/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.9647029]

This isn't the worst game ever made. I wouldn't even put it in the top 10 worst games ever made.

[Anonymous No.9647259]

But it is still bad.

[Anonymous No.9647269]

>Horrible thing isn't actually horrible! I MUST DEBOONK!

[Anonymous No.9647336]

It's a top 5 Atari game

[Anonymous No.9648097]

>>9647029
This. People who say this "durr le worst evar" have never even heard about the likes of pic related or Ganso Saiyuki; these people have no idea that the "irredeemably bad kusoge" rabbit hole can go quite deeper than the games AVGN presented in his channel

[Anonymous No.9648730]

There are far worse 2600 games. Try playing Final Approach, it's nothing but stress and frustration.

[Anonymous No.9648735]

>>9648097
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Shmi76Pax8&t=2874s

This is more like it.

[Anonymous No.9648742]

This review actually made me appreciate the game lot more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ5A5PqCygU

[Anonymous No.9648746]

>>9648742
Most people that rage about ET don't even know how to actually play it. It's not that bad.

[Anonymous No.9649006]

>>9647029
Well it's not terrible for a game made within 5 days in the 70s - its the marketing scam attached to it that makes it memed as the "worst vidya EVAR!" - I mean why even make twice more cartridges than existing consoles at the time?

[Anonymous No.9649017]

>>9649006
>I mean why even make twice more cartridges than existing consoles at the time?
Because they had to sell that many just to make back the retarded amount of money they spent on the ET license.

[Anonymous No.9649026]

>>9649006
>within 5 days in the 70s

[Anonymous No.9649040]

>>9648097
Similarly shallow as OP.

[Anonymous No.9649357]

>>9649006
>game made within 5 days in the 70s
That's why the game sucked. They made it before the movie it was based on even existed.

[Anonymous No.9649495]

>>9649026
>>9649357
>phoneposting - not even once

[Anonymous No.9650316]

>>9647029
It really isn't even close to the worst of its time. It's not very good, but it's far from the worst, if you polished it a bit it'd be pretty ok. It was a big waste of money for Atari, but Atari were very good at wasting their money in general.

>>9648097
I vaguely recall him once saying that E.T. isn't actually anywhere close to the worst, but I don't know for sure, never saw his movie, heard it was very bad.

>>9649006
Atari did this a lot, they often overproduced games, they had this problem even for games which were big commercial hits, such as Pac-Man for 2600. The thing which set E.T. apart was that 1, it was kind of bad, 2, attached to a popular movie, and then 3, Atari paid out the ass for the licensing agreement.

[Anonymous No.9650472]

>>9650316
>I vaguely recall him once saying that E.T. isn't actually anywhere close to the worst
He did. AVGN is a fictional character, not a mouthpiece for James Rolfe's personal opinions. Rolfe personally didn't think ET was all THAT bad.

[Anonymous No.9650693]

>>9647029
Of course it's not THE worst. There was an astounding amount of shovelware by that time and there's no shortage of contenders for the absolute worst. But all those awful games were mostly unknown. They weren't attached to an expensive license, they weren't printed by the million and they weren't bought by the vast majority of the userbase. E.T.'s not the absolute worst in terms of its playability but in terms of negative impact on the industry it might be #1.

You have to consider the context. The gaming market was oversaturated and becoming something of a circlejerk with every console selling the same arcade ports. And the quality control, especially when it came to the 2600, could be very lax. What the industry needed was something to revitalize consumer confidence and make them feel like plunking down the equivalent of $100 or more in today's money for a new game wasn't just a roll of the dice.

And E.T. was a chance to do that. It was a console exclusive with a huge brand name attached to it and a major marketing push. People understandably expected at least a passable game. Something the kids they bought it for would enjoy for at least five minutes before getting bored or frustrated. And instead they got a game which was technically functional and had at least kind of unique but not really fun or intuitive gameplay. It was a 'wtf is this' moment for everyone the first time they played it. And again, this was THE game of Christmas. "Well It's not top 10 worst of all time" isn't remotely good enough under those circumstances.

