Bending Reality will be starting a Fan of the Month that will run in the magazine every month. To get this started we need our fans to email us a picture and the name you would like to use. [email protected] we will post each month the new fans to be voted on and also the Fan of the Month. So get to sending in those pics, the first set of voting will be in the July Issue, and then we will have the First Fan of the Month for August and it will continue from there. We love our readers!!!
Hi there everyone. For those of you who didn't see Part 1 of this article which can be seen in last month’s Bending Reality Magazine, I'm an avid lover of classic video games. There are so many systems at the house that I live that it is crazy! The new video game systems of today, the X-Box One, PlayStation 3 and 4, and the X-Box 360 do have some video games that pertain to the classics, but if you want to try a real classic, the only ways that I know of now are having programs like Stella and Zane’s or find a website on the net that allows you to play the classic video games. You might need to have Java to play the games, but it is so worth it. Onto Part 2 of my history of Video Games.
One of the game makers that was big during the days of the Atari 2600 was Activision. This company made a handful of video games that could be played on the Atari 2600. This company still exists today on its own, producing video games for almost every video game system ever made. One of these video games was called Pitfall. In Pitfall, your job is to collect gold to increase your score. You start with three lives. You lose a life in a lot of various ways. You could be eaten by an alligator, drown in the water, fall into a hole, get hit by a snake, or get hit by a frog. You can also lose points if you get hit by logs both rolling and stationary or falling through the ground to the bottom. The game ends when you run out of lives or you run out of time, whichever comes first. If you swing from the vine, you would hear the arcade voice of Tarzan doing his famous calling. There was a second version of Pitfall made for the Atari 2600 that featured the same challenges, except different graphics. There was also a version for the Nintendo Entertainment System called Super Pitfall. In that game, there's no timer, but you can get hit so easily in that game by a lot of things. It's one of the worse that I ever played for that system.
Speaking of bad video games, video games that came out of movies can be good or bad. A video game that was like this was Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark. The trick with that game is that you needed two controllers to play that game. While it was bad, it wasn't the worse ever made. In December 1982, a video game designer by the name of Howard Scott Warshaw would made a video game that was so bad that in ended up in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. This video game was E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial. Let me share with you the words amazon.com said about this game.
HELP E.T. GET HOME! What kind of crazy planet is this, anyway? We came here to conduct a simple study of primitive planets, and look what happened! These...things...came and scared away my friends. Before I knew it, all my friends boarded our lightship and flew home. What do I do now? The only one I can trust is that nice little alien-- Ellleeott. He gives me those tasty energy pills (What did he call them? Reeessseess Peeesssesss?) But these other aliens! Every time I get ready to assemble my Trans galactic communicator, they come and take me away. The one with the white coat sticks that temperature measuring device in my mouth (I wonder why he was so upset when it melted?), and the other one in the trench coat keeps muttering those strange sounds (Naaashaaannaall Seeeccuuuureeetteee?) I just want to go home! I hope Elllleeott and I can assemble all the pieces of my communicator before my energy runs out. Oh, oh. Here come those crazy aliens again. Help me, Elllleeott! Help me get home! Your mission is to help E.T. find the three pieces of his interplanetary telephone, call his ship, and guide him to the landing pad in time to be rescued. Do this before E.T.'s energy runs out, and you'll win the round and score points! E.T. transverses six sites on Planet Earth. Four of these are full of pitfalls--they are dotted with deep wells into which E.T. can fall. A fifth site shows Elliott's house, the Institute of Science, and the FBI building. Here, E.T. is taken by the scientist to be studied. The sixth site is a forest setting where E.T. first lands and where the ship will land to pick him up. A game ends when E.T. runs out of energy or when you decide to quit playing.
Now why is this the worse video game made of all time at the time? Probably because it was done in only six weeks or perhaps it was just the worse video game Atari ever made? You be the judge. However, there would be other video games as bad as this. If you want to find out more about this, check out TheAngryVideoGameNerd E.T. on Youtube or watch the documentary Atari: Game Over to find out why this video game among others was put into a landfill then excavated many years later. This concludes Part 2 of my history of Video Games. In Part 3, I will be diving into the next video game system that I owned, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for short. For now, game over.