Have any of you actually played this game? Is it as bad as everyone says it is?

>Zero effort
>Atari Game
Stop being redundant

Boomer here.

It's impossible to understand the letdown today. Now, when a game is shitty, no matter how much the devs hype it, you have every single website shitting on it and pointing out every minor flaw for years before the game comes out.

With ET, we had a game based on a movie we all loved, and were told how great the game was going to be. We had commercials on every channel, ads in every magazine. It was expensive as hell, so it must have been good, right? You begged your parents for it, even though they were getting sick of buying games.

This was 1982, we just got Digdug, Qbert, and Pitfall. It seemed like games were never going to die. I mean sure, Pac Mac was shit on the Atari, but they can't all be lemons right? But no, ET was there to ruin your Christmas. ET was the final straw. Your parents saw you play the game they spent $40 (over $100 today) on only one time, and vowed to never buy you another game again.

Everything in stores was suddenly cheap, because no one would buy them, and no matter how much you begged your parents, they wouldn't get one. They saved up and bought your family this stupid thing called a Commodore 64 instead.

But that's another story.

>C64
>stupid thing
please, enlighten us

Well, you were used to playing games at the arcade, or on the Atari, You just slapped the game in, or put in a quarter, and you could play. With the C64, you couldn't do that. You had to type on this "keyboard" ("like a typewriter?" you asked). You had to enter these weird codes that didn't make any sense to play a game, but your dad showed you how. You couldn't even play on your TV, you had to use a different, tiny TV.

But you got used to it, soon
>LOAD "GAME",8,1
became second nature. Eventually, you learned how the thing worked, and got a nice collection of complete RPGs and other games you could never have on the Atari. You subscribed to magazines and they mailed you games every month - you had to type them in (which took hours) and then spend even more hours finding the letter you missed, but when you got it working you felt like a genius working for NASA.

Nah, it's okay. Not exceptionally good, but there's a lot of depth to it, even if it is buggy.

Yes
>fall in pit
>spend a bunch of your energy getting out
>only to fall right back into the pit because pixel perfect collision detection
>repeat until game over or you get lucky and somehow don't fall back in
>boring gameplay where you just walk around and collect stuff on top of that

Yes. I guess, I mean it's one bad game in an industry loaded with them

I played it back in the early '90s. I could never figure out how to get out of the first hole.

The game is not good , but it's in line with all the other atari VCS games of the era.
It's not that disastrous as they say and it's certainly didn't create the videogame crash.
This rumour was started in the 90s by a stupid tryhard website that wanted to sound knowledgeable

stupid zoomer pretending to know things:
-noone "loved" the movie ET, it was just very hyped maistream shit
-digdug was not released on atari vcs