E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial

"E.T. Phone Complaints Department? Too harsh, this game is respectable."

Although E.T. is maligned as a sort of cultural joke, it's actually a decent game. Its main problem may be that it doesn't live up to a wonderful movie, and after a good first impression(title scene and landing scene to start the game) it becomes rather dull. Your basic goal is to wander through a bunch of scenes to fall through wells and pick up three pieces of a phone before your energy, which is reduced by walking around or falling through/levitating from wells(no climbing down allowed!) and increased by eating Reese's Pieces, which lie randomly on the ground and have been there for goodness knows how long(well, at least you don't have to take 'em from strangers!) runs out. Then you must use the phone in a designated area and make it back to the landing scene, where a ship will pick you up if you make it in time, and you are treated to a confusing scene of Elliott, who's almost an early-eighties version of Waldo, running back and forth through his house. The only way to get out of it is to start over again. There are three levels of play, one with a scientist, FBI agent and Elliot--the Gummint Goombah, who like the scientist captures you and unlike the scientist takes a phone piece you've found away, does not appear in one, and only Elliott, who ''helps'' you by showing up on demand and taking your Reese's Pieces but increasing your final score, is in the easiest, which is confusingly not the default. This seems terribly poorly planned, as with E.T.'s rules, people could be turned off quickly.

There's no question E.T. is a bit of a disappointment. After all, if you compare it to Adventure, it has fewer scenes, fewer items, less color variety, and no clever mazes. But the controls are wacky. In an effort to make E.T. do different things, the writers put a small space for icons. The icons tell you what E.T. will do if you hit the fire button at that point. So there are small spaces designated for calling the spaceship, catching it when it lands, forcing people off the screen, calling Elliott(giving him Reese's Pieces gets you a nice bonus at the end,) eating Reese's Pieces(that E.T. can only eat in certain places seems more restrictive and less constructive than anti-smoking laws) and, rather usefully, detecting if there is a phone piece in a well or jumping to the screen indicated by an arrow's direction. Whoah! It takes a lot of chasing to find the right spots, and it's not really clear how big they are. Perhaps if the manual, indispensable for learning to cope in the game, mentioned that there are so many zones per screen, it would be a help. You can also fall right back into a well whether or not you've read the manual. So these are controls; what about the game in general?

I read somewhere that the world of E.T. is a lot like a cube; there are six scenes total, and you can leave in any of the four directions from the six scenes. This is reasonable, almost clever, and it requires minimal mapping. The scenes themselves are clearly distinct, with different well patterns for the middle four scenes, where the three phone pieces are located, and acceptable if wretchedly dull earth-tone color schemes there. For the landing scene(up from the middle) and the residential(below the middle) you have more of a variety of colors. Transitions between scenes can be annoyingly arbitrary as the unsuspecting person may often fall through a well moving from one scene to another, get caught by a person just as he switches scenes, or even get stuck for some time running in place when captured. It's almost as annoying as having the default setting be the toughest and having switching the selection take forever.

The graphics, the first scene aside, are rather bland, although it's neat to see E.T. landing. The most memorable part is that E.T. really looks like one of those annoying flexible desk lamps that are too hot when they're near enough to do any good, and when you push a button to raise his head, he looks like a street lamp. The people who take E.T. to the bottom are also believable. There's also a scene with a flower that's kind of nice, although the phone parts themselves are incomprehensible. I suppose the icons make sense, and I found that I was able to guess the meaning of those I'd forgotten after breezing through the manual.

The randomly located telephone parts and power areas make this game somewhat replayable, even if you must do the same thing over again, and finding the different areas requires a lot of walking around. I also found that I was unable to complete the default(hardest) game after a few tries, but the easy level was okay, so if you like this game, it gives a relatively lasting challenge as you can probably improve at it with successive tries. Still, the randomization, which might have been a big drawing point, only turns the game into a technological version of searching for your lost keys. We can't really blame the programmers for the over-hype, though. We probably can't even blame the marketers if some people played the game without the instruction manual which, admittedly, is a bit too prominent. So those who insist on cracking jokes along the lines of ''It woulda been coded in Leetspeak if that language existed back then'' are a good ways off. This game seems, overall, a bit above average in retrospect.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/01, Updated 08/01/01