And keep in mind this was about the same time Atari horribly and inexplicably botched 2600 port of Pac-Man came out as well. The message from both these games was "we're not gonna try that hard anymore because we're pretty sure you're giving us your money anyway." They dared people to put the games down and do something else, and much to their surprise, people did. An epic miscalculation all around.

[Anonymous No.9650716]

>>9650693
So tell me, anon, what does ET do that makes it so much worse than Raiders of the Lost Ark, a game the "ET is the worst game ever lol" people don't even seem to consider to be bad?

[Anonymous No.9651082]

>>9647029
i'd put it in my top 10 games ever made list. instant classic.

[Anonymous No.9651218]

>>9650693
>but not really fun

Not to argue with the main thrust of your explanation, but... I think it's fun. For a 2600 game, I mean. The problem isn't at all that there's something actually bad about it, it's that the game is inaccessible for casual players. It's very bad for the kids-on-Christmas-morning audience you describe, but it's not bad in general. In fact it's unusually good, by the low standards of the console.

[Anonymous No.9651258]

>>9649495
>phoneposting
What?

[Anonymous No.9651323]

>>9650716
Raiders, convoluted and inscrutable as it may be, at least had some variety to its gameplay. You equipped different items which had varied effects and needed to be used in different places.

E.T. was just pits. Some pits had stuff in them and some didn't and that's the game. Neither one is particularly fun but I think Raiders at least feels like a fully fleshed out concept for a non-arcade type game. E.T. feels like a "this is all we managed to come up with before we ran out of time" type of game

[Anonymous No.9651341]

There were many many worse Atari games. Thing is, those other Atari games that were worse were random obscure or budget crap. I remember playing a game by Johnson & Johnson that was a thinly veiled advertisement for their products disguised as a crappy breakout clone. I remember an A-Team game that has pretty much nothing to do with the series and was just a re-skin of an earlier game that also sucked.

Thing is, those were obscure budget games, many that weren't even really sold at retail.

E.T. was a huge movie at the time, a major IP, and this was well before it was well known that licensed games tended to suck and before internet or even many gaming magazines. It was basically as close as a massively hyped AAA game as you can get, like Tears of the Kingdom, or Hogwarts, or Elden Ring, or God of War Ragnarock.

This would be like the equivalent of those games ending up like Sonic 06, Superman 64, Balan Wonderworld, or even Big Rigs considering it's clearly rushed nature.

It was a Christmas release too, so that added fuel to the "Worst game ever" fire, not to mention it was one of the first examples of such a massive bomb in the gaming world. It wasn't just because it was a horrible game, there was indeed worse, but it was a massively hyped and anticipated game of an at the time massively popular children's IP that was released for Christmas during a time when people would not have had the hindsight of licensed games usually being poor or internet/much magazines to warn them.

[Anonymous No.9651351]

>>9650693
>And keep in mind this was about the same time Atari horribly and inexplicably botched 2600 port of Pac-Man came out as well

Wasn't the story behind that one that it was basically a not-even-alpha tech demo just to show that Pac Man could be possible on a 2600... and then Atari basically went "Good enough programmer, we won't pay you any more money to put more time into this, ship it"? There are homebrew versions of Pac-Man on the 2600 that are miles better.

I remember a detailed webpage by some guy who actually took it upon himself to patch E.T. to be a lot more playable. It was crazy to read how since he was only able to hex-edit the ROM and not able to disassemble it to change the actual source, any code he replaced has to take the exact same amount of time to process since the CPU manually outputted the video signal and changing the timing would completely mess up the image, parts he had to optimize to make it run faster so he could add new instructions that overall then took the same amount of time as the original code altogether, and scouring the rom to find handfuls of bytes to squeeze it all into.

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

[Anonymous No.9651365]

>>9651351
Yeah, it was a rough proof of concept and Atari published it right away, the 2600 could do the game better justice than that. Still, the game sold well, it basically played like it should even if everyone was disappointed that it wasn't better, and yet still, Atari outpaced demand and made too many copies.

