Current Events > How does E.T. for Atari hold up?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I hear the game is the pits. :v

Someone made a patch for it that fixes most of the worst issues it had.
---

Or just its career
---

I actually had that game as a child

FortuneCookie posted...

I hear the game is the pits. :v

I c wut u did thar
---

Tyranthraxus posted...

FortuneCookie posted...

I hear the game is the pits. :v

I c wut u did thar

it works on 2 levels. both in the real world and in the game too.

Zikten posted...

I actually had that game as a child

sad!
---

It looks no worse than other Atari games of the period. seriously.
---

MakoReizei posted...

It looks no worse than other Atari games of the period. seriously.

nah. It's definitely worse than a bunch of other games, but exactly how bad it is gets blown out of proportion by people who never played it.

It's full of absolutely ridiculous mechanics like how your food determines how much you can walk and if you run out you're just stuck and have to wait for elliot to come and give you more, and that gives you enough to maybe walk for another 10 seconds.

collision detection with pits was misleading and you'd often fall into them when you think you shouldn't have.

the game was unreasonably hard. there were only two enemies in the game, the scientist and the fbi agent. they were identical except I think one only kidnapped you and another kidnapped you and took your phone equipment. kind of fuzzy on memory. In order to phone home you had to avoid the enemies while collecting the parts to the phone, then you had to phone home in an extremely specific place and stand perfectly still for a pretty long time during which if enemies walked on screen you were just fucked because you couldn't move to avoid them and if they touched you it canceled the whole thing and you had to start over.

the game had a way to adjust the difficulty and you could turn off the enemies but then the game had no challenge whatsoever. Like if the easy mode of Dark Souls did so by removing all enemies in the game and bosses automatically kill themselves as soon as you walk into the room.

Good Atari 2600 games I'd consider like Jungle Hunt, Phoenix, Gyruss, Ms. Pac-Man, Battlezone, Mario Bros, etc. They're not all bad even though most of them are bad.

But E.T. is far from the worst. It was just also one of the most popular games because of marketing so it had a lot of vocal complaints and it was massively overproduced. This is probably the first example of game hype backfiring in a really bad way.
---