Is it worth the joke? Did I need to spend 45 minutes deciphering and maneuvering through this game's absolute nothingness of an experience just because I shared my username with it? To experience the E.T. video game?

Fuck it, yeah. Sometimes I pull myself into poor decisions, sometimes I irony my way into doing dumb shit for a bit, but in the end, it's an experience to have. There's a huge difference between taking someone's word on a game being bad and giving the word.

actually, sorry, no, i'm not going into detail on this game. it sucks, but not for very long, and it's very funny being able to say that i've finally played and beaten E.T., especially while having parents who played the game on official hardware back then and couldn't.

i promise i won't do it again.

My favorite part of the E.T. movie is where he stretches his neck to get out of a pit, only to immediately fall back in no matter how you steer. Multiple times in a row. Kind of poetic about how the game where ET ends up in pits, well, ended up in a massive pit.

Those that call the game confusing haven't read the manual that break every mechanic down, but at the same time that doesn't make ET's pit adventure any less tedious. You're still moving blindly searching and searching for the phone pieces and where to use your abilities to get out of this game. Once you DO get the phone and find the Call Home spot and the mothership drop you have to make sure no humans are on the screen (except Elliot sometimes) and it's a lot.

It gets 1 star instead of half because this game at least had an idea rather than try to just blatantly copy something which I can respect. Like all "Worst games of all time" it just suffered heavily from circumstances outside of its control, and gets all the blame for the crash when it was really only half of it, and only half of that was this game's fault.

You don't need me to tell you that you shouldn't play this one outside of historical curiosity, but I know there are worse games than ET at least.

You can honestly do far, far worse. E.T.'s biggest issue is its lack of conveyance, something that was a potential issue with every video game of that era if you lost the manual. If you fall in a pit, hit left or right as soon as you switch screens. If you're struggling with the FBI Agents/Scientists, switch to Game 3 to get rid of them. Don't sweat the timer of doom.

E.T. is a bad game, of course, but it's not really the cause of the 1983 Video Game Crash. It's more emblematic of Atari's hubris at the time. Right before Atari went all-in on E.T.'s success, they produced 15 million copies of the 2600 port of Pac-Man when only 5 million Atari 2600s had been sold. To hope any single game would move ten million consoles was foolhardy; to put that hope into one of the all-time worst video game ports was just inviting disaster. E.T. needed to be an overwhelming success; to that end, they got the best possible talent they could in developer Howard Scott Warsaw, gave him five weeks, and set him at it. Warsaw did the best he could, but there was no escaping the hole Atari dug for themselves.

Time for the main event!
Behold: One of the worst games of all time. A game so bad it crashed the whole market. Copies of it were hunted and destroyed.

...uhhhh am I missing something?
When I look at this game, then look at the small selection of atari garbage I recently played I can see that they are not created equally.
E.T. actually has a title screen, an opening and ending cutscene, a map made of multiple screens, 3 npcs that wander the map, multiple collectibles...
Sure at first I was constantly falling into the holes over and over, and it took me a while until I understood how the hell I could get out without falling again.
Then I was walking aimlessly around the map trying to understand wtf I was supposed to do, or what anything did.
But through trial and error I kinda understood my main objective: gathering... shiny pieces of something (it's hard to tell what anything is on the atari) found randomly on the holes.

I don't think everyone would be as patient as I was, figuring out what to do when nothing seemed to work immediately. I especially don't think that the people that were hyped for this game (thanks to the movie and whatever deceptive advertising was used to promote this), would be happy after booting this up and playing for a few minutes (although having the manual is an advantage they would have over me lmao). This released around christmas...
History tends to repeat itself and I believe that this game is the first hyped AAA game that was rushed in development and then underdelivered. You hate to see it.

It's funny how expectations warp your reception of media (or anything in general really). Since I was expecting the worst of the worst, I'm... disappointed but not in the same way.
E.T. is not that bad. It's not good either, it's full of flaws, but for the console it's in... I mean what were people expecting a movie adaptation?
Most of the game's flaws can be blamed on the rushed development. Imagine if escaping the holes wasn't that painful, the game's reputation would be better for sure.

I ended up beating the game on my 3rd try. So, you have to find 3 of the shiny things, and once you have them all you activate the alien ship power and a count down activates. Oh, I forgot, the powers (or actions idk): On the top of the screen icons will appear as you move. I believe it's random but certain coordinates will result in specific powers. Some move you to the next screen, others heal you. One highlights a hole if it has a shiny object.
The one you need to use when you have the 3 shiny objects looks like a space invader, after activating it you then have to stand on the landing zone on the first screen where the game started. If you are standing on the correct square when the timer ends, you win, and E.T. will go back home.

It's... kind of dull but it's way more elaborate that the atari2600 games I recently played. It definitely isn't "worst game of all time" material.

