i feel like E.T. is like super fascinating even as a game actually, backstory notwithstanding... i actually played it not too long ago on an actual Atari my roommate has. there's probably other examples of games like this, but i've personally never seen a game before where like... the game does have its own internal, consistent rules, and it can be played like a normal game, but most people don't even know that and see it as a bunch of random stuff happening because the core flaw of the game is that it communicates its gameplay so extremely poorly.

i feel like a lot of games from the Atari 2600 era have that problem, but E.T.'s probably the most extreme example... other newer infamously bad games don't really have that as their biggest flaw because the nature of games changed a lot during the NES era.

E.T. is just like, so esoteric. i mean, honestly, even if you get past the wall of weird crypticism E.T.'s still just kind of an "eh" game at best. but the idea of a game being so cryptic and impenetrable and having to adapt to a logic you don't understand is really interesting conceptually to me

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The game seems incredibly complex. This isn't a real problem. Once you learn how to play, it's really very simple. You just need to read the manual, or watch a tutorial video, to understand it.

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lord... the period of time when many instruction manuals were lost but the Internet hadn't quite become the extensive resource it is now probably did a looooot to hurt its reputation



i'd never thought about how actually genuinely kinda groundbreaking E.T. was and how it was a forerunner to the more complex, goal-based games of later systems; that's actually a really interesting perspective



i actually think the drive to improve E.T. comes from the fact that it had more potential than most famously bad games. from what i can tell, E.T. was a genuine passion project from a guy who was actually known for making games that were actually famously good (a lotta people probably know this but the guy who made E.T. was the same guy who made Yars' Revenge) and a lot of the reason it ended up so bad was a combination of a lotta factors -- because it was a licensed game, they rushed to get it out as fast as possible to meet deadlines, which probably resulted in a lot of the coding problems listed on that page. compare that to Superman 64 which has way more fundamental problems (it's lacking in content and the gameplay concepts are boring) and seems like it was just a garbage licensed title literally just made as a Cash Grab. (... granted i think the fact that Superman 64's problems are so fundamental means a playable Superman 64 would be a way more difficult project to tackle, and probably interesting in its own ways because of that.)

i think games like Castlevania II, too, are fixable and have a good game buried somewhere underneath... granted a lot of Castlevania II's problems are entirely its own fault (it has some ASININE design decisions), but they're still fixable problems.
i'd even make the argument that Sonic '06 has a good game buried somewhere in it!! as blasphemous as that may be. (i had someone explain to me that it was pushed two years ahead in its development cycle so they could market it as a Sonic 15th anniversary game -- that doesn't account for some of the godawful plot elements, but it does account for the ridiculous bugginess. i'd argue the reason most latter Sonic games suck is Sonic Team being rushed to meet deadlines)

in other words, capitalism makes everything worse

(Xk posted while i was writing this and summarized everything i was trying to say way more succinctly lol. also Sponty posted while i was writing this and mentioned a fixed version of Sonic '06, so.)

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