E.T. Phone Home, Then GO HOME, AND NEVER COME BACK!!!!!

Welcome back to another installment of Video Games and More, and boy did you guys come at a worse time. So because I'm a man of controversy I decided to review the proclaimed "worse video game of all time". E.T. Now as many of you may have guess E.T. the video game was based upon the widely successful film of the same name. During my studies of this film,  I spoke to many film students who asked me "why was E.T. The video game was deemed a bad video game when the movie was highly successful?"

Well in my opinion ET was a videogame that clearly shows us that when we rush the predevelopment and development stages of a game we end up having a poor product, even though the idea behind it was good.

So lets take a moment to relieve the massacre that is E.T.

According to wikipedia (yes I used wikipedia, it gave me the best definition of this massacre),

"E.T. is an adventure game in which players control an alien (E.T.) from a top-down perspective. The objective of the game is to collect three pieces of an interplanetary telephone. The pieces are found scattered randomly throughout various pits (also referred to as wells). The player is provided with an on-screen energy bar, which decreases as time passes. To prevent this, the player can collect Reese's Pieces, which are used to restore the energy of the character; when enough are collected, the player can call Elliot to obtain a piece of the telephone. After the phone pieces have been collected, the player must guide the character to a call-ship area, which allows him to call his home planet. When the call is made, an interplanetary spaceship appears on-screen, and the player must reach the spaceship in a given time limit. Once the spaceship is reached, the game starts over, with the same difficulty level, while changing the location of the telephone pieces. The score obtained during the round is carried over to the next iteration. The game ends when the energy bar depletes, or the player decides to quit.^[2]"


I couldn't help but laugh when they said "or the player decides to quit" (UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR!!!!)


Now for the sanity of myself I will focus on two reasons why this game was so unsuccessful:


1.The product was rushed: Because the E.T. movie was so popular, the video game industry wanted to capture some of it's success, so in July of 1982, plans starts to developed this game and by the end of that year the game of finished (5 MONTHS). Most game take at least a year to be fully developed, if not longer. Due to this, the gameplay, was lousy which leads to multiple forms of frustration to the game player.


2. The Gameplay was too difficult to use: since the game was in fact rushed, the game play had cut-screens that just happened which throws the player off, scenes where people randomly come out of no where. And probably the worse issues that this game had (besides the horrible color) was that the game was only one continuous level, where even if a player was to beat (and I say this phrase loosely) the game, the game would simply restart and put the items ET collected in other places.


Such Madness from a video game like ET caused massive riots, which ultimately lead Atari to destroy the games in New Mexico. (Sad ending to an even sadder game)

In fact, the game was also marked as a contributor to the Video Gaming Industry Crash of the 1980s. 

But if you would like to explore my own experiences with this madness watch my V-Log.  

Sorry about the cutoff, I don't have good video making software.