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Any love for the Intellivision?


jetset

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I'm not too impressed with the Intelly either. After trying it for a couple of years, I sold it and a bunch of games off. Beauty and the Beast was the only game that I came back to on the Intellivison. I'm also in the grew with Atari but also like Colecovision now camp.

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One of my friends, back in the day, who had a ColecoVision and an Apple //e actually borrowed my Super Video Arcade for like a week so he could beat Treasure of Tarmin. I think I got a few bootleg disks in return, he wouldn't let me borrow his CV. :(

 

I got my Inty stuff post-crash, circa '84, so everything was real cheap.

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My family's first console was an Inty, so it has a special place in my heart. I still enjoy playing it, though I think a lot of the appeal was that it was so far ahead of its time. In fact, Treasure of Tarmin is a game that I would say is one of the most "ahead of its time" games ever. D&D Cloudy Mountain was amazing - I played through that dozens and dozens of times. The sports games were great multiplayer, of course. And it also had a nice array of unique, quirky titles - Utopia, Frog Bog, Shark! Shark!, Space Hawk, Dracula, etc. The Inty still has my favorite home version of Burgertime (haven't picked up Beef Drop yet :)).

 

As for how well it holds up today, I think fairly well. I can still enjoy Astrosmash, Burgertime, D&D Cloudy Montain (on higher difficulty), Thunder Castle, Night Stalker, and lots of others. They have a totally different feel and... I don't know... "direction" than Atari games. Which is a big reason why I still play it. Sometimes you want chocolate ice cream, sometimes you want blueberry pie. They're both good, even though they're different! I even like the Inty controllers much better than the CV's, although I can totally understand that that's probably due to growing up with the system. Many of the games do feel slow and sluggish, but most games also have harder difficulty levels that alleviate this. And personally (again, probably due to having grown up with it), the Inty's "slow" graphics and gameplay feels better to me than the choppiness of most Colecovision games. I actually ended up selling my CV collection last year because I never played it. The Intellivision has a great library of unique games, and I'm still a big fan.

Edited by BydoEmpire
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I sold my Intellivision awhile back with lots of games - no regrets. I think if you like classic gaming you tend to like action/arcade type games that you can play in short gaming periods. The Intellivision doesn't fit into this mold. In ways the Intellivision was more of a modern system where you need many buttons, a manual, and a good chunk of time to sit down and get through a game.

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Y'know...I know I posted my overall thoughts before, but...back in the day, I loved Intellivision. I never actually owned one back then, but one of my best friends had it, and my cousins also had one. In fact, my cousins actually left their Intellivision stuff at my grandparents' house so they'd have something to do when they went there and the adults were doing their grown-up stuff...my grandfather, who always was pissy, got mad and eventually demanded they take it back home, though...but for the months it was there, I had a lot of fun playing it. They had a pretty sizeable collection, too...

 

I remember playing Major League Baseball, Bomb Squad B17 Bomber, Burgertime, Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack, Skiing, and several other games and just L-O-O-O-OVING them.

 

Some time last year I decided to get my own Intellivision, along with the above-mentioned games and a few more that I never played before but learned to love -- including Beauty And The Beast and The Dreadnaught Factor. (Actually, Inky turned me on to the latter via the Atari 8-bit version.) And you know what? I grew bored with it. Fast. Really fast. I suddenly couldn't remember why I loved the Intellivision when I was a wee lad. So I eventually sold my Intellivision stuff. Just really couldn't get into it. Just couldn't have as much fun as I've been having with 2600 and 7800 games....

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I never had an Intellivision as a kid but got one when I became a classic game collector as an adult and really fell in love with it, so for me it's not a nostalgia thing. My favorite game for the system is Tower of Doom, a rogue-like for a home game console, who knew? Great replayability due to the randomly generated dungeons.

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The perculiar thing about the Intellivision is that most of its games require reading the manual throroughly and mastering each game's control setup before you can really begin to enjoy it. You simply can't pick up a game like Sea Battle, Bomb Squad or Utopia and understand it within a few minutes just by playing it. That's the downside of making heavy use of the keypad. People at Coleco understood this, and that's why they chose not to use the CV keypad too extensively, beyond skill level selection.

