"Kicked out of the nest too soon"

E.T. was a little before my time. I was still in diapers when the movie came out, and if my family had actually owned an Atari I probably would've just been sticking the joystick in my mouth at that age. But being as I have a thing for playing unusual games these days, especially ones with awful reputations, I had to see for myself if this game was all it was cracked up to be. Or should I say crapped up to be.

So you're E.T., right? The lovable little alien who got stranded on Earth and made friends with a suburban family and made a bunch of bikes fly while fleeing from the nasty guvmint men. E.T. just wanted to go home, how could they be so mean to him? It sounds like I'm mocking it, I'm sure, but E.T., the movie, is one of the top twenty movies of all time. It's Atari's game supposedly based on it that stinks.

Look, I know how far video games have come in the twenty-some years since they made this game. But this has none of the simplistic charm of Pac-Man or Gorf or Berzerk. It's just bad and stupid. E.T. apparently took an elevator to Earth in the game. And he falls down holes while trying to stay away from the big nasty FBI man who wants to take away his phone but doesn't care about E.T. Yeah, that's really sophisticated and well-planned. This game is a classic. Bravo.

In the movie, Elliot helped E.T. put together a radio to call his alien family to come get him from junk around Elliot's house. For some reason, in this game it's broken into pieces and scattered around the bottoms of a mess of giant holes. What??? What does that have to do with ANYTHING in the E.T. movie? The frustrating thing about falling down the holes and learning to levitate back out and then stop levitating at just the right minute so you don't fall back in the hole and have to do it all over again is that you have to master it in order to beat this awful game. You have to get all the pieces of E.T.'s phone so he can go back to his own planet before the evil scientists catch him, and every single one is at the bottom of a hole in some unknown, unmappable wilderness. Yeah, that's a good game, all right.

And as if floating out of the same hole twelve times in a row wasn't aggravating enough, E.T. has limited energy. He uses it up from levitating out of the holes while looking for the phone pieces to just walking around while looking for the next hole to fall down. There's no way to replenish it, except from Elliot juicing you back up when you run totally out. And for some reason he can only do that twice. And if one of the evil FBI men touches E.T., you might as well just start the whole game over, because he just stole all your phone pieces and hid them in different holes. I bet that's news your really needed to hear after all the hassle it was spending seventeen hours and exploring 5,602 holes to find just one of the things. Yeah, that's a good game, all right.

Admittedly, the blame for the magnitude of awfulness in this game rests on it being a rush job. E.T. was such a popular movie Atari wanted to cash in on it as much as they could, so they rushed a game "based" on E.T. into stores as quickly as they could so they could ride the movie's popularity as long as possible. That does not excuse it from being a crummy game, though, because good license does not equal good game, a lesson that sadly still doesn't seem to have caught on.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 01/22/04, Updated 12/20/06