First Impressions: It's Alive, IT'S ALIVVEE!!
A few months ago I did an Xbox preview for the game called Midway Arcade Treasures where you have the chance to play over 20 legendary games from the arcades right on your game console. That may sound like a really good deal for all us old school gamers out there looking for a retro fix but the people at Intellivision Productions Inc. are teaming up with Crave Entertainment and Realtime Associates to release a even bigger pack of 50-60 plus games from the 80's and even the ancient 70's in one collection. Here's the kicker though! These games are from one of the biggest video game system from gaming's golden age: the Mattel Intellivision. The new collection is called Intellivision Lives!
Travel back in time to the early eighties when the popular TV show M*A*S*H came to a end, Michael Jackson wasn't white or a pervert yet, and video games were so big that it was making companies like Atari, Mattel, and Coleco millions of dollars. Despite all the success however, the video game industry was very still very new back then and a lot mistakes were made. Imagine one day you're working for your dream job as a video game designer and the next day the entire market crashes and now all of a sudden you are out of work? This is what happened to the Blue Sky Rangers, a team of Intellivision employees. Although many would move now after the great game crash, some Blue Sky Rangers however still remain surprisingly loyal to their Intellivision roots. That's why we now have this new collection of Intellivision games complete with new editions like a 360 degree Pizza parlour filled with the titles, a jukebox with Intellivision theme music, and you may even find some history too.
Many of these classic 16-bit games could already be found on СClassic Games from the Intellivision' for the Sony Playstation but there were only 30 translated games, and they played even slower then their originals. On Intellivision Lives there will not only be more games here but there may even be some rare prototype games that were never released to the public. I just hope they are translated better on the Xbox.
Although the list of games have not been finalized yet, here is the list of Intellivision games that are pretty much guaranteed to be part of this new compilation:
Armour Battle Astro Smash (a.k.a. Astro Blast) Auto Racing Baseball (a.k.a. World League Baseball)* Basketball Boxing Buzz Bombers Checkers Chess Football (a.k.a. NFL Football) Frog Bog Golf (a.k.a. PGA Golf) Hockey (a.k.a. NHL Hockey) Horse Racing Hover Force |
Hover Force Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack Night Stalker Pinball Sea Battle Shark! Shark! Skiing Snafu Soccer Space Armada (Space Invaders clone) Space Battle Space Hawk Star Strike Sub Hunt Tennis |
*This was the famous 2 player only Baseball game that Mattel cleverly used in their ads. The advertisements would show both Intellivision's World League Baseball with Atari 2600's Baseball game Home Run side by side. It was clear to see from the ads that the Intellivision version was clear winner.There is a good chance that this will named simply СBaseball' because of the price of the СWorld League' license.