 

Those raised on Atari and Coleco (and Nintendo, to an ulterior extent) usually don't have the patience to read a manual of more than a few pages. They just pop the cart in the console and learn as they go, while only referring to the manual to check for obscure gameplay features. That type of gamer usually can't get into Intellivision games, even when he really wants to give it a chance. At best, he will enjoy fast-paced games like Dreadnaught Factor or Burgertime.

 

Some gamers who used to love the console but haven't played with it in years can find the Inty games lamer than they remember, because they don't want to take the time to remaster the control setups all over again, and video gaming has moved forward so much since the early eighties that playing just about any other console seems more interesting than playing the Inty.

 

Of course, everything I've said in this post is a generalization that doesn't apply to everyone. There are plenty of Inty fans who still enjoy the console and its games today. :)

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I had an Inty a while back. I had some games for it, but it wasn't a systems I would play too often and there weren't too many good games for it, so I sold it.

 

Donkey Kong for the Intellivision seemed like a conversion of the Coleco tabletop game with those graphics. :(

 

 

Very true, but Burgertime was the best on the Intellivision

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I had limited exp. w/ Inty. growing up, only like 1 or 2 people I knew had it. I was Atari guy all the way. My main Intellivision exp. was w/ Intellivision Classics on PS. I only liked ONE game on that disc (of 30? games), Hover Force IIRC. The rest of the disc was utter trash, in Golf you could only swing in the 8 compass directions!

 

If those games on that disc were emulated properly/close to the originals, I dont see how anyone could like the Inty.

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Next to the 2600, this is my favorite classic system. I love it. The controllers are kind of bad, but you get used to them. There are so many great strategy and rpg titles that are not playable anywhere else, as well as a pile of original action games that are fantastic.

 

It's a system that garners lots of extreme reactions. You either love it or hate it.

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Some time last year I decided to get my own Intellivision, along with the above-mentioned games and a few more that I never played before but learned to love -- including Beauty And The Beast and The Dreadnaught Factor. (Actually, Inky turned me on to the latter via the Atari 8-bit version.) And you know what? I grew bored with it. Fast. Really fast. I suddenly couldn't remember why I loved the Intellivision when I was a wee lad. So I eventually sold my Intellivision stuff. Just really couldn't get into it. Just couldn't have as much fun as I've been having with 2600 and 7800 games....

 

Now that I think about it...I also tried some ColecoVision stuff via an emulator, as I remember thinking back in the day how awesome ColecoVision was....well, my thoughts: "THIS is what I was going nuts over?!" I then played some Atari 2600 games for several hours. :) (And this was just months ago, btw.)

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I dumped my thoughts on the Intellivision in my semi-occasional blog.
I think skunkworks blog (link fixed) pretty much sums up how I feel about the intellivision as well. Only thing I will add though is after setting up a handful of games to run on the xbox emulator I'm convinced that the keypad encouraged poor interface design.

 

There are several games that use two buttons where one button could have been easily used (context sensitivity). It's actually pretty ridiculous. There are a few gems for the intellivision (hockey is a blast) but ultimately I think the best combo is the Atari 5200 and colecovision. They compliment each other well.

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My gut feeling is that, if you didn't grow up with an Intellivision, you will not be impressed with it.

 

You may be on to something there. I've tried over and over again to get into the Intellivision (I've actually got a huge collection), but I just can't. It's not that I can't appreciate something I didn't grow up with, I love the Colecovision, but there's just something about the Intelli that doesn't click with me. I think it may be the internal character set graphics that were used for everything, they made everything look so blocky and all the game start to look the same after awhile. The running man was neat though.

 

Tempest

 

I totally agree. I was never enamored with it, but the graphics were nice. It's sort of like today's consoles. Pretty pictures, shitty gameplay. Night stalker was a game that had so much potential, but let us down.

 

Later 2600 games like raiders of the lost ark actually looked good and delivered interesting game play.

 

Hey this has me wanting to dust off my Inty2 and try it again. Anyone know what I need for a power supply for the IntII? I've heard a NES power supply works, but don't want to fry anything.

 

Many of us have made home-brew controllers for atari consoles. Anyone make one for their inty?

Edited by Zonie
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