video games as a result. When video games got popular again they carried them again and were very happy to sell you the mountains of dogshit shovelware on the NES.

[Anonymous No.7458817]

>>7458460
>The crash happened because the fad of "games on your tv" died once people got sick of playing the 5 minute long, single screen, 1 button games that were more or less all the 2600 could do.
This.
I'd go home from a birthday party at the arcade and fire up Atari just to pretend for a bit. It was fun but not a whole lot more fun than just playing with Legos and Star Wars toys. Super Mario Brothers on the other hand, was kid crack.

[Anonymous No.7459775]

>>7456069
>Why hasn't a team of dedicated homebrewers come up with an indie game that really captures the magic of the movie? I could see a nice point and click adventure. It's a shame.


There was a real ET game released on the GBA, and it is arguably worse than the 2600 game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyAFh7S5c0&t=116s

[Anonymous No.7459879]

>buy ET for 5 bucks on ebay
>throw in dirt, run over it with car a few times
>list on ebay "AUTHENTIC HIDDEN GEM ATARI ET FROM BURIED NEW MEXICO SITE HOLY GRAIL OF RETRO GAMING"
>ridiculously overcharge for it
>????
>profit!

[Anonymous No.7461009]

>>7455314
It's not good, but it's really not some godless atrocity either, it's a game with some at the time novel concepts, yet with a lot of bugs and poor coding which makes it below average, if you patch it up, it's actually pretty ok. For an example of a game which I think is a billion times worse, there is Duke Nukem Forever, one of the very few games which actually makes me kind of angry just thinking about it, because it's bad on such a fundamental level.

>>7455675
>and it didn't cause the crash
The crash itself is kind of revisionist history, because people think the entire industry was at its knees, when it was really just Atari fucking themselves up by continuing to fail at basic finance and logistics. As said, they made too much of not just ET, but other games too, and also quite a lot of hardware, frequently being left with stock which they simply couldn't move, because they kept pushing more of it on retailers than they could move at the best of times, who eventually had enough and told them no.

How did this affect the rest of the industry? Not really as much as legend suggests, Atari was the biggest player at the time, and wrecked themselves as previously stated, so retailers got funny ideas about the actual nature of videogames, but they never went anywhere, people didn't grow tired of them, they kept going to arcades, they kept buying computer games, and they kept playing the fun console games that they already had. Nintendo saw an excellent opportunity to launch fresh and exciting next gen games in the vacuum Atari had created, and they took it. By tricking retailers early on, they could get those games out to people and then word of mouth would start to do its thing, because there's really not anything on the 2600 which is as cool or as fun as a game like Super Mario Bros. or Duck Hunt

It should really be known as the Atari Crash, because that's what it actually was.

[Anonymous No.7461013]

>>7456069
>point and click
What, on the 2600? I don't think you've got enough space or power for something like that.

[Anonymous No.7461023]

>>7459775
Wow, that was quite amazingly bad.

[Anonymous No.7461024]

>>7461013
>What, on the 2600? I don't think you've got enough space or power for something like that.

Point and click adventure games didn't really exist that far back. The adventure games back then would generally use text input for commands. It wasn't until stuff like Maniac Mansion when actual mouse pointing became a thing.

[Anonymous No.7461780]

>>7456120
is it true that Nintendo never saved the gaming industry and used the narrative as an excuse to push third-parties out of it..?

[Anonymous No.7461803]

who are the motherfuckers who are saying that is on par with other 2600 games?
are you guys shitting me?
games like River Raid, Megamania, HERO, Pitfall, Missile Command and Jungle Hunt are hundred of times better than this pile of garbage.

[Anonymous No.7462415]

>>7461803
>games like River Raid, Megamania, , Pitfall,

One of Ataris biggest competitors was Activision. Apparently Atari would force large orders of retail outlets to help block third party software from being sold on the same shelves as Atari games. All the third party 2600 publishers were unlicensed. Some of the third parties were generally making better games than Atari too.

[Anonymous No.7462420]

>>7461780
The video game crash only happened in yankeestan. Civilised countries were not affected at all, or had even heard of it. There was nothing to save because gaming was doing perfectly fine. In the UK and EU most people had computers anyway being as they could actually afford them. Even the Sega Master System matched NES sales in the UK/EU. Nintendo were fucking irrelevant. Mutt shit isn't world history.

