Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. That is an abomination.
The grand internet majority hatred of ET for the Atari 2600 has pissed me off for years now. And I had ET for the Atari 2600, cartridge, back when it was current (I was 4 or 5 years old at the time)
I mean, come on - 50% of all Atari 2600 games are Space Invaders clones. 25% are Breakout clones, 20% are shit “sports” or “racing” games and that leaves a precious 5% for interesting new ideas (at the time.)
ET was a stab at an Atari adventure game. Certain mechanics were clunky (it does get a bit tiring falling endlessly into pits until you figure out the levitation mechanism and rules) but this is an Atari game that has you searching for parts of your communication mechanism (telephone) under a timer, while NPC FBI and Scientists try to imprison you. Plus, novel at the time, different zones on each map do different things if you use E.T.'s psychic power - you can teleport, call Eliot, send NPCs back to home, etc.
In terms of complexity and novelty, this is light-years beyond anything else on the Atari 2600. Plus - though not the first Atari 2600 game with Easter Eggs, there were a few neat ones. You can turn the flower found in one of the games many pits into a Yar (Yar’s Revenge) and then also into Indiana Jones.
Forget all the haters. At the time it was released, people were probably looking for an ET skinned Space Invaders or Pacman. When it turned out to be something interesting and new, it was rejected, and that’s why thousands of cartridges ended up getting buried. But I’ll go on record as saying - ET was one of the best Atari 2600 games ever made.
Are you saying it is the worst video game of all time? Really?
Forgot that despite my earlier post defending ET, I never bothered voting for/discussing my vote for worst. 2600 Pac-Man.
Pac-Man is the true poster child for Atari’s hubris, and a crummy game to boot. They seemed to think “people will buy whatever garbage we shovel onto the 2600,” and proved it with Pac-Man. One of the best-sellers for the system, but still way overproduced (it’s one of the titles that had so many unsold copies that it got buried alongside ET in the legendary New Mexico landfill). An ugly, flickering mess, crammed into 4k to save money on chip fabrication. (To be fair to the programmer Todd Frye, he apparently programmed a decent 8k version, but was told to strip it down to 4k. He also was given a severely short time to develop the game, and no help to do so, because Atari was anxious to get the game to market as quickly and cheaply as possible.) They didn’t even get the look or sound of the thing right. Every clone made for every other system was better – hell, every release Atari did for competing systems was better. Atari made their millions, and severely damaged their 2600 brand in the process.
The game spawned a whole movement in 2600 circles to show that the various excuses often offered for why the game sucked (besides Atari’s hubris and cheapness) were not made in good faith. Some hacks simply tweaked the colors and sound in the original, yielding a better looking game that at least resembled Pac-Man. Others hacked Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man to get games that played better. And my favorite, a lone programmer sitting in his bedroom managed to do his own 4k homebrew that actually sounds and plays right.
It turns out that your memory is faulty. The game operates on a lifebar, and lives system, and there is no timer.
My vote is for Superman 64 of course, but an honorable mention must go to the original 1995 PlayStation version of Wipeout. Great graphics, brilliant music, “next gen” gameplay… so what am I on about then? Well, it was impossible to drive more than a few feet down the track without hitting the roadside which would stop you immediately. Steer the other way to get of the kerb and you would hit the other side of the road and stop again. Rinse, repeat. Very frustrating and I literally had to leave the room when watching the wife play it or the machine would have been smashed into a million pieces.
ETA: Luckily they fixed it for Wipeout 2097, glancing blows were allowed with a satisfying screech and a few sparks. Plus the lovely exhaust trails which glowed in the tunnels.
Superman 64, no question. I know that E.T. is often blamed, not without merit, for the videogame collapse, but despite it not making sense, I remember enjoying it as a kid. I might think a lot less of it if I were older, but hey, whatever.
But Superman 64 fails in all the ways E.T. did and more. It has a big name franchise and completely wasted it, it has terrible play control and game mechanics that make no sense, and it also has bad graphics and sound, something that we can’t really say one way or the other about E.T.
My personal experience with it was when a friend bought it used. Oh, it’s only $5? It’s got to be worth $5, right? No. First thing you do is fly through a bunch of rings. Really, unless it’s a flying game, you NEVER introduce the most complex game mechanic, 3D movement, in the first level. Worse, for a game based around a flying super hero, the controls for flying are TERRIBLE! A game should be difficult because it requires quick reflexes and timing, good strategy, all that sort of stuff, not because it’s borderline impossible to move your character how you want to. So it took like a good 20 minutes just to beat the first level and get to a different kind of stage, and by that point I had no interest in playing it anymore. Also, why the hell is Superman flying through rings rather than fighting bad guys or saving people? My friend did eventually play through the whole game and beat it, not because he enjoyed it, but because he saw it as a challenge of perseverence to play through it. It was painful just to watch him play it. Afterward, he didn’t even want it anymore and gave it to me vice just throwing it out.
