Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Re: No, I played it as a kid. It was godawful, and unplayable.

[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Mysterio"]Despite what Crappier Mysterio up there says, this isn't the Matrix sequels where loads of ambiguous detail give apologists endless ground for defense. It's a trivially simple action-puzzle minigame, by today's standards. There is almost nothing in it. If you can't figure out the rules for the weird symbol system, then it's unplayable. But you can, because you have a brain, and you have half an hour. If you can't work out how to get in and out of pits efficiently, despite that they are everywhere and have a couple of bugs that sometimes make it hard to avoid them or hard to get out of them, then it'll be annoying and frustrating. But it's not very hard to figure that out. And whether you do or not, the rest of the game is just a little treasure hunt. You run after the things you're supposed to get while enemies chase you and block you. You get the things and then you win, or you run out of life and you die. For the 2600, this is ordinary. To say it's bad because it has the aforementioned bugs and because its central system is presented in a weirdly obscure way (unless you read the manual) is reasonable. For a kid, giving up early is understandable. But there is really nothing to see here except a tiny, fairly ordinary action-puzzle challenge with a few ugly problems that can be easy to work around (though some people wouldn't want to and there's no particular reason why they should). It's not great, but if it's unplayable garbage then nearly everything on the 2600 must be pretty bad as well. Which maybe it is.[/quote] I thought there was an article going around where someone fixed E.T. One sec. Oh yeah, here it is. I am glad you waited for me to find it: <a href="http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/">Fixing E.T. For the Atari 2600</a> ICJ[/quote]