E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

The Good
30 years ago, the Atari 2600 was about to go up in smoke and the company has faced terrible stiff competition against their rivals Nintendo, Commodore, Colecovision, and Sega. With the 2nd Generation winding down, Atari made one last disappearing trick and that's releasing the first movie-licensed game to be released on the 2600. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. A video game that's so bad, no one ever wanted to pay good money and play an alien who wants to phone home. And so it began, the video game crash that is still remembered this year and just as you know, Atari is D.O.A. And I saw an X-Play episode way back where Adam and Morgan are trying to figure after what happened where truckloads of millions of unsold copies of both Pac-Man and E.T. were buried in a landfill in Alamagordo, New Mexico.

The Bad
The reason why E.T. was a big failure for the Atari 2600 was that the controls were broken, the music is terrible, and I certainly don't know what the hell happened to the company that spawned millions of fans jumped up and played the original Pong way back since the birth of arcades in the late '70s. I mean, what's in the future for Atari these days? No new games, no employees, no fanbase, things were never looking good if you're still stuck in 1983.

The Bottom Line
Many of video game critics were still questioning what really did happened after the crash. I would really hope to see an Oscar-worthy documentary sometime in the future and find out some evidence and new clues that might've forced Atari to run out of business as of their bankruptcy announcement last January and what is the future behind current and future next-gen consoles. E.T. is still one of the worst movie-licensed games of all time, but it will soon be remembered. September 26, 1983, the crash that crumbled the gaming market.

The Good
This game is based on the movie with the same name, which I have yet to watch. The movie was released in 1992, with a game from Atari released the same year. There are also a few more games that were released over the years, for different platforms, with varying degrees of success.

E.T. for the Atari 2600 doesn't have much of a plot.The object is to collect three pieces of a telephone located in the many pits, while avoiding two guys (scientists and Mr. FBI guy) that will chase you around, making your job difficult, stealing pieces or transporting you elsewhere if you are caught. Once you manage to collect all three pieces, you then have to return to your home base in a limited amount of time so that the spaceship hopefully comes back and picks you up. Moving around decreases your health, but pieces belonging to Reese can be picked up and used to restore some of that health.

E.T. is one of the few Atari 2600 games to actually have a title screen, and the title screen in this game is good enough. E.T. is drawn the way it should, and Howard Scott Warshaw, the game's programmer, provided an excellent rendition of the theme.

Although the graphics are blocky, this is what Atari's games look like back then, and the sound effect heard when E.T. beams down in his spaceship sounds futuristic. You can press the fire button while moving the joystick left or right to make E.T. scurry across the screen if his enemies are on his tail.

The Bad
After developing two excellent games, namely Raiders of the Lost Ark and Yar's Revenge, HSW should be ashamed of himself for creating a game so mediocre it was partly responsible for the video game crash of 1983. Sure, much of the game is spent falling down pits to collect the necessary pieces, but falling into these pits every five seconds gets tiresome after a while. When I played this game, I knew how to levitate out but, more often than not, I moved to get out of the way only to fall back in again.

I didn't fully manage to complete my objective, mainly because I was too busy trying to avoid the bad guys. Even if I did complete it, I went back to the home base, only to discover that the spaceship is not there. When you arrive at your home base, you're supposed to call out for your spaceship. I didn't have any time to do that, however, since the bad guys can even chase you on the home screen. Furthermore, I thought I could evade them by deliberately falling down pits, but they were just waiting for me to get out and steal whatever it is I'm carrying.

The Bottom Line
Anyone can argue that E.T. is a game aimed squarely at kids, but you need to ask yourself: would a kid spend at least five minutes of their time falling down pits when they could be doing something constructive? In my opinion, the gameplay stinks. Nearly half of the game is spent falling down pits and dealing with two guys that are difficult to evade. HSW had just six weeks to complete the game, but had he been given more it wouldn't be as crap as it is now.

The Good
This game was great because, as an 11 year old boy, I was able to win. I played this game after having just seen E.T. What I liked was the way I was able to get a feel for the pattern of the world. I knew which way to leave each screen, where each direction would take me. I was good at escaping the villain who kept coming and trying to get me. Most of all, I like the way I was able to learn what to do, by trial and error. The graphics weren't great, but consider the era and the game machine and my age. I was satisfied.

The Bad
What I came to not like about the game is that it was simple enough that a child could learn it. The qualities that endeared it to me as a younger boy made it boring and simple later. Had there been a higher level version, with a more complex world, it might have held my attention longer. But I was able to grow, while the program stayed where it was. I moved on to more complex systems and games.

The Bottom Line
An excellent kid's game, perfect to introduce a child to gaming and to self-mastery of the gaming environment. Not a great game for complexity-desiring adults.