E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial

"Yes, even back then, they made crappy games based on movies."

I was about four years old when I got my first taste of video games. Just about every chance I got I would sit in front of my TV, hook up the Atari 2600, and flip ON the power switch, regardless of whatever game was in the console at the time. It was all pure mindless fun, as far as I cared, and that's what got me hooked. But, like all systems, the Atari 2600 had its share of stinkers. By now, most of you have probably heard the story of the E.T. cartridge landfill...stories of people throwing away their E.T. Atari 2600 carts because they didn't like them/didn't want them anymore? You probably wouldn't think that a game would be bad enough to warrant an entire landfill of discarded cartridges, and if you didn't, you'd be wrong. E.T.: The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600 is that bad, and then some.

Having not watched the E.T. movie until I had started playing Nintendo, I didn't know what to expect from the game's ''storyline''. Basically, you take control of E.T. and try to get him on a one-way trip to his home planet by finding pieces of his telephone to call home (just like in the movie, eh?). Half of the time I didn't know if I was going to find those pieces because I was constantly falling down holes. Not just any ordinary black holes, mind you...near-invisible ones that are buried in the scenery. Why was it so hard to navigate? It all comes down to one word...GREEN. Green, everywhere, as far as the eyes can see. The grass is green, the trees are green, E.T. is green, and even those little M&Ms (okay, they're just dots) on the ground are some shade of green. Put them all together on the screen, and you get a graphical mess that's terribly hard to navigate. I won't speak much on sound effects, since this IS an Atari 2600 game and all, and they managed to somehow get the bleeps and blips right.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anything even close to resembling gameplay in E.T. I already mentioned the problem with falling in near-invisible holes above. Since E.T. moves around at such a sluggish pace, you'd think it'd be easy to go around them, right? You can't even be assured that you won't fall down a hole when you transfer from map to map. To top it off, exploration is almost totally random...and that means that when you walk to one map, you most likely won't be seeing that same scenery again, should you want to memorize its location later. That big red button on your joystick won't save you, either. Sometimes it won't do anything at all, but oft times it'll launch you into another totally random map, and quite possibly over...another hole. Great. I'm spending half of my little green alien's energy falling down holes...and I still haven't found that telephone. *sigh*

I think this is the game that started that whole stereotype of ''a good video game does not a movie make.'' Playing this game made my Atari 2600 cry, and it hasn't forgiven me since. If you can strike up the nerve to play this game, you'll soon find out that that large landfill suddenly sounds very appealing...

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/02/02, Updated 11/02/02