CONS
- Pretty much everything is wrong with this game, but first, let's talk about the gameplay. E.T. 2600 is an adventure game in which the titular character lands on Earth and must pick up phone pieces from pit holes to escape, while also communicating with Elliott, the young deuteragonist as in the film, and avoiding the government agents from hindering progress. You know everything that made Steven Spielberg's film a success, right? Well, Atari tried to do just that by programming an Atari 2600 game in just 5 weeks, as opposed to the typical 9 months, to meet the deadline for 1982's Christmas, and the result is a remotely-related 8-kilobyte code of garbage. It is simply a strange-looking alien falling down pit holes to pick up telephone instruments, send a signal through the telecommunicator, and then escape in the only level. It is the type of game whose tone can only appeal to children (which is not to say that I want anything obscene in it, which I clearly do not).
- It was 1982 by the time both the film and the game and adaption were released, and with plenty of console (i.e. arcade) games and decent computer games out there, we should have all been out of the Stone Age of gaming, right? Apparently, E.T. 2600 is not, and it was a huge mistake on Atari's part to insist that their 1977 console was still the predominantly superior console to play on. The result is absolutely primitive, in terms of low-resolution graphics; beeps, doots, and a complicated sequence of kinks for audio; and limited controls. On a creative level, it is not even that great. The graphics and animations generally look amateurish and somewhat redundant, and the only controls are the joystick for movement and the only button for running, climbing out of pits, and performing special functions. As for those functions, E.T. can teleport, consume Reese's pieces for health, detect telephone instruments in the pit holes, call in Elliott to hold on the Reese's pieces, send away the government agents, and signal an alien ship through the telephone to escape, but E.T. must be in certain areas of the maps to perform those particular functions. Unfortunately, the positions to perform a function as indicated at the top of the screen (and I had to read the manual to understand all the symbols of the functions) are randomized for every new game, so it seems that the only way to beat the game is to strictly memorize every vital and helpful part of the game.
- E.T. 2600 is perhaps the most difficult game of the 1980s not because it is meant to be challenging, but because it is buggy and anti-player. First of all, we have the abysmal pit holes, which are easy to accidentally fall in but hard to float out, where if you do climb out, you may fall back in, and if a single part of your character sprite overlaps the pit hole sprites, you fall in. On top of that, the enemies are able to walk over the pit holes without a problem, and if you stand near a border of one of the 6 sections of the map, there is a great chance that an enemy will appear in your spot without a warning and steal your vital resources. Additionally, running or even teleporting from section to section is likely to result in bumping into an enemy or falling down a pit hole. Even worse is that the player is required to fall down some of the holes in order to progress.
PRO
- The only thing that saves this Atari game from being a complete zero is that it can be completed, provided that the player has read the manual and fully understood the game's atrocious mechanics, but even after beating the game, it does not take much of the frustration from the game's proud and showy flaws, and the player is ultimately better without.
CONCLUSION: The game that deserved to, and had to, be buried in New Mexico (which is no longer a myth), E.T. deserves a spot in a museum that serves to remind humanity never to repeat those mistakes.
