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Here's an obscure factoid for you: Atari crushed and buried five million unsold copies of this game in a desert in New Mexico, to prevent it from ever being sold again. This should tell you something about the game. If it hasn't already been made clear by that, I guess I'll have to pound it into your skull later. Moving on.

First Glance

Well, it starts like any other Atari VCS game. You put the big black box in the socket, then flip ten or twelve switches that do stuff - nobody's quite sure what - until you find the one that turns it on. Then, on your screen appears something greyish-yellow that looks vaguely like a blob of pixels, surrounded by lots of other pixels that have absolutely no meaning. What is this? It looks like a modern art piece. Montage in Green and Dogshit. I don't even want to look at my television any more.

Graphics

Well, it's an Atari VCS game. In other words, the graphics suck. With some games that's excusable; games like Combat, Pong, and Frogger are just so much fun that you don't even notice that the graphics look like interactive Legos. In ET, one is all too aware of the graphical ass-biting. Seriously. On one screen, there's a green background, a vaguely house-looking thing that's supposed to be a house, a vaguely Coliseum-looking thing that's supposed to be the FBI headquarters, and another Coliseum-looking thing - identical, pixel for pixel, to the one right next to it - that's supposed to be some sort of laboratory. And the whole screen is supposed to represent Washington, D.C. Did I miss something? Was D.C. invaded by ancient block-warriors while I was asleep? And then there's ET. As I mentioned, he looks... blob... ish. That's about all you can say. Except that if you fall into a hole, he can fly out by stretching his neck. What in the living hell?

Rating: 1.5/10

Sound

Atari beeping. See above section for discussion of why Atari's technological primitiveness can be overlooked in good games, yet in bad ones like this serves only to ensure that conspiracy to produce the game will receive the death penalty.

Rating: 1.5/10

Gameplay

Okay. I've played this game. My grandparents still own an Atari VCS, and I play Combat and Pitfall on it often. They also own ET. Now, ET is one of those games that NO ONE still has the damn manual for, so I've probably spent a total of two hours wandering about the landscape, falling into inexplicably large random pits, levitating out of inexplicably large random pits, getting molested by pixel-blobs that vaguely resemble men in trenchcoats, falling into more pits... in fact, most of what you do in this game seems to fit into the Falling Into and Getting Out Of Unrealistic Pits category. I went to the trouble of looking up an online version of the game manual, and I still don't have a goddamn clue what's going on. They say ET's supposed to be falling into pits searching for Reese's Pieces and bits of his broken satellite phone. Now, I find several things wrong with this:

1. I've wandered into upwards of a hundred bloody pits, and not once has there been anything in them.
2. There are no large, conveniently geometrically placed pits that I know of in Washington, D.C.
3. Eating candy found in highly improbable pits is a clear violation of the Five Second Rule, even for extraterrestrials.

In other words, after wandering about the game for hours, reading the manual, and poking around on the Internet to see what else I could find, I still don't have a damn clue how to play this game. I know I said something about not giving perfect scores in my Chrono Trigger review, but this game's putrescence violates relativity, causality, charge parity, gauge symmetry, and numerous federal, state, and local zoning laws, thereby allowing me to give it the coveted Zero.

Rating: 0/10

Controls

Allow me to preface this section with an angry rhetorical question:

HOW DO YOU FUCK UP THE CONTROLS ON A ONE-BUTTON SYSTEM?

That being said, the game's controls could not possibly be worse without adding more buttons to dick with. The stick doesn't seem to respond to anything you do to it, and the other button cycles through several random and totally useless functions depending on where ET happens to be standing at the moment. Unintelligible icons appear in the corner of the screen to tell you what the button is supposed to do when you push it, if that happens to be anything at the time. Whatever commands you input are processed through the cartridge's special Command Input System, which accurately approximates the control skills of a ninety-six-year-old Siberian yak herder with Parkinson's.

To quote VGCats: "'Oh come on now! He's eating the controller!' '...AND WINNING!'"

Rating: 0/10

Overview/Recap

This game can be summarized in one sentence: there's a reason they buried this hell-spawned torture tool in the desert.

Points of Interest/Point and Laugh

+ It's buried in New Mexico.

- This game should not exist.

? What happened to the flying bicycle?

Overall (not an average): 0 of 10
Not only the worst game ever made, but the worst game which it is possible to make. .