Tymeg

It's one of the best Zup conversations ever. And that movie is a Christmas time favorite. We watch it every year on Christmas day...

While I don't watch it every year, it is one of the movies that I do try to catch during Christmas.  Along with the Peanuts Christmas Special and a Nightmare Before Christmas.

Zup (and the rest of us) got a ton of mileage from that one though...  It's definitely a classic!

I haven't seen A Nightmare Before Christmas in a long time. And yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie, so is this one...

Oh yes, Gremlins is most definitely a Christmas movie.  And so on a related note, that would make E.T. a Halloween movie...

E.T. the movie is good. E.T. the video game, not so good. And those Hallmark movies are so typical. Single city life professional woman goes back home to the "old" country. Finds the local handyman a simpleton, but ends up falling in love with him and gives up high profile career to become a country bumpkin <blech - puke>...

I agree, E.T. the video game is not so good.  But I read an article (or saw a YouTube vid?) that said that game was not the reason for the crash, nor was it the worst game ever.  The arguments were sound and the games that were listed as worse really were.  The E.T. game could have been a good game if some of the gameplay was fixed.  Like if those damn pits that consistently swallowed you were fixed so it was not so automatic.  They were able to make a decent game out of Indiana Jones, E.T. could have been a hit.  And they went on to blame the crash on no quality control with the third party developers pumping out and flooding the market with mediocre titles.  Plus Atari had far too much faith in the titles they were producing so over produced far too much quantity.  The last thing that they said was Atari should have phased out the 2600 and brought the 8-bit line in as a game console.  Kind of how they released the XEGS too many years too late.  If that was released around 81 or 82, it would have done a lot toward keeping Atari on top of the game console market...

It was 2 years ago that I watched the E.T. documentary and if I remember it failed due to unrealistic deadlines. They needed the game finished before Christmas, obviously it wasn't. And comparing this to the worst games on the 2600 isn't fair. E.T. would have been considered a AAA title game like on the PC - Tomb Raider, Battlefield, Call of Duty, etc.. But when you have a AAA title game come out like Cyberpunk and it's complete trash, then it gets voted as worst PC game of the year - despite the absolute plethora of garbage indie titles that are out there. But on a different note, these 3 games just came out of for the 2600 last year...

I heard about the new VCS titles and thought it was pretty cool that there are people still actively developing for that platform.  One of the Atari Flashback versions has all of the necessary points on the motherboard to connect a card connector for a cartridge and can be relatively easily modified to take cartridges...

I'm not gonna lie, when I saw first saw the new 2600 I thought it was pretty slick looking - but was a little curious as to where the cartridge slot would be. That's part of the whole nostalgia. And then I found this...

Holy crap!!  That is awesome!  I know it's relatively easy to find an original 2600, but that RetroN goes a long way toward making sure it works the first time you plug it in.  I'm curious how compatible, it looks like it's just running Stella...  It would be cool if you could get add-on packs that provided a different cart adapter and controller.  So you want NES, or PlayStation 1, just add on and away you go...

It's pretty neat since it does a cartridge dump before playing - so games like Pitfall II that use a custom logic chip won't work, but the downloaded ROM file will. I had to boot up Stella and play a little bit...

Many years ago I played with MESS and it was a real pain.  Now that it's included in MAME I may try that again, especially with that tiny arcade that I made...

I'm still working on the game room - I don't know what I want it to be - current, retro, mix, custom. But I couldn't let this one go and I finally got it to work using RetroArch...

That game room sounds awesome as long as you are cranking some good tunes and I can stop by and plunk a few quarters down...

Oh definitely you'd need one of those at the end of the bar. It almost goes without saying. I still would love to have a pinball machine, but they're pretty big and noisy so it'd have to be in a separate building from the house...