E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

The Good
E.T. was a hit movie. There was great potential in a game where you get to play E.T. and in the grand old adventure style had to run around town looking for the missing pieces to your phone so you can call home. Avoiding the FBI and the Scientist. Look for Elliott to help you with Reeses Pieces. There was a cool title screen and a recognizable E.T. Tune playing. But what I liked about the game was what it was supposed to be. Now it's only fun to go back and play as a bad game.

The Bad
All the excitement was about what the game was "Supposed" to be like. It's hard to navigate around without falling into holes and tricky getting out of them. But that is where some of the parts are hidden. The concept was great but due to the frills of the marketing needs there was little room for gameplay. The music and title screen used up 1/3 of the cartridge space. It was very disappointing and having bought it new made me think twice about buying other games.

The Bottom Line
Millions of dollars spent on the license. Too much spent on marketing. Too many limitations placed on the programmer. You control E.T. walking around different screens that represent your town. Trying to find the pieces of you phone so you can call home and get picked up by your ship. You have a limited amount of energy. Most of this is used to Levitate which you need to do to get out of holes. Bugs in the program make getting out of the holes tricky and you waste a lot of energy doing this. You have two bad guys to avoid. Find all the pieces, go to the landing zone, call home. Win game.

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
The title screen has a nifty graphic. It otherwise barely resembles the movie (which I've also never liked). There's three difficulty levels you can set it to, with the easiest still being reasonably winnable despite its frustrating flaws.

The Bad
The collision detection at the edges of the pits is just awful: getting out of the pits is an exercise in frustration of almost getting out, then falling back in. Very often this happens right when it changes from the pit screen (side view) to the world screen (top view), not even giving you a chance to compensate for the bad collision detection. Fleeing from enemies is overly tough, in that it's too easy to run yourself right back into a pit (the speed boost is too excessive).

The Bottom Line
I received this game at about 6-1/2 years old along with an Atari Jr. I think my parents picked the game up because it was probably on clearance. Even that young, and with only two other games to start with (Ms. Pac-man and Junglehunt, both far superior), I could tell it was a bad game. Even with the flaws, I could beat game on the easiest difficultly. I eventually returned to the game as a late teen, and beat the hardest difficulty out of pure spite. I've only occasionally played it to show others just how bad the game is. Yes, there are worse games that have been made, but this is the first game that was legendary for being bad, and that counts for something, I guess.