So is this actually the worst game ever made?
>>11495787not even close
>>11495787ET sold 1.5 million copies, blaming the video game crash on it is just an old meme. The crash would have happened regardless, and while Atari did bury ET cartridges in the desert, they also buried other games.
Not when shit like Sqij or Hareraiser exist.
>>11495787Nah, there's far worse games out there. ET is actually very impressive for being rushed by one guy in one month, and trying something different instead of just being a Pac-Man clone like Spielberg originally wanted.
This piece of shit right here.>launch title for the PS
>>11495797Gr8 b8, m8. r8 8/8
>>11495972It plays fine though.
>>11495996Nah it's jank.
>>11495830Sqij was a worse game, but E.T. had less bang for the buck since Atari games weren't as cheap
>>11495998Plays better than any mortal kombat
>>11495787Not even remotely close, it's not even the worst 2600 game. E.T is just a rough game which with some cleanup would actually be pretty decent by 2600 standards, it's biggest impact is that Atari spent magnitudes more money on the license than it was worth, and they produced cosmic amounts of stock which they could never have hoped to move even if it had been the best 2600 game ever made. There were a lot of returns from customers, but that in itself was just a small piece of this pie.Atari tended to overproduce stock for games which were hits or they anticipated to be hits (also hardware like peripherals and computers), even big sellers like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, resulting in often losing much or even all of what would have been really good profits, because they didn't scale back production in time or they made more production runs when they had already matched market demand. When Atari realized that, OH FUCK, sitting on a bunch of unsellable stock actually costs you a bunch of money (warehousing isn't free), their initial panic impulse was to try to pawn off as much as they could on retailers and sellers around America. This spooked the fuck out them, and this is where the perception that games were a dying fad came up, on the distribution end. Their second plan was to just trash all this stock, so they did, which probably did save them from bankruptcy.There's been a lot of ridiculous exaggeration and myth about all this, such as E.T giving you AIDS, or that videogames actually WERE going to die (they never were), thus some people then try to overcorrect and insist that it simply never happened at all, or that E.T is secretly a masterpiece, neither of which are remotely true. Atari faced dramatic financial losses to these ventures, and they in turn did pretty serious damage to the American videogame industry for a few years, when Atari scared the hoes (retailers), companies like Coleco and Mattel suffered in the market for that too.
>>11496227Where Nintendo comes into the picture is that, they weren't "saving videogames," people were never gonna stop playing videogames, it's like saying people would stop listening to music or watching movies, rather it's that they came in to a market in shambles with a fresh and strong product which made everyone else's look like shit.It was a little expensive, but goddamn, there weren't many other games like them around at the time. Nintendo also did some shady stuff, like anti-trust shit and what not, which they eventually got in some minor trouble over, but they were quickly getting way too wealthy for that to actually matter to them, because they had some very good products which people wanted.The purpose of R.O.B. The Robot was less to "trick the audience," (they always wanted more games) and more just a red herring to try to ease retailers still wary about another Atari brundlefuck, to make it look like the thing was more than just a videogame console and that it could do much more (which it sorta could).The Zapper was also intended for this purpose, but unlike R.O.B., it was actually pretty fun and people liked it, thus more games were made for it after Duck Hunt.
>>11495835Yeah, it's actually a pretty ambitious title for the hardware and time. If they had given him a couple more weeks to complete it, it probably would have been remembered as a good game.Atari would still have fucked up after that, but that's another thing.
>>11495787Yes, and ignore anyone who tells you otherwise.
Better than any post 2010 AAA slop.
>>11496347That's true for literally any old gameI'd much rather play ET than play The Last of Us lmao
>>11495991No, the worst would have to an RPG of some kind. The genre uniquely combines terrible non-gameplay that does everything you could possibly do wrong in a turn based game with drawn out repetition and pointless and excessive cutscenes while frequently being needlessly restrictive on top of all that. RPGs do not get enough shit for how bad they generally are.
>>11495972Now wrap your head around this: a bad game, based on a bad movie, based on a good game.
>>11496347>>11496353AAA has been in decline for a while, but I think it's in the late 2010s where it starts getting really bland and turn into mush. Early 2010s AAA was almost as good as 2000s AAA in my opinion.>>11496354Try some other RPGs besides generic mainstream JRPGs.
>>11495805Couldn't they have flashed and reprogrammed the cartridges or salvaged the circuit boards/casing?
>>11496449Possibly, but that would still cost money to do, you'd need to do new labels and packaging too, discard the old ones and all. Might not have been worth the money and effort.
>>11496227>such as E.T giving you AIDSWut?
ET is pretty bad, but it's not some kind of mystical bad game that tanked everything on its own. There are a lot worse games for the 2600 than ET. It was just the final straw in the first phenomenon era of video games. Everyone was out to make a lot of money and I mean, you think we have it bad now with clueless execs but todays big-game-company CEO clueless dumbasses could not hold a candle to ancient mega-jews like Sid Sheinberg or the people who ran Atari after it was sold to Warner Communications. I talked to Howard Scott Warshaw several years ago, I think he's still working as a therapist in the valley. He was one of the whiz kids at Atari but really, most of those people were, because the pool of "people who can program a game" was incredibly small. He doesn't seem to have any bad feelings about the ET thing but he's had 40 years to think on it and get asked about it relentlessly so, you'd hope he would've moved on. which he did.
