The original Intellivision was released by toy manufacturers Mattel during the first flourish of a then youthful gaming market; the pioneers of the software frontier at Mattel, dubbed the Blue Sky Rangers as a form of secret identity (Mattel, like Atari, didn’t want the names of their programmers on the games lest the competition lure them away with shiny baubles) were mostly twenty-something employees who came to video game development almost by accident. Some thirty years later and those bonds are still incredibly strong, so much so that the Intellivision Lives website has been up and running for approaching fifteen years and the interest it’s generated resulted in the formation of the company behind the Intellivision 25-In-1 and several other similar projects.

So what we have in the Intellivision 25-In-1 is, unsurprisingly, twenty five games all squirreled away neatly inside a controller; the pad itself isn’t anywhere near authentic since the original machine used a controller that vaguely resembled the love child of a telephone keypad and an iPod whilst the 25-In-1 bears more of a resemblance to recent console control pads (the Xbox in particular for shape and at least some of the layout). I’d stop short of actually calling the thing “cheap”, but even with the batteries in place it does seem somewhat insubstantial and the control stick in particular feels pretty nasty with it.

Looking at the list of games, they’re something of a mixed bag; the highlight of the show is probably bottom shooter Astrosmash, an attempt to produce something that played a bit like popular coin-op Asteroids without triggering off an attack wave of rabid Atari lawyers – Astrosmash shifted a cool million cartridges back when the market was small enough for that to be a huge deal and players hammered it incredibly hard to the point where the code’s inability to deal with scores of ten million or over became an issue. Buzz Bombers is similarly “inspired” by an Atari arcade machine, this time Centipede is the muse and the player controls a mobile can of bug spray that must be used to blast bees before they reach the bottom of the play area and magically produce flowers(!) – the limited supply of spray in each can adds an interesting dynamic which discourages gung-ho spraying in favour of more carefully aimed shots.

Shark! Shark! is another title of note because there are a serious number of relatively recent casual games like Feeding Frenzy that take almost all of their design cues from it; the player is a small fish in a large pond and must literally work their way up the food chain by devouring anything smaller than themselves whilst avoiding being gobbled up by fish further up the ladder including the titular sharks. There’s some maze-based action in Night Stalker, the player, as the Intellivision man, takes on what appear to be bats, spiders and robots (which happens to us all regularly of course, I’ve just described what I was doing last Wednesday). The action is slow moving but that works in its favour, everything ambles around the play area and there’s a sense of tension built by this reduced pace and trying to dodge a slow-moving bullet with an equally slow avatar.

There are of course a few low points too, whilst not particularly bad Space Armada is an obvious Space Invaders rip off that ticks most of the boxes but neglects the difficulty curve right up until the wave where some of the invaders become invisible, at which point it’s suddenly and hideously hard. Pinball on the other hand is a terrible implementation where the movement of the ball is clinically strange, it fails utterly to be influenced by such trivial matters as gravity, inertia or angles of reflection and opts instead for haring around with a life of it’s own, making seemingly random changes of direction on impacts before zooming unexpectedly past the damned flippers!

The Intellivision 25-In-1 was released a year after the Atari 10-In-1 and there are some obvious similarities; both are intended to be plug and play gaming devices that recreate a slice of gaming history and, as with the Atari, this Intellivision isn’t driven by a simulation of the real hardware (Mattel used a CP1600 processor) either and instead uses NES-on-a-chip hardware. That transition is more drastic than with the Atari (which I assume utilised at least part of the original 2600 code) and everything has been reprogrammed based on the Blue Sky Rangers’ code less literally and a few control schemes and menu pages altered to make them workable on the new hardware’s simpler control scheme.

But as with the Atari 10-In-1, at least half of the titles included are still enjoyable to play even without previous knowledge of the Intellivision and that’s pretty much the point of a cheap and cheerful direct to TV device. For those players like myself who don’t have any previous with the Intellivision these reprogrammed copies of the games won’t really make a difference, whilst for gamers who remember the original experience will be somewhat like buying a Hits Of The 1980s CD where all the tracks are cover versions; their spider senses will probably be tingling just a little but not enough to wreck the experience.

Tags: Astrosmash, Buzz Bombers, Character, DTV Gaming, Hover Force, Intellivision, Motocross, NES On A Chip, Night Stalker, noac, Pinball, Shark! Shark!, Snafu, Space Armada, Space Hawk, Techno Source, Thin Ice, Thunder Castle, Tower Of Doom, Vectron

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 13:43 and is filed under DTV Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.