The best Inty game you've never played

[Lord Thag]

I was fortunate enough to score a mint (as in still in the shrink wrap) ECS computer for my Intellivision II console last week. Unboxing such an obscure console was quite the treat! I hooked it up and plugged it in to test and see if it worked, using the loose Mind Strike cart I had lying around.

 

Wow. Anyone here ever played Mind Strike? This is by FAR one of the best console strategy games ... ever? No one ever talks about it, due to the obscurity of both the game, and the ECS, but man, did the world ever miss out on an incredibly unique strategy title when the ECS tanked.

 

It's similar to chess, but instead your pieces are numbers. A piece can move 8 spaces minus it's number, so a 7 moves one, a 5 moves 3, and a 1 moves 7. Get the idea? You can split and combine your pieces as well, though there are penalities. If you move a piece onto an opposing one, it will capture it if it is equal or greater than the number of the enemy piece. You win by destroying the enemy castle.

 

In addition to the incredibly deep strategy (which is every bit as complicated and deep as chess), there are *50* different boards. Yeah, fifty! And did I mention that you can design your own boards. And program the AI?

 

This is one hell of an amazing game. It's creative, it's fun, it's deep, and it's rewarding. Everyone I've showed it to has spen a couple of hours playing multiple games. Mindstrike is a true forgotten gem on the Intellivision.

 

Anyone here ever play it? It's completely worth the price of an ECS.

[Ransom]

Thank you for the intro to Mindstrike! I'd never heard much about it.

 

You've provided some food for thought...

[+jsmith73]

HMMM...

 

Now I have to go find an ECS and a copy of Mindstrike to play. Which means I'm going to be in trouble...

 

You made it sound really great....

[Cebus Capucinis]

Nothing will ever beat Frog Bog. Nothing. Though now you make me want to pick up an ECS and Mindstrike!

[4Ks]

Space Battle. Although, it's the only Intellivision game I've played.

[Rev]

how will i know it is good if ive never played it?

 

i still havent played melody blaster.mainly because i do not have the piano for it.it looks like great fun and i bet my kids would even like it.

[+cvga]

I have Mindstrike and an ECS lying around here somewhere and I've still never played it. Thanks for writing about it. It definitely makes me want to hook up the ECS and play some of the games designed specificially for it!

[Lord Thag]

I am really coming to the conclusion that the ECS is one of the most underrated 'oddity' peripherals out there. There are a lot of limited release computers from the crash era (Aquarius, ADAM etc), but the ECS has some really amazing software.

 

In addition, it makes a wonderful teaching computer, with a simple BASIC language built in (with syntax highlighting no less) with the awesome feature of having several commands built in for stealing the graphics off of ANY standard Intelly cart! Yeah, you can just plug a cart in, and fool around, and use any of the graphics off of that cart that you want, and up to seven sprites at a time. Free memory seems to be around 1.5k though. SOme of the other ECS games are fantastic too.

 

World Series Major League Baseball was LIGHTYEARS ahead of it's time. It was the first 'field perspective' baseball game ever, and it had real ball physics to boot. I must own this at some point. Check out the vid:

 

 

And check out Melody Blaster. Basically musical Astrosmash that taught you how to play songs at the same time on a real keyboard:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ee1TV7wMYc&NR=1

 

Awesome stuff.

 

Just played Mind Strike again. Can't keep away from the damned game. I need to post a youtube video of the gameplay. It's so good I'm actually considering making a real boardgame to play. My brother is interested in it. This is easily the best two player boardgame I've ever played on a console, of any era. The strategic options are staggering. Lots of surprise turnarounds and sneaky attacks, as any piece on the board can break off a 1 or a 2 and go zipping all the way across the map.

 

Strategy seems to be to defend your castle VERY well, and either exert pressure by moving some slow, big pieces across the board looking for forks and combos (hard to anticipate), or zip lots of 2s and 3s around, and combine them when you get close to the other guy's castle, taking the loss in exchange for speed. This really is a fantastic two player game. One of the best I've ever played. I'd go so far to say it's one of the top ten best Intelly games. Maybe one of the top 5 if you like strategy games.

 

What a damn shame Mattel didn't support the ECS better. It had so much potential!

[accousticguitar]

There's a thread around here somewhere about making a homebrew Intellivision game. Perhaps this would be a good candidate for that.

[jaybird3rd]

I'm fortunate that I have an ECS on the way (complete with World Series Major League Baseball), and that I just received a beautiful boxed copy of Mind Strike from another AtariAge member this past week! The game is available in the Intellivision Rocks! collection, so I've seen it in emulation, but I'm really looking forward to playing it on the original hardware.

 

This may not make sense, but games on the Intellivision seem "deeper" to me when played on the real system, more so than games on other classic consoles, and I somehow have a hard time getting into them to the same extent when I play them in an emulator. Emulation is great as an short-term solution (such as when I'm on the road playing the Intellivision Lives collection on the DS, as I hope to do by the end of this year), but for serious gameplay, I much prefer having the real hardware.

 

But anyway, regarding Mind Strike ... it's a pity that David Warhol wasn't allowed to make the game playable in two-player mode without the ECS as he wanted to (the extra memory in the ECS was required for the computer opponent), because this meant that relatively few people got the chance to see it. It isn't often that one gets to look forward to a new experience on a game console that's over thirty years old, but I'm even enjoying the anticipation of waiting for my ECS to arrive, because I already know that Mind Strike will quickly become one of my favorites.

[jaybird3rd]

Because there are a few Mind Strike fans here, and because I wanted to preserve the new copy of Mind Strike that I obtained last week, I thought I'd make some high-resolution scans of the box and its contents. Perhaps they will be useful to those who are playing the game through emulation, or who only own a loose cartridge.

 

Here are my scans of the box (fresh from its shrinkwrap) and overlays (still attached together!):

 

 

I've taken apart and scanned the manual also, but that will require some more cleanup, so I'll post it when I've finished with it.

[BydoEmpire]

Never played it, but it sounds very cool!