E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial

Our lasting memory of E.T. the film is having to leave the cinema in tears at about the point the eponymous alien has turned an unhealthy shade of grey in a freezer.

We should make clear we were very young.

We didn't find out that E.T. went on to make a recovery until we dared to watch it again at about the age of 18. Up until then, we'd simply assumed it was just a horrible film and that Steven Spielberg was out to psychologically damage little children.

E.T. the mobile game is quite similar to the film in this respect (but few others). It induces tears a bit earlier on, though – like after the third mini-game – and they're caused less by emotional empathy towards a little lost dying alien and more by sheer frustration.

In terms of premise and visuals, things aren't too bad at all. The game sort of follows the plot of the classic film, with Elliot finding E.T. in the woods, taking him home and trying to keep him hidden from his mum. All the characters are depicted in a fairly cute cartoon style and the concept of lots of different mini-games linking the story together isn't terrible, either.

For one, it ensures there's a lot of variety. The problem is just that the mini-games are so difficult to control and, often, have the kind of completion criteria we found super tough.

Admittedly, some of the 50 examples on offer are better than others. Take the mini-game involving shining a torch around the dark screen to follow E.T.'s footprints to where he is within a time limit, and a Pac-Man-style event where E.T. collects sweets in a maze while trying to avoid running into Elliot's mum, both of which are quite playable.

But for every decent game, there are three bad companions. Like having to collect falling teddy bears of a certain colour when E.T. keeps randomly taking two sideways steps instead of one. Or the one we still haven't figured out how to complete, where you have to put down a line of candy for E.T. to follow through a maze. But there don't seem to be enough sweets, and E.T. keeps stopping and saying he can't see the next bit of candy even when it's two inches in front of his face. Perhaps aliens suffer from short-sightedness. If it wasn't for our 'skip level' cheat, we'd still be trying to lure E.T. like a deficient golden retriever through that maze now.

Ultimately, the game is just remarkably counter-intuitive. Even the menu before each mini-game is annoying, and slow to load. You feel like one of those people on Fonejacker calling the prank answering machine that keeps telling them to talk after the beep, then not beeping, then when they go to talk, beeping. Honestly, you keep pressing a button to skip the tutorial you've just seen ten seconds ago, then you stop pressing it and realise the game's waiting for you to press it now. (And it's possible it was just the version we had, but the game kept freezing, too.)

Video game history likes to recall the Atari 2600 version of E.T. released back in 1983 as partly to blame for the subsequent crash in the video game market, a time when many publishers went out of business. Indeed, it's been widely reported that the game was so awful, Atari ended up burying millions of unwanted E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill.

There's hardly a danger that the same thing will happen to the mobile gaming market as a result of this release, of course. But you could argue the above episode should have served as a warning to publisher Ojom that it's probably best to let sleeping aliens lie.