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

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.