ET is what I imagine Hell would be like: difficult and pointless.
User Rating: 1.5 | E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial 2600
I have to say when I saw my cousin had the game of the movie ET, I just about soiled myself. It was the late 80s, I didn't even know such a game existed - and with the cover depicting Elliot and ET in a photo from the movie, how could I lose? Throwing it into my cousin's Atari deck, I went to it. I was going to help ET by being ET. Maybe I would phone home, maybe I would fly a bicycle, maybe I... well, the possibilities were endless. The opening screen came up, blaring the theme music in typical tinny Atari fashion. So far, so good. From there it all went downhill. You move ET with the joystick, ever so slowly, to pick up dots that appear on the screen, walk into larger dots on the screen, reveal pieces of a 'phone', and get caught by men in white suits and brown suits. Every now and again a child dances on the screen.
I had had enough by the third time I wound up in, I think, prison (really just a set of pillars), and turned it off.
I read recently that Atari buried millions of copies of this game in a New Mexico desert after they'd all been returned. When I heard this, I kind of wondered why my cousin had never returned hers.