After fiddling around with this game for less than 2 hours I can confidently say that anyone who thinks this is one of the worst games ever made has either
1. Never played another 2600 game in their life
2. Didn’t read the manual
Seriously y’all need to calm down about this one. Not that it’s perfect, obviously. Getting out of pits is easy with practice but sometimes you fall into one on a screen transition. Or the fact that humans will frequently walk onto the screen while you’re waiting for the timer and ruin your attempt. But it’s pretty ambitious for a 2600 game, and unfortunately it was a bit of a rush job. It didn’t crash the video game industry, Atari did by wasting money producing way more copies of this than anyone could reasonably sell. Give this one a chance (with a manual at your side) and you might actually have a little fun with it! But play Yars’ Revenge first. Or maybe just play that actually

Completely dumbfounded at how this is one of the first rogue games ever made? Beneath Apple Manor and, uh, Rogue both predated E.T. by a few years each, but for many, this was surely their exposure to the genre - I know it was for me, anyway. Assuming you don’t manipulate your RNG and lock in the positions of the phone pieces (and presumably the zones, I’m not sure) in advance by holding the fire button on startup, each reset should essentially result in a completely unique playthrough. For a time where most games didn’t even have an ending, let alone such variable factors to consider in each run, this is a pretty impressive piece of shit, I gotta say. It’s not all glamorous of course, people have torn this game apart for years (and repeatedly recited the same factoids about its history to a more exhausting degree than even the development of Super Mario Bros. 2) and I’m obviously not blind to its faults. Still, I think people can be pretty uncharitable towards it all the same.

First, if you’ve ever belabored that the game is too confusing or doesn’t make sense or whatever, you have to consider that all the game’s mechanics were actually broken down in the manual. No stone is left unturned, it even explains how the scoring system works (or how it’s supposed to work, apparently the way your point total gets tallied during the ending is kinda fucked up). Pits are the mechanic that have seen the most criticism at this point, and while they can certainly be frustrating, they’re not glitched or broken or whatever. People have even pointed towards the collision being the culprit, which isn’t true either. In fact, they work completely perfectly. The real problem is that the collision is too good. E.T. and his sprite is so accurate that it’s incredibly easy to clip the pits while navigating, on top of easily falling back in once you get out. While this can be alleviating beforehand by improving your steering, or afterward by leaving the bottom part of the pit rather than the top, it’s still a mechanic that could have seen some brushing up with some hindsight - shrinking your hurtbox slightly should theoretically fix the issue entirely.

Once you have a grasp of world navigation, finding the phone parts and scraping the map for zones is actually pretty fun. And I hate to say it, but scrambling for and getting to the “go the fuck away” zone icons in-between scuffles with the government agents can actually provide very small bursts of excitement during the game. Getting grabbed by an agent sucks, but since the game is over in three minutes and a fresh start is a reset away, the pace is genuinely kind of electric. Where it does fall apart for me is actually in the home stretch of the game - while placing the Phone Home zone on one single unique spot of the map is a natural evolution of the preexisting rogue mechanics, it’s pretty obnoxious blindly running around each of the game’s five major screens looking for the correct spot while avoiding the rest of the hazards. Oftentimes I’d get all the phone parts, fumble around for the last zone, get caught, and then just reroll the system for better odds. Again, while the game can get away with these weird bumps due to its length, this one in particular feels the most cheap to me - it’s not enough to ruin the game, but definitely holds it back from being something I’ll want to replay often.

If you’re not 5 years old and refuse to read an instruction manual, there’s really no reason to be so vehemently against this one I feel, especially on a system like the Atari 2600 which, in retrospect, wasn’t pumping out the finest of the medium. It’s not high art, and surely there’s a lesson to be gained from how its launch window was handled (not just for this game, but other games launching around the same time), but gimme a break lmao. With 40 years of hindsight, I think it’s fair to say this is easily the 2nd best piece of E.T material that’s ever been made.

Não é o pior que o console tem a oferecer, na verdade diria que é apenas um puzzle mais complexo do que deveria.

ET anda sobre um grande cubo que é todo o mundo dele. No topo está a floresta, no fundo a cidade e nos lados o campo de dezenas de buracos. Um dos dilemas é como sair dos buracos que parecem feitos de manteiga de tanto que se cai deles. Uma dica é quando subir de volta, mirar para a direita o esquerda do buraco, as chances de voltar a cair a partir dali são mínimas.

Dito isso, o objetivo é encontrar espalhado aleatoriamente nesses buracos os 3 pedaços do telefone para ligar para a nave-mãe lhe buscar. Para te atrapalhar estarão os cientistas que te levarão pra cidade a troco de nada, é só voltar pra onde tava, e o detetive que vai te roubar uma peça do telefone, esse é muito mais irritante.
Você tem um total de 9999 passos para completar a missão, ao acabar, o garoto irá acordá-lo com mais 1500 passos, o que francamente é quase nada.

A grande confusão que assola este jogo é como saber onde estão as peças, o que fazer com elas e como terminar o jogo. Aí que entra os ícones que aparecem no topo da tela. Eles não são aleatórios, tudo depende de onde exatamente está o ET, e cada um decide o que o botão de ação fará. Setas te transportam para a tela naquela direção, interrogação te revelam onde estão as peças e 3 romano (cidade) manda os inimigos embora. Os ícones que você está procurando é um que parece uma batata com janelas, é a nave-mãe, neste ponto você deve ligar para eles com o telefone completo. Após isso uma contagem regressiva começa, e você deve achar o último ícone que é um alvo quadrado, ele é o ponto de pouso, esteja ali para ir embora, normalmente é pra ele estar na floresta.
Com um pouco de sorte de nenhum cientista te tirar do lugar, você terminará o jogo.

A ideia é muito mais complexa do que muitos jogos do 2600, e eu na verdade parabenizo o Howard por ter conseguido fazê-lo em 6 semanas. Mesmo sendo um jogo extremamente confuso que retornaram quase todos na época, é uma ótima peça de colecionador