Reviews
"FUN!"
I’ve been spending some time recently with the Intellivision Greatest Hits: 20th Anniversary Edition. Yeah, I see you snickering. Yes, the graphics and sound are primitive. Yes, the  gameplay is simple and crude, but it’s FUN! I for one like being able to just select one of the many games that came with this collection, load it up and go. It’s a very refreshing change to not have to sit there and memorize eight million button combinations and spend 10 minutes reconfiguring the controls. These games all are very easy to get the mechanics of even if they’re not actually all that easy to play! I think of the 15 year-old loudmouth that I overheard ranting at EB World about how Halo just wasn’t challenging for him any more. I’d like to sit him down, make him play with this for a while and listen to his screams of total frustration as he continually got his head handed to him on a plate.
The major types of games are all represented here: sports, space shooter, RPG. In addition to the games, this collection also has some DVD-like special features, namely old Intellivision commercials and interviews conducted with some of the Intellivision programmers, which is a nice chunk of history. There are also screens that tell you a bit about Intellivision's past, making this not just a game collection, but an interesting history lesson about the beginnings of gaming.
This is all the code from the original games, no polish, no updates, just adapted to play on a PC or Mac. Yes, they’re blocky, but that’s the way games looked back then. Just considering what kind of juggling had to be done to accomodate these graphics onto a high-end machine with a gigabyte of RAM, 128MB of RAM just on the video card, and running Windows makes me give it a high score.
I’ve really been enjoying this collection, but I do see a problem with it. If you are under 26 you're probably not going to be all that jazzed about it, which is a shame. If for no other reason, you should at least check this out and view it like a special on the History Channel. If it weren’t for games like Tower of Doom and Stadium Mud Buggies, you wouldn’t be playing Baldur’s Gate or Midnight Club 2 today.
> Drew Carmody
WickedToast.com |
