Did he really actually like... (spoilers)

The effects were meant to be bad and meant to look craptastic. James loves that stuff because of the practical and creative process that goes into them.

ET was his most requested game because of its stigma as the worst game ever. While it was from a financial standpoint, it wasn't from a technical and creative standpoint considering Raiders of the lost ark was just as cryptic and confusing as he points out and from a quality standpoint he's already reviewed far worse games.

Whether James actually liked the game or not became less important than the story surrounding the game itself as it took on a life of its own. That probably made it harder to do an full on angry review of the game. I doubt it had anything to do with Warshaw.

Anyone who says ET for the atari is the "worst game ever" clearly hasn't played many video games. It's not even the worst atari game by far.

His opinion at the end was spot-on. For what it was and given the time crunch, it WAS more sophisticated than it could have been. I remember reading somewhere where spielberg was thinking if some pacman clone where ET just eats reese's pieces in a maze. Howard Scott Warshaw really was a creative man.

And to be perfectly honest, whenever i break out a stack of atari games to play, ET is always among the bunch. Also Adventure, Star Raiders, and Secret Quest :-)

ET was not the Worst game. It was a very complex game that many gamers never gave a chance because you actually had to read the instructions to understand what was going on and what to do. The Worst game in my opinion is Superman N64. That game is a piece of dog *beep* I don't even think the people that made Superman N64 even tried to make a good game. They just abused a license. ET does not fit in the category of abused licensed game. Howard Warshaw made a good game for how much time he was given to make it.

That ET game review and the whole "greater meaning behind the game" speech came off like Kyle or Stan at the end of a South Park episode. The difference is, those are supposed to be ridiculously preachy, and this just intentionally came off like that.

The Atari VCS 2600 had a high stack of bad games. Also, in this early days, I guess the number of games which just were broken was higher of later eras. E.T. has a bad name because of all the lore surrounding it, and it serves as the big example for the video game crash in the early 80ies. But you can single out the worst game for Atari: this is Custers revenge, a game with the premise that you are a cowboy who rapes a native american woman on a totem pole.

It's because the game, in reality, doesn't warrant much to say. It's a shitty game, but it's a boring shitty game. You can beat it in about 2 minutes if you know how to play it. Its status as "the worst game of all time" is a bit overblown because I could think of a few dozen other games from that era that are genuinely much worse, like Sneak & Peek, Ghostbusters NES, The Uncanny X-Men, Menace Beach, any of the Bible games, etc. Those are all games that have awfulness that can be broken down into different layers. E.T. on Atari cant.

For an entire movie to be based on a game review, E.T. is probably the worst possible choice due to how simple and short it is. He should've chosen a much more complex and interesting game shitty, like maybe Superman 64, Action 52/Cheetahmen, Big Rigs, or something modern.