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What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2010 (Season 3)

cvga

By cvga
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JayWI Stargunner

JayWI

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Sega Genesis

 

Got my shipment of 10 CIB games from Ebay today so I figured I'd test 'em out.

 

Jeopardy - 20 minutes

Mortal Kombat 2 - 10 minutes

Ms. Pac-Man - 5 minutes

ESWAT City Under Siege - 10 minutes

Chakan - 10 minutes

Championship Pro-am - 10 minutes

Strider Returns - 5 minutes

Earthworm Jim - 15 minutes

Adventures of Batman and Robin - 15 minutes

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VectorGamer Quadrunner

VectorGamer

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Arcade

Eagle 20 mins

Hyper Pac-Man 10 mins

Pac-Mania 7 mins

Pac-Man 10 mins

CutieQ 135 mins

 

Eagle is this week's Arcade/MAME HSC and the Pac games are three of the six Easter Weekend Arcade/MAME Pactacular.

 

I'm trying to break the world record in CutieQ. The record is 375K.

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sandmountainslim Quadrunner

sandmountainslim

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Atari 2600 games

 

 

AIR RAID (due to all the Air Raid hullabaloo) 50 minutes (stella of course)

 

Communist Mutants 30 minutes

 

Bombs Away 30 minutes

 

Debro Pac Man 25 minutes

 

Evil Magician Returns 25 minutes

 

MissAdventure Revised 15 minutes

 

Adventure 15 minutes

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Kurt_Woloch Stargunner

Kurt_Woloch

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Here are my times for this past week (March 29th through April 4th)...

 

The classic games (eligible for the Top 10):

 

Shamus (Atari 8-bit) 334 minutes in 3 sessions

Shamus (VIC-20) 149 minutes

Shamus (C-64) 54 minutes

 

I'm not sure if the following one should also be listed in the Top 10:

 

Shamus (Game Boy Color) 44 minutes

 

The non-classic games (non-eligible for the Top 10):

 

Pizza connection 2 (PC) 640 minutes in 3 sessions

Taberinos (Online game) 95 minutes

Turnellio (Online game) 16 minutes

I can hold my breath forever (Online game) 11 minutes

Deforest (Online game) 6 minutes

Tic Tac Game (Online game) 5 minutes

Emilio's flight (PC) 4 minutes

 

As you can see, I've tried several different versions of Shamus this week. I completed the Atari 8-bit version due to a bug in the program... sometimes if you get very far in the game (and I made it to the start of the red level), the speed doesn't get reset properly. In that condition, I changed the difficulty to "expert", and suddenly the speed dropped to about one frame per second. Well, with the help of frameskip (I don't have an Atari 8-bit, so I emulated it), I upped the speed to about 7 frames per second, which is much more comfortable to play, but still much slower than in normal mode. At that speed, I made it through to the end of the maze comfortably, although it took about 1 hour and 40 minutes, where normally it would only take about 40 minutes or less. However, after that the game gets ridiculously fast... it nor runs at 60 frames per second (normal speed is about 15, but raising with each level), and at that speed, you lose your lives pretty fast.

 

The C-64 version isn't as smooth as the Atari 8-bit one, and most of all it has an annoying bug where if you die by a robot running into you, you lose not one, but three lives at once. I tried to map out its second map, the "Holmes" map, but it's just too hard to do it.

 

The VIC-20 version has got a whole different maze with only 32 rooms in total, and also the game structure is somewhat different... it doesn't differentiate between "corridors" and "rooms" so much... on the VIC-20, some rooms have exits at the top or bottom, and some corridors have a shape which wouldn't ever appear in the other versions. Also, the enemies are all software sprites moving around freely on the screen while they are restricted to certain character positions in the other versions. Your character can shoot 3 bullets at once instead of 2, and the enemies are able to overlap... heavily, in part. Often when you enter the room, you can just make out a "bunch of enemies", but you can't make out what they are exactly.

I made it to complete the maze once, and after that comes "Level two" where the enemies fire at you much more often. I read somewhere that there is an ending after beating Level Two, but I didn't bother doing so.

 

The GBC version is actually very true to the original. I felt right at home with the mazes. But it's very easy... the enemies shots have been slowed down compared to the Atari 8-bit version, so they aren't much of a danger anymore. The only thing making the game a bit harder is that you can hit only one enemy with each shot, but the game is still very easy... I completed the map on only the second attempt. The maze structure is exactly the same as on the Atari 8-bit, although the levels have been renamed (there's a film studio, an underground complex and a hotel instead of Levels Blue, Green and Red) and some graphics and one special enemy type per level have been added... but that type doesn't behave much differently to the enemies we already know. What's remarkable is that the screen is scrolling... they made the room an estimated 24x32 characters big and show 18x20 of them at once on the GBC screen.

