How many people who talk about E.T. or Custer's Revenge have actually played it?
E.T. is an underrated game. I'm not saying it was good or even worth playing, but it doesn't deserve the scorn and hate that it receives. Most people who dump on it have never played, and very few of those who have played understood the point or purpose of the game.
As a child we had E.T. for our Atari. Even though it wasn't a good game, it did have some redeeming features - in fact, you could even argue that most of the faults stem from being too ambitious. So what is good about E.T.?
- decent connection to the movie, from the opening music to key points about the game (Reese's Pieces, flower, Eliot, phoning home)
- ambitious "open world" gameplay that was more than a cheap arcade experience designed to simply test your reflexes
- better story than the vast majority of Atari games, and good sense of accomplishment when you finally do mange to phone home and get picked up by the mother ship
Does that make up for the lousy controls (getting out of pits without falling back took a ridiculous amount of experience) or the uninspired use of pits all over the world map to hide phone pieces? No. But it's a heck of a lot better than another poor Pac-Man/Space Invaders clone and also better than dozens of other failed Atari games. It's also a reasonable design when you consider the time, resources, and hardware available when this game released in 1982.
Custer's Revenge, on the other hand, is terrible. I guess that should be expected from a game that is clearly selling based on sexual exploitation though...