From the early days of home video games come thirty -
yes, on one CD, thirty - classic Intellivison games, emulated perfectly.
(Activision, 1999)
The emulations may be perfect, but one major problems keeps me from giving
30 Classic Games from the Intellivision full marks. As you may remember
if you were around back then, the Intellivision
controllers consisted of two action buttons, a directional "disc" (a
direct descendant of today's ubiquitous control pads), and a twelve-key,
telephone-style keypad. Not every game required the keypads, and those that did
may not have necessarily utilized all the keys. But for those games which do
make full use of the keypad, it's a major headache trying to emulate that with
the Playstation's controllers. This Playstation version of several of the
emulations from the very popular Intellivision Lives! PC collection makes
things worse by introducing pointlessly complex control schemes to stand in for
the keypad. Avoid those games, such as the card games, which use these trigger
sequences. Simpler arcade-style games, such as Astrosmash,
Snafu and
Space Armada, are very playable.
Almost making up for the deficiencies in the control scheme is the large
amount of supplemental material included with Intellivision Classics.
Not only is the original packaging faithfully represented for every game, but
there are also interviews with many of the Intellivision programmers and game
designers. One gets a very real urge to root for the underdog as these
determined codesmiths reminisce about the days when they were up against the big
boys - i.e. the market-dominating Atari 2600.
So, ultimately, who is this game for? Quite a few people, myself included,
still have their real live Intellivision consoles, but
not everyone kept them. And not everyone will remember what the controls were
like, and so the difficulties of controlling the more complex games won't affect
them in the slightest. If you still have a working Intellivision, skip this
Playstation Retro Revival, because the control difficulties will drive you nuts.
If you don't, however, and still want to relive the glory days of the underdog
system, you might do well to invest in this collection. And all things
considered, it's a lot of good, simple, family-friendly games for a fair price.
Rating:
Two quarters - worth playing, but could use some more work.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
Games emulated (links lead to reviews of the original games):
Two quarters - worth playing, but could use some more work.
