Intellivision Game Classics Review

If you were an Intellivision owner, and you believe that playing these games on a grossly inadaquete controller will bring about pleasant feelings of nostalgia, then this is the package for you.

As companies dig deeper and deeper into the past in search of old games they can package and rerelease as a part of the increasingly popular retrogaming movement, there's going to be some misses. Not every package can contain 30 perfect classics. That's where this collection of Intellivision games comes in, bringing with it a swift reminder that even in the good old days, some games were just plain terrible.

The Intellivision is one of those console systems that most people have forgotten by now. Sure, there are people that are downright fanatical about the system and its games, but by and large its place in history is as "The system that kids that weren't cool enough to have an Atari 2600 had."

Contained in the package are Armor Battle, Astrosmash, Auto Racing, Baseball, Basketball, Boxing, Checkers, Chess, Football, Frog Bog, Golf, Hockey, Hover Force, Las Vegas Poker N Blackjack, Night Stalker, Pinball, Sea Battle, Shark! Shark!, Sharp Shot, Skiing, Snafu, Soccer, Space Armada, Space Battle, Space Hawk, Spiker! Super Pro Volleyball, Stadium Mud Buggies, Star Strike, Sub Hunt, and Tennis. It would have been nice to see the Dungeons & Dragons games, as well as the Tron games, but licensing issues probably put the kibosh on their inclusion.

Aside from the games, there's also a collection of short video clips that feature interviews with some of the original programmers. The only other option is the ability to save your game at any time. The Intellivision controller featured a keypad. So, to play this collection on the PlayStation, you must bring the keypad up on your screen, push whatever buttons you need to push, then close the keypad window. The keypad blocks a small portion of the screen, and it's generally a big hassle to use, especially in games like Las Vegas Poker N Blackjack, where most of the action takes place on the keypad.

A small screen that appears before each game starts quickly informs you of the controls, but it would have been nice also to see some onscreen directions or even scans of the original game manuals. Instead, you're forced to flip through the manual and read the usually terrible directions. While the poker and blackjack game has about five pages of directions, Hockey is limited to "Objective: Score the most points as possible." Granted, there's not a whole lot more you need to know about Hockey other than that objective and the controls, but even to put that in the manual seems totally silly. Also, given the simple nature of these games, there sure is quite a lot of loading involved in getting the games going.

If you were an Intellivision owner, and you believe that playing these games on a grossly inadequate controller will bring about pleasant feelings of nostalgia, then this is the package for you. But you must really have an attachment to these games - anyone else just won't get why you just spent the last four hours playing Astrosmash.

The Good

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The Bad

About the Author

Jeff Gerstmann has been professionally covering the video game industry since 1994.