So recently there's been some commotion about two certain runs, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, both TASes for the Atari 2600. There has been some generic critisim against these runs like "This looks boring!" , "'I played this game as a kid' isn't a legit reason to vote yes" and my personal favorite, "There is a lot of waiting in these TASes!!!!" . While I'm not gonna spend a lot of time shooting down each and every of those arguments, I'm gonna do some general venting.

Actually, I pulled a Handsome Jack on you and lied. I am gobsmacked at how all of a sudden "Yeah, no, you played this game as a kid and that affected you when voting" isn't a legit reason for voting. First of all that's bs. Check out the top rated movies. These are popular games. Really. A lot of us grew up with Super Mario 64. It gets great ratings. This implies that the issue here isn't so much that the viewers are being biased by their childhood memories as much as the fact that the game itself isn't popular. Now have no illusions about this, I am very much the same. I did not grow up with Ocarina of Time. I even consider it guilty for destroying the Zelda-series and this is one of the reasons why I'm so wildly debating against every OoT-TAS ever. I find it childish to say "No, your memories are less worth than our, because you are older and grew up with games that looked like shit". That isn't true however. I did not grow up with E.T.. Really. I'm not that old. Christ, I was 6 when it was discontinued. I read about the game in a book when I was about 17, and did some research but then forgot about it, and I got reminded by it by AVGN. I now own an Atari 2600 and the game. When adelikat asked me to help out with TASing E.T. I nearly shit my pants from excitement. Having played that game, I wanted to break it bad. To be fair, we did. To be even more fair, I did not expect this bad feedback that we got. The game is incredibly fast-paced and finished within 25 seconds. That's the entire run. The next part is "from end of input to final screen", which takes some 35 or so seconds. That's very fast. Very few runs go from "input end" to "end screen" within 35 seconds, and in most case, there's not that much to see either. This actually brings me to the second issue.

Boo there's so much waiting!!!! I get so bored I want to kill a kitten!! . Really? Are you serious, I mean, uh, for real? In both Indy and E.T., we get somewhere around 30 seconds of waiting in a long stretch. That's enough for people to get bored. Now, to compare with other runs, it takes 3 minutes before the player can control Link in OoT. It takes a minute before Mario starts running in SM64. That's a lot of waiting before the run has even started, but it seems that no one gets bored from that. Sure there are pictures and sound, but we have all seen it a hundred times. I for one try to skip them. However, skipping boring parts doesn't seem to be an option when it comes to A26-TASes. I seriously don't think you are that impatient that you get bored from waiting 30 seconds. What I would like to know is how the hell is it possible for such people to function in the modern society? Really. It's impossible to not have to wait in line in the supermarket, by a red light or whatever. What do you do then? Fall asleep?

This is boring! is the most legit reason to vote against a run, but this isn't really clever either. Even if it is boring, it's the fastest run known to man of said game. It should be recognized. This isn't just a current matter, but for all games involving some skill, and where the gameplay is vastly different from if a real person would speedrun the game, deserve a publication. It's easy as that! Such is the case of both E.T. and Raiders. Truly. It's also the case of a lot of rejected runs of other games, which I too believe is wrong.

Now to be truly fair, I don't think this is a bias against the console. I think it's a bias against the players. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have gone there, but I did. Had it been "ben & jerry's A2600 E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial in 00:25.25", the votes would have been totally different. You might want to man up and admit that such is the case. Until then, drife safely. And oh yeah, do a few TASes so you know how tough it can be really be. And don't base your opinion on what others say, even if that seem to be the TASvideos-way.