Intellivision

 

My Tron blog led me to this one, as seems logical.  These days we’ve got Nintendo Wii, the Xbox, and Playstation, with their super-sophisticated graphics and plotlines.  I’m old enough to remember the Olde Days, when we had much cruder games to play with.

Pong.  WAYYY back.  I remember playing this in the basement of my friend Paul, who was also our next-door neighbor.  Tennis, hockey, and squash, with big or small paddles, was about the range of games in this thing.  Black and white.  That was it.  Pretty crude, but very simple and very playable, especially if you didn’t even have an Atari to compare it with.

Odyssey.  My relatives in Long Island had this thing.   It was a modest improvement over Pong, using overlays on the TV screen but still having crude graphics.  We couldn’t get it to work.  I remember it had a haunted house game I would have liked to have played….

Atari 2600.  This was the first game to really have any impact, and certainly had by far the most games.  Back in 1980 we had the choice of this or an Intellivision.  Going with quality over quantity, we picked the Intellivision, though we had no shortage of friends who had made the opposite decision and were happy to play their games with us.  The graphics were crude but viewable, but the play was fairly simple, with a simple joystick with one button.  In retrospect, though, despite the wide variety of games available for this system, the only Atari games which were really decent were “Combat” (the stock cartridge which came with the system, and curiously absent from the recent standalone Atari units you can get at Toys R Us these days) and “Adventure” with its dragons which looked more like ducks.  Activision actually made better games, and probably saved Atari’s butt from an earlier extinction.

Intellivision.  We loved this.  From 1980-84 we were relentless in trying to collect literally every single game they made, even boring ones like Reversi which we played once and never again.  Although the disc-based controller wasn’t nearly as easy to get used to as the Atari’s joystick, the keypad and side buttons dramatically enhanced the range of options available, making the games considerably more sophisticated without necessarily (!) compromising their playability. The graphics were 10x better than Atari’s.  The voice cabability – with the IntelliVoice module and the games Bomb Squad, B-17 Bomber, Space Spartans and Tron: Solar Sailor – wasn’t nearly as remarkable as the games which featured them weren’t that great.  Here are some of the highlights.  Relax, I won’t name them all, but the games tended to be fairly high quality, so even picking the highlights means picking a fairly high percentage of them.  Although the sports games were “officially licensed” by the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, NASL, PGA, etc. none of them were nearly advanced enough to allow you to actually select real teams.

            Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.  The earlier Cloudy Mountain game was cruder, but far more playable and enjoyable than the later, more ambitious and complex (and boring) Treasure of Tarmin game.  We were huge gamers when the first cartridge came out, only to have our Intellivision unit fry on us shortly before getting the game. 

            Astrosmash.  Clearly cool with huge scores available and varying color backgrounds, but after a certain point it got dull and repetitive.  It’s like Asteroids but oriented left-to-right across the bottom of the screen.

            NFL Football.  You could program plays, offense and defense, and could actually complete passes.  This game actually scrolled left and right, rather than up and down the screen.

            MLB Baseball.  One of the best, EVER, and had crude voice ability (the umpire) long before IntelliVoice.  The keypad allowed complete control over all players on the field, yet the game was very playable.  I’m not a fan of baseball, but I loved this game. 

            Bump & Jump.  How can a dump truck go at 200 mph?  Who knows.  This game was cool, especially with the changing seasons, but you got 50,000 points for completing a segment without crashing anyone, far higher than you ever would by crashing as many cars as you could.    The Death Skull car was cool.

            Lock & Chase.  Like Pac-Man but better (I always thought Pac-Man was dull, as the maze never changed, whereas Ms Pac-Man had changing mazes which made it more worthwhile to advance, beyond simply ramping up the score for its own sake).  The original arcade version was at the arcade in the Jardin where we used to go as kids.  You’re a thief who steals coins in a bank, avoiding the Keystone cops and picking up bonus items along the way.  Instead of an energizer pill, you can lock doors behind you.

            Burger Time.  I brought my Intellivision to college with me during sophomore year and my roommates got addicted to this one.  I’d come back from class and find them doing marathon sessions of this (“screw class, I’m getting a high score!”).  I got pretty good at it myself.  Your little chef makes giant burgers by walking across the buns and patties, avoiding animated evil hot dogs, a fried egg, and a pickle.  Cute but compelling.