[Anonymous No.7462469]

>>7458817

This, people used to games being a creative medium tend to forget that games were once literal electronic toys. Fun toys, but still toys. The only games that hinted at where the industry would go were text adventure games, and those weren't very accessible in the early 80s

[Anonymous No.7463471]

>>7462420
>The video game crash only happened in yankeestan.
It only happened to Atari, and in extension the home console market because Atari had the largest market share, Americans never stopped playing arcade games or computer games, nor the console games they already had.

>or had even heard of it
Americans never heard of it back in the day either, the industry wasn't widely talked about like that, and again it pretty much just affected Atari.

>There was nothing to save because gaming was doing perfectly fine
Correct.

>Nintendo were fucking irrelevant
They were popular here in Sweden, and generally had plenty of good action games which things like even the C64 couldn't compete with.

[Anonymous No.7463479]

>>7463471
>it's another dumb yuro speaks about what happened in America like he was there post

[Anonymous No.7463514]

>>7463479
As opposed to the other dumb yuro?

[Anonymous No.7464046]

>>7461023
>Wow, that was quite amazingly bad.

The same developer made another ET "game" for the GameBoy Colour. Which is not really a game at all, but an ET themed digital assistant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92lcf_oL-ws

Which is a lot like Austin Powers: Oh, Behave! digital assistant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNd3HwKMOzk

[Anonymous No.7464059]

>>7464046
I remember the Austin Powers ones. I wonder who thought kids wanted really shitty PDAs based on movie licenses?

[Anonymous No.7464093]

>>7456154
>For a while now, AVGN
People were making jokes about ET being bad before AVGN ever existed dude. I swear that guy lives rent free in the heads of some posters here and they can't ever let him go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)#Critical_response

https://youtu.be/vmLJB66Vgpo?t=823
Have a random G4 video too

[Anonymous No.7464101]

>>7463479
He's not wrong though. The real reason for the "crash" was that home computers were starting to become affordable at that time. Computer games arguably had their first "boom" during the same period, 1983 - 1985 in particular.

[Anonymous No.7464108]

>>7464093
AVGN was born in 1980. He predates E.T.

[Anonymous No.7464262]

If ET had been the only trainwreck trash game that was allowed and sold on the system, nothing would have happened. It's a big-seller licensed game so it just became the most prominent example of a problem thousands of times larger than itself.

[Anonymous No.7464308]

>>7462420
>shitholer cope: the post

[Anonymous No.7464631]

>>7455501
>>7455512
jesus christ you meme forcing faggots need to stop

[Anonymous No.7464708]

>>7456154
>>7456442
and it has a few bugs, including one that causes you to repeatedly and frustratingly fall into pits if you are somehow so extraordinarily stupid that you can't find the simple and easily applied workaround that reliably neutralizes this bug.

It's not a bug, you literally just keep the button held down and movie in any direction out of the hole. That's it. The hole has a hitbox, just as everything has a hitbox. If you let go within the hitbox, you fall back into the hole. It was deliberately programmed that way, it's the opposite of a bug. I figured this out on my own when I first emulated the game as a kid. You aptly point out someone would have to be extraordinarily stupid to get hung up on this. Keep falling back in on their first try? Fair enough. But to repeatedly do it without realizing what they're doing wrong after trial-and-error and experimentation attempts would be a sign of stupidity and the bad reputation this mechanic of the game gets is owed to this.

[Anonymous No.7464716]

>>7456154
>>7456442
>and it has a few bugs, including one that causes you to repeatedly and frustratingly fall into pits if you are somehow so extraordinarily stupid that you can't find the simple and easily applied workaround that reliably neutralizes this bug.

It's not a bug, you literally just keep the button held down and movie in any direction out of the hole. That's it. The hole has a hitbox, just as everything has a hitbox. If you let go within the hitbox, you fall back into the hole. It was deliberately programmed that way, it's the opposite of a bug. I figured this out on my own when I first emulated the game as a kid. You aptly point out someone would have to be extraordinarily stupid to get hung up on this.

Keep falling back in the hole on one's first try? Fair enough. But to repeatedly do it without realizing what one is doing wrong after trial-and-error and experimentation attempts would be a sign of stupidity and the bad reputation this mechanic of the game gets is owed to this.