The full version of that scene makes it pretty clear, IMO, that the laughing is supposed to sound very fake and forced. The plot of it is basically “be a stepford smiler”.
I’m sure that E.T. - Atari 2600 is the worst video game of all time, that’s why I voted, but I gotta admit there are a few games in this poll that I’ve didn’t know about.
Agreed - didn’t PC Gamer actually give Black & White a high rating and a glowing review, and later apologized for it?
Did Atari have 8K ability (which, IIRC, required page flipping) yet? (IIRC, the first 8K cartridge anybody ever made was Activision’s Bridge (yes, the card game, but it didn’t play a full game; you couldn’t defend against a computer hand).)
When choosing the worst game, should games that were so buggy that they were “games in name only” included? If so, then I have a few candidates, but I can’t remember the titles; one was a Space Shuttle simulator, one an Apollo mission simulator, and one a B-17 mission simulator (not 50 Mission Crunch; this one was in real time). Otherwise, my choice is the Atari 2600 version of Crazy Climber (which, IIRC, was not available in stores, but only by direct mail from Atari); the 2600 version uses just one joystick, which makes the game pretty much unplayable.
Perhaps buddy remembered a NES arcade machine with TMNT 2. Those were time-based and TMNT 2 is very similar to the arcade version.
A NES arcade machine? Something like a cabinet where you pay to play NES games, and that existed in arcade machines 20 years ago? Any links to the sort of thing you are talking about? The idea of an arcade game ported to a NES, put in an arcade on a NES, is rather amazing.
It was called the PlayChoice-10. Nintendo Entertainment System models - Wikipedia
I think that the worst series of video games are the Extreme Paintbrawl games. They were so bad it’s almost unimaginable. Every single entry in the series is considered “one of the worst games of all time.”
The games are
Extreme Paintbrawl
Extreme Paintbrawl 2
Extreme Paintbrawl 4
Where was 3 you ask? Never existed. But 4 was just a re-release of “Ultimate Paintbrawl 3” which was an attempt to use a different name to get rid of the bad memories people had of the Extreme series.
It’s just an utter travesty of video gaming. Try them if you dare!
So not just a cheap way to get TMNT into the arcades (as the name suggests, the player could get a choice of games). I remain amazed.
I think Bridge was 4k. The first 8k I remember is Asteroids. Using anything over 4k does require bank switching; the largest commercial release was Fatal Run at 32k, and some homebrew efforts have gone higher, with one homebrew released at 64k (Stella’s Stocking, a Christmas game). ETA: Bridge was indeed 4k, but was known at the time for being twice the size of Activision’s then-current releases, which were 2k.
Beyond that, I wouldn’t call Space Shuttle buggy… it’s pretty tightly coded, but it requires the use of switches on the console beyond the use of the joystick to control the shuttle; it’s really meant to be played on a 6-switch model. It came packed with a control overlay for the console’s switches, so the game as distributed was pretty straightforward to play in that original configuration, but few people who run across the game in the wild will know about the switches, have the overlay to reference, or even have a 6-switch model on which to play it. I agree that Shuttle Orbiter (Avalon Hill release for the 2600, presumably the one you’re referring to as an Apollo sim) is pretty blah.
The only B-17 game I can think of from that era would be the one for the Intellivision, B-17 Bomber, which suffers from a similar problem as the 2600 Space Shuttle game; it requires an Intellivision set-up that few people who would find it today would have (along with the usual Inty problem of needing controller overlays that tend to get lost). It operates without the synthesizer, but really needs to be played with it, as it explains and narrates the game and what you need to do. Very few people who pick up the game in the wild would even know they needed the synthesizer, and those that know it often don’t have it.
I don’t get the hate-on for Black & White. B&W 2? Sure, that game wasn’t great, but B&W was awesome. I still play it sometimes, (though admittedly the last level is crap and I’ve never finished it because it gets tedious). It wasn’t the best game, but don’t mix up failing to live up to Molyneux’s motor-mouth hype with being a terrible game.
Custer’s Revenge. While the likes of E.T. and Big Rigs are terrible, terrible games at least they aren’t actively offensive beyond their general suckitude. Custer’s Revenge on the other hand is a blemish on humanity’s hitherto spotless reputation. I imagine archaeologists digging it up in 500 years and dusting off an old Atari and being shocked that someone actually thought it would be a good idea too simulate that - and someone else agreed!
There’s also a load of those weird Japanese metro-molesting games that fall into this camp.
I wasn’t talking about 2600 or Intellivision games when I mentioned the simulators; in fact, Space Shuttle for the 2600 was one of my favorite games. I was referring to PC games, simce there are PC games in the list of “video games” (and probably shouldn’t have been). X-Plane’s space shuttle simulator is quite good as well.