One funny thing is that the changed the scoring again... OK, so the scoring already seems to be different in each version. On the GBC, you only get 1 point for each enemy killed and 10 points for each room completed... and you don't get any points at all in any room you enter repeatedly. This matters at the end where it says that with 2500 points, the next level would be unlocked... I fell short of that by 100-200 points.

 

Other than that, I also played some more modern games this week, most of all "Pizza Connection 2", which is a pizza restaurant simulator. What's unique about this one is that it actually simulates the run of the day, where kids enter at times when they are out of school etc., and you also schedule your employees for 9-hour shifts each instead of for the whole day.

 

Taberinos is a billard-like game where you hit lines with a ball. If you hit them, they disappear, but your ball also gets reflected by them. Your goal is to hit all the lines on screen within a given number of shots. Later on in the game, there are pods which reflect the ball, oversize pods which shrink down if you hit them, and angry pods which generate new lines if you hit them.

Actually, this game has pretty simple graphics, and I think it should be nicely doable on an 8-bit machine with some kind of bitmap graphics and sprites or with multicolor graphics, like the C-64, the Atari 8-bit, the TI-99, MSX, Colecovision and so on. The display of the lines is basically monochrome, and on top of that the only moving object is your ball, other than that there are the pods which are fixed until they disappear. I think the game should even work on character based systems or the Odyssey^2, but then there would probably have to be some constraints concerning how the lines are allowed to run.

 

Turnellio is some kind of puzzle game with revolving objects, and "I can hold my breath forever" is an underwater adventure where you have to reach caves with air in it in 10 seconds time.

 

Deforest is some kind of simple Sim City. The Tic Tac game is a variation of Breakout where the lines slowly come down at you (reminds me a bit of "Alleyway", one of the Gameboy launch games for Austria).

 

Finally "Emilio's Flight" is a game where you have to survive in the middle of a swarm of 100 triangles. The nasty thing about this game is that it streams music from an Internet radio station, and the more intensive the music gets, the faster the triangles get!

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StanJr Quadrunner

StanJr

Posted
Posted

Pretty thorough breakdown of Shamus across platforms! Well done! I don't even have a clue what Shamus is!

 

Anywho, here's what I got so far:

 

Spelunker (NES): 30 mins.

Gumshoe (NES) 10 mins.

Might Bomb Jack (NES): 20 mins.

 

Grand Prix (VCS) 10 mins. (another best time for Game 1!)

 

:spidey:

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cvga Quadrunner

+cvga

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Intellivision:

 

Demon Attack - 20 minutes

 

I'm not a big fan of this game. I played solely for the HSC and didn't realize that I had already missed the deadline. I'd like a refund on my 20 minutes please :)

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JayWI Stargunner

JayWI

Posted
Posted

Intellivision

 

Demon Attack - 20 minutes

Locomotion - 10 minutes

Lock 'N' Chase - 10 minutes

 

 

Sega Genesis

 

Buck Rogers Countdown to Doomsday - 50 minutes

Earthworm Jim - 15 minutes

NBA Jam Tournament Edition - 20 minutes

Cyberball - 15 minutes

 

 

Super Nintendo

 

Super Punch-Out - 35 minutes

 

 

NES

 

Paperboy - 20 minutes

Castlevania - 20 minutes

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thegoldenband Quadrunner

+thegoldenband

Posted
Posted (edited)

I just realized I forgot to post my times this week. Not a lot of gameplay, since I was traveling, but here's what little there was:

 

Sega Master System:

Air Rescue - 64 min.

Toto World 3 - 5 min.

 

Sega Genesis:

Columns - 25 min.

Mortal Kombat - 25 min.

 

Sega Dreamcast:

Worms World Party - 110 min.

 

In Columns, we came very close to beating Pro 9 in Flash doubles. I think we had a same-colored jewel lined up next to the target jewel, but somehow slipped up and weren't able to get back on track.

 

Meanwhile, Air Rescue is yet another promising game ruined by uneven difficulty, inconsistent collision detection, and poor controls. In the first four levels, it's not such a big deal that your helicopter is unresponsive to small movements, and often won't react at all to a brief tap on the controls. It doesn't even matter that much when occasionally, if you stop your helicopter and push in a new direction, the helicopter will move a few additional pixels in the previous direction (!) before changing course.

 

But when you reach the final level, which requires pinpoint navigation of narrow caverns while under heavy fire, these issues become insurmountable, and lead to crash after crash. Add to that the fact that enemy artillery sometimes don't blow up even when you score a direct hit, and you've got a recipe for controller smashing. I tried two different emulators just to make sure that it wasn't an emu issue, but my experience was the same as this Australian guy (language NSFW), who's clearly playing on real hardware (and at PAL speeds, which should be a bit easier).

 

Oh well, at least there's a stage select code, though many sites get it wrong: you have to hold down I & II, and then do two 360-degree sweeps of the direction pad, until you hear a confirmation tone. (Most cheat lists say it takes one revolution.)

Edited by thegoldenband
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