Intellivision Lives: The History Of Video Gaming for the Playstation 2.

After last week’s look at the Intellivision 25-In-1, this time we’re going to continue the theme somewhat with a squint at Intellivision Lives: The History of Video Gaming. Grandiose subtitles aside, this is a complete collection of sixty two Intellivision titles including a couple that weren’t finished (or indeed released) and one non-playable demonstration cartridge that was supplied to shops so that their display machines could spend the day extolling the virtues of the Intellivision to passing punters.

The main menu is based in the fictional Hal’s Pizza (quite appropriate really, a menu in a pizza parlour) which is described in the manual as being a place where “the 80′s never stopped”. Hal himself must be something of an Intellivisionary in fact because, along with a couple of pictures of the Blue Sky Rangers themselves, neon Intellivision men across one wall and posters of game artwork scattered about the place, even his jukebox is loaded with nothing but Intellivision-themed music. And rather than being from Taito, Nintendo or Atari, the arcade cabinets dotted around his eatery are instead a series of presumably custom-built machines which play Intellivision games – nothing as simple as a MAME cab for our Hal!

Intellivision Lives - main menu

Navigating between machines is a simple matter, the camera starts in the middle of the room and left and right on the PS2 pad to automatically turn between points of interest, pushing forward moves in for a closer look at a machine and forward for a second time brings up it’s game list. These seven cabinets divide the catalogue of games into genres, those being “space”, “arcade”, “gambling”, “combat and sorcery” (why those two are lumped together I’m not entirely sure), “sports”, “kids” and “unreleased”. Along with the games are instructions (a combination of the original manual and newly written text) and scans of box artwork and production notes where appropriate. Each machine also has an achievement, a challenge set through one of it’s games that, when completed, unlocks bonus material for the machine itself and one of the unreleased games in the dedicated cabinet; some of the milestones are relatively easy such as ending a game of Astrosmash with over 20,000 points or scoring better than 300 on Frog Bog, but others take a bit more doing such as beating the console at poker.

Intellivision Lives - playing Night Stalker

Since everything released for the machine is included here, obviously the games that stood out on the Intellivision 25-In-1 such as the Chinese proverb-powered Shark! Shark!, simple but enjoyable blasting from Astrosmash or Buzz Bombers and Night Stalker with it’s tense, slow motion gameplay are present and correct along with the less beguiling ones such as the clinically strange movement of Pinball. The additional thirty seven titles are something of a mixed bag and for a console there are a surprising number of (admittedly rather primitive) simulation games such as B-17 Bomber, Sub Hunt or a resource management game called Utopia and there are a lot of gambling and sports based titles as well with some of the latter providing some good, old fashioned button mashing. One new arrival of particular interest however is the unreleased puzzle game Hypnotic Lights, which wasn’t an official Intellivision project and instead was written by programmer Stephen Roney in his own time as a favour to his boss; it’s not complete and can’t check for stalemate conditions on the board so a game never ends, but the idea itself is very sound indeed and it’s probably the title I’ve returned to most after Astrosmash and Night Stalker.

Intellivision Lives - playing Thin Ice

These games all appear to be the originals running under emulation rather than having been re-written and that means the numeric keypad of the Intellivision controller also needs to be simulated. There are two ways to use the virtual keypad, the first is to press select on the pad to bring up or dismiss a visual representation of the iPod love child itself (during which time the game controls are re-routed to pressing it’s buttons) and the second solution has R1 “pressing” whatever the right analogue stick is pointing at – when central it’s over the 5, pushing left gets four, down and right for 9 and so forth. Neither solution is perfect but with both present at least players have a chance to mix and match as they see fit.

Intellivision Lives - playing Hypnotic Lights

As noted previously, the major driving factor with this kind of collection is the nostalgia value and it’s laid on with a trowel here from the décor of Hal’s Pizza onwards; that isn’t something I can relate to personally since my own misspent youth wasn’t occupied with playing Intellivision games or hanging around in pizza parlours for that matter and some of the titles included feel noticeably dated, not in the way they look or sound (experience of contemporary platforms such as the Atari 2600 prepares Intellivision virgins for that) but more the overall feel… well, it’s hard to put a finger on exactly but a few titles just seem overly complex for a console game, the pace of the gaming titles in particular is slow and user interfaces occasionally seem a little overcomplicated or even downright cumbersome. But Intellivision Lives is fairly cheap, generally cheerful and there’s the entertainment value of the video footage (or production notes if you’re a bit of a geek like I might possibly be [Ahem]) even if many of the games will probably only see a few plays before another session with Astrosmash.

The Intellivision Lives: The History of Video Gaming hanging around this particular pizza parlour was the Playstation 2 version, a similar burst of nostalgia exists for Xbox and Gamecube owners.