            Frog Bog.  Childish, but still cool.  Two frogs jump from pad to pad trying to catch bugs with their tongues.  The frog with the most points after a time period wins.  At night the bugs are fireflies.  The frogs could actually miss the pad, splash into the water, and swim back onto the pads.

            Mission X.  A scrolling bombing mission in a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, with strafing and bombing.  It was unclear whether the targets were German or Japanese.

            Night Stalker.  One of my favorites: you’re hunted down by killer robots in a dark maze, and you have to keep getting new guns as each only has 6 shots.  Bats and a spider lurk around to paralyze you.  The robots get progressively more dangerous (aggressive and intelligent) as your score increases, up to the invisible robot who was by far the most difficult to kill.

            Sea Battle.  I loved this one.   You have a whole fleet, including a sub, two PT boats, an aircraft carrier (minus aircraft??), destroyers, a battleship, a troop transport and a mine layer and mine sweeper.   Mines were so damn annoying we generally agreed to ban them. If you were really cocky, arrogant and good at the game you’d try and wipe out your opponent’s whole fleet using only your mine layer or mine sweeper.

            Snafu.  Killer funky disco music!  Simple but effective, reminiscent of the light cycle phase of Tron.

            Triple Action.  Race cars, tanks – with ricochet effect! – and biplanes (with stall) brought Intellivision up to Atari’s Combat credentials, with better graphics and few wrinkles.

            Shark! Shark!  More groovy music, adding bubble effects too.  You’re a fish eating other fish, avoiding a shark and jellyfish, gradually getting larger and larger as you successfully devour smaller fish and avoid the larger ones.  You can eat your opponent, which is pretty funny.

            Star Strike.  We got this one at Hamleys, the toy store in London.  They ripped off “Star Wars” for this one.  You have to kill aliens swooping over their space station channel or they’ll destroy the Earth.  Whether you defeated the alien death star or let them blow up the Earth, the finale was impressive either way.

            Vectron.  This was more my favorite than my brother’s.  Abstract puzzle kind of shoot-em-up, very challenging and thought-provoking, but with fantastic graphics and sound effects.

            Utopia.  Long before Civilization and SimCity, there was Utopia.  Two islands, two competing societies, with housing, schools, hospitals, hurricanes, rain, rebels, and crops, etc.  Well before its time.

            Space Armada, Space Battle, and Space Hawk.  Armada was nothing more than Space Invaders.  Space Battle was pretty good (a fairly originally done shoot-em-up) and Hawk was OK as long as you didn’t set it on the realistic but unplayable drift mode.

            Pitfall.  One of the Activision games.  My brother loved this one.  Any of you Atari fans will probably recognize this one.

            Tron Deadly Discs, Maze-A-Tron, and Solar Sailor.  I mentioned these in the last blog.

            Skiing.  We could do the downhill, even to the point of mastering the fastest speed, but the slalom was well beyond our capability.

            Imagic.  This was by far the most impressive of the aftermarket suppliers.  Their games were ….original.  Microsurgeon, Beauty and the Beast, Demon Attack, Atlantis, Safe Cracker, Dracula, White Water, and Dragon Fire were the ones I’ve played.  The games weren’t always impressive, but they were certainly imaginative.

            Lame-O’s.  ANY of the gaming ones (Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack, Horse Racing, Roulette, Royal Dealer), the strategy games (reversi, backgammon, checkers, or chess, although the chess game played “The Ride of the Valkyries” when you won); or the Electric Company Word and Math fun games.  Sports: Boxing & tennis.  The golf, auto racing and basketball games were mediocre.  The hockey game was cool that you could trip the opposing players and get sent to the penalty box, but the team colors were brown and green, which made it hard to see which was which.  

Colecovision.  I have to mention this in fairness, as it rivalled the Intellivision in graphics quality at that time, and had a similar controller.  The Zaxxon and Smurf games were the best.  It could also play the Atari 2600 games (with a special module), something the Intellivision could never do.

After Intellivision and Colecovision came the first generation Nintendo and Sega Genesis, which lead us up to the present day.