>>11496227you are basically right anon but in a way, video games never really became a full-on phenomenon again afterward. All of the arcade operators who held on during the early to mid 80s blowout thought "well, this might come back around." But even if they held on long enough for MK and Street Fighter, it actually never happened again. And now we live in a world where everyone plays some kind game, sometimes, but in that era people of all ages and stripe were checking out this new video game thang.
>>11495998It's worse than jank. It's boring. At least the arcade version was so broken that it was funny.
>>11496264>Nintendo also did some shady stuffNintendo did nothing wrong. It's their platform and they should be allowed to choose who gets to make games for it. Nintendo didn't hold a gun to anybody's head and force them to sign the agreement.
>>11496445>Early 2010s AAA was almost as good as 2000s AAA in my opinion.how old are you?
>>11496034But wasn't the only way to play the Speccy port of Sqij was by breaking into the source code?
No. Not even close. There's far worse games for the system. that said, it's not a game I'll sit down and play very often. Usually, I'll boot it up once every couple months, play through it a few times, and I'm good.
>>11495787>>11495797>>11495972Hardly
>>11495797
>>11495972The arcade one was awful, the console version was okay
>>11496584No, that's just your typical quality bit of European programming, every game from that region is like that.
>>11496043True, yet next to Killer Instinct, Mortal Kombat's gameplay feels like a masterpiece.
>>11497053Xenogears was based once you understand it's about the Jews.
>>11497157Still trying way too hard.
>>11495797That's not FF13.
>>11497190Xeno series is shit once you realized its based on shit.
>>1149655732.I largely liked 7th gen, it felt like it had a lot of changes and advancements from 6th gen, but I also feel like AAA games have also not developed further since, that the industry has horribly stagnated. I liked Far Cry 3 a lot, and a lot of people liked Assassin's Creed (I never tried it), but Ubisoft have really been running those into the ground, doing the same games over and over but less and less good each time (hell, even Far Cry 4 felt like a big downgrade already).It's the same sort of games, but the budgets balloon with nothing of substance to show for it, nothing is really new, and in the worst of cases, they get loaded down with shitty moneymaking schemes, games as a service scams, and in recent years DEI bullshit.I'm glad companies like Ubisoft are finally starting to collapse under their own bloat, they fucking deserve it, we need to scale back down to AA budgets.
it's not even the worst game in my atari collection
>>11498028what is?
>>11495787It's pretty abysmal. Even when you figure out how to play it, it's still abysmal.It's at least among the worst games and biggest disappointments of all time.
>>11496457Hyperbole.
>>11498138I don't think you've played many games if that's the case.
>>11498143I have. Don't be a contrarian shitbag or pretend to be retarded for replies, ET is a very bad game. Even if you read the manual and learned what you were supposed to do, even if you understand Howard Scott Warshaw's design philosophy through interviews and what he was going for, even if you figure out what it wants you to do on your own, even if you know it was marred by a short deadline, it's still a very bad game. If you do read the manual and do what it wants you to, the game also can be beaten in five minutes.Five minutes. No replay value, a total of FIVE minutes of gameplay for what would have been 98 dollars in current year money (new Atari releases typically sold for 30 bucks).98 dollars for 5 minutes of game, or a game that was so fucking stupid and boring you didn't care to even figure it out. Any child who got this for Christmas was pissed.I think there are plenty of other games that are worse than this, but ET is very, very bad.
>>11498158>If you do read the manual and do what it wants you to, the game also can be beaten in five minutes.That's 2600 games for you.
>>11498162Unlike most Atari games, ET actually has an end screen, which after the game restarts from the beginning.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmrQkQsM9FUThis wasn't an arcade style game that gets progressively harder to challenge you therefore giving it a lot of replay value. If you follow the instructions in the manual to a tee, you can beat the game in less than 5 minutes.
>>11498167I know, and most adventure style games on 2600 are not very long at all. It really is not a great game, make no mistake, but there's so many games out there which are infinitely worse.
>>11498181I would argue even a game like "Adventure" which also has an end screen (and can be beaten quickly if you have memorized it) is more fun to play since it offers multiple variations and some trial, error and exploration on the player's part.I think ET is abysmal but there are worse games than ET.I also think games like Superman 64 are fun simply because they are so bad, frustrating and stupid it dares you to complete it. I don't feel that way about ET, which after you figure out it's cryptic nature just becomes supremely boring.
>>11495787>So is this actually the worst game ever made?E.T. has more sales than Concord
>>11498227Holy fuck, you're actually right.I'm still so violently astonished at what a catastrophic failure THAT game is.
>>11498227>>11498331>The game sold over 2.6 million copies by the end of 1982. However, at least 669,000 copies were later returned in 1983.ET sold a lot more copies than most games, especially at the time. Those are insanely good sales figures. The only reason it was a financial disaster is because they printed way too many copies and nearly 700,000 people returned it for being shit.They must have expected it to sell even better than that which is wild to think about, pretty dumb move on what could have been an easy win.
>>11498208Boring is by any metric the worst thing any entertainment product can be if it's not caused by difference in taste. At least it is short, as a game being boring and long is even worse.
>>11495797BASED
