Reviews
"3 1/2 STARS"
...I'd recommend it for children of the '80s or hardcore gamers who yearn for a better understanding of gaming history. A few commercials starring the late George Plimpton enhance the package, as do the funny, intersesting production notes. [S]ome [games] remain downright fun (most notably Night Stalker, Snafu, Baseball, and Shark! Shark!).
Chris Baker
Official U.S. Play Station Magazine
February 2004
"FABULOUS ENTERTAINMENT"
For most people, $40 or $50 is a significant amount of money. But those are routine prices for the hundreds of computer and video games that generate the most attention each year.
Consumers must make tough choices while being bombarded with publicity and reviews that make scores of games sound indispensable, regardless of a family budget. One week's $50 mega-game is followed by the next week's $50 must-have game, which is followed by another week of two more $50 four-star games.
Let me suggest a gem -- a few gems, actually -- that combine a bargain price with fabulous entertainment: revived games from the Mattel Intellivision brand, which enjoyed its heyday in the early 1980s.
We're talking about graphically primitive games with enormous retro appeal and, in some cases, an addictive quality that remains amazingly strong all these years later.
My obsession is Astrosmash... For two young children I know, it was Night Stalker and Chip Shot Super Pro Golf, For someone else, it may be Thin Ice...
You can get this stuff and much more as Intellivision Lives! for either PlayStation 2 (out now) or Xbox (coming soon) at just $20. [T]here are more than 60 classic and unreleased games and a variety of extra material, including old Intellivision TV commercials.
If you're not yet tempted, spend some time on the Web site that also chronicles the Intellivision history: www.intellivisionlives.com . Of course, that could ignite another temptation. You may find yourself headed straight to eBay to bid on 20-year-old Intellivision consoles.
Mike Antonucci
San Jose Mercury News
December 6, 2003
"EXCELLENT COLLECTION"
When people think of pre-NES "classic gaming," the blocky graphics and bloopy sounds of the Atari 2600 are usually the first thing to come to mind. Atari wasn't the only major player in the early days of console gaming, though... In the US, the 2600's most successful rival was Mattel's Intellivision. Though it went on sale a full two years after Atari's groundbreaking console, the Intellivision had taken command of roughly a fifth of the gaming market by the time the industry imploded in 1983. It also introduced snobbery as a key selling point for video games: Mattel hired popular pundit George Plimpton to inform the public that Intellivision offered nicer graphics, better sound, and even more complex gameplay than its competitors. Even the system's name (a contraction of "intelligent television") bordered on elitism.
Two decades later, of course, Intellivision games are a largely forgotten historical curiosity rather than the bleeding edge of home gaming. But Crave Entertainment is banking on the hope that the underlying gameplay of the Intellivision library was solid enough to appeal to 2003's gamers -- many of whom are, in fact, younger than the system.
As it happens, their new collection, Intellivision Lives!, stands a good chance of doing just that.
Intellivision Lives! is an impressive package, compiling roughly sixty games for a wallet-friendly $20. The emulation is solid, and the games are presented via arcade machines within an amusingly kitschy virtual '80s pizza parlor. Although this gimmick has been used before (Namco Museum and Activision Anthology also made use of similar visual metaphors), "Hal's Pizza" is arguably the nicest take on the idea. It nicely captures the feel of the 1980's-era neighborhood pizza. More importantly, it works well as an interface: while the jukebox in the corner plays campy Intellivision-themed music, moving between hotspots is fast and intuitive and load times are negligible.
The zippy loading times complement the simple nature of the Intellivision's games, which is a touch of canniness by the developers; it turns the package into a painless pick-up-and-play experience. You can boot up your console and be 5,000 points into Astrosmash in the time it takes for Vice City's initial loading progress bar to crawl its way to the right side of the screen.
The sixty games are divided into more than half a dozen categories, including Space, Sports, Gaming and even Unreleased. Each individual title includes a bevy of options, such as stomach-churning wacky presentation modes, detailed online instructions and historical trivia. Additionally, every category features an unlockable bonus earned by achieving set scores on certain titles -- a nice touch, as it adds a concrete goal to the gameplay. The unlockables are mostly those old Plimpton commercials, which are interesting if only as a reminder of how sedate and tasteful gaming ads were before the Sega Scream.
In other words, there's a lot here to see and do. Still, the collection would be worthless if the games were garbage. By luck, quite a few are actually very good. Each category contains at least one enduring classic. Having come into this review with practically zero Intellivision experience, I was impressed by how many of the system's titles are still fun two decades later even without the warm rose tint of nostalgia. Games like Astrosmash, Night Stalker (a tense fusion of Pac-Man and Berzerk), Duncan's Thin Ice (think Qix meets Pengo) and Thunder Castle are all immensely addictive despite their obvious technical limitations.
Unfortunately, my objective perspective also gives me a clear sense of where Intellivision Lives! fails. I was completely unfamiliar with every single one of these games; there are no licensed titles here, no arcade ports, no third-party hits. The commitment to original content is admirable, but at the same time it fails to provide the immediate hook that familiar classics like Pac-Man or Pitfall would offer. And though certain games are sufficiently straightforward that anyone can jump right in and enjoy them, many are far too abstract or obtuse to appeal to a casual player. I pity the person who sits down and randomly selects Space Hawk or Vectron to serve as their introduction into the world of Intellivision.
Intellivision Lives! is still an excellent collection. Fans of the system should have no reservations about picking up a copy; it was put together under the supervision of several of the console's original programmers, and their love for Intellivision shines through in the detail and polish of the package.
More casual consumers may want to proceed with slightly less enthusiasm -- the crude graphics and rudimentary sounds of the world's first 16-bit system won't be to every modern gamer's tastes... Anyone willing to give these ancient games a fair try, however, will very likely find a few to their liking. Plus, there's a lot to be said for having so many games -- and so much history -- on a single disc.
Jeremy Parish
1up.com
November 24, 2003
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"This takes what we've been doing with the Intellivision games to a whole new level," says Keith Robinson, president of Intellivision Productions, Inc. "We've always tried to put them in the context of when they were released - it adds that extra nostalgic boost to the experience. In our PC and Mac collections, we've done that with video clips and music and the overall design of the graphics. But now we can actually put you into an animated 3-D world that captures the feeling of 1982. It is 1982! The first time I scrolled around Hal's I started laughing. Pizza and video games. Yeah, I could live here."