[Anonymous No.9651447]

>>9647029
Man I don't even know what's going on in pic related.
I'm going along and *POW* there an explosion. I didn't see anyone throw a bomb, but whatever, now I'm going right and *POW*, something else happened, GAME OVER.
I... What the fuck?

[Anonymous No.9651462]

>>9651323
>E.T. was just pits. Some pits had stuff in them and some didn't and that's the game
And this is how you can tell anon only played it for a minute or so and didn't read the manual.

[Anonymous No.9651486]

>>9647029
the yars' revenge fag had to make a complicated, overthought game for kids and it flopped. its not fun and most people dont know how to play it, just a bunch of adults who needed other adults to explain it to them. its a case of poor design. all this fuck had to do was make a flying bike game or something and kids would have lost their shit over it. ET was so hot that an arcade game aimed at kids could have changed the fate of the atari home system and maybe even nintendo's arrival down the line.

[Anonymous No.9651492]

>>9651486
>most people dont know how to play it, just a bunch of adults who needed other adults to explain it to them
It comes with a fucking manual you retard.

[Anonymous No.9651512]

>>9651492
hey faggot, if your atari game has to be explained by adults then its not a good choice to make it an adaptation for kids. everyone bought the same video game and shitted on it. you deserve the same.

[Anonymous No.9651619]

>>9651462

That could be, since there is certainly more to the game than just randomly trying pits, but maybe anon was referring to the fact that pits were the entire main landscape of the world in this game. That's pretty limited. It seems natural to add maybe two more kinds of terrain or obstacle to check behind/atop/inside during your search. Instead of four pit screens or whatever it was, there could have been two pit screens, maybe two screens of rooms in Elliott's house or something like that where you could look inside closets or drawers for phone parts (dunno what the punishment for messing up in there would be, Howard would have to think of something), and two screens of... a forest where you'd levitate up a tree to search, maybe? Or who knows what.

I mean, it could even have been a few different KINDS of pits, if nothing else. I think the game is good enough (if only for the rare weirdo kids who actually cared enough to read manuals and actually put forth mental effort and stuff), but it could certainly use more content and more variety. (Not that its lack of those features causes it to stand out among 2600 games or anything; E.T. is surely a richer experience than say Dodge 'Em is.)

[Anonymous No.9651758]

>>9651258
I have greasy chodes for fingets

[Anonymous No.9651765]

>>9650316
Why there was no more than just 2 games total for ROB?

[Anonymous No.9651813]

>>9651765
Low sales of the existing games, and Nintendo had only created the robot to make it easier to get the console into American toy stores, so they didn't really care about trying to make it a success anyway.

[Anonymous No.9652547]

>>9651813
>Nintendo had only created the robot to make it easier to get the console into American toy stores
Why does it also have a Famicom equivalent then?

[Anonymous No.9652658]

>>9652547
Not to mention that the early Gryomite NES carts were just the Feamicom game with a Famicom to NES adapter in the cart.

[Anonymous No.9652731]

>>9652547
Because they had already made the games and the robot, might as well try to see if it would actually sell.

[Anonymous No.9653178]

>>9652547
Because of what >>9652731 except backwards. It was launched in Japan first.

[Anonymous No.9653217]

>>9653178
It was, but it was always meant for the American market. They just wanted to see if it would actually sell instead of just making American toy stores want to carry the thing.

[Anonymous No.9653734]

>>9653217
Sauce

[Anonymous No.9653850]

>>9648097
>Ganso Sayuki
Shit game, played it on my everdrive a good while back, glad it exists for this alone though

"I wanna lick your pussy! I want a perverted miss. I like vagina and the clitoris!"

[Anonymous No.9653875]

>>9653217
I'm not sure if that's true, but Nintendo Of America definitely hoped that an accessory like that would make it look more versatile to retailers wary of another Atarifuck. As long as it did that, I don't think they're that bothered that it didn't do better itself since it helped get their foot in the door like they were hoping for.

[Anonymous No.9653879]

>>9648097
also fuckin stargazer lmfao, been a while since I've seen those awfully tiled graphics. should get around to playing the remake as there's actually some interesting story concepts in this game