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For the
most part, games don’t really die. There are always ROM images somewhere, fighting
the decay of optical media. Outside of some of the earlier examples of broadcast gaming
- think the SatellaView and the Sega Channel - the memories of your past are still around.
You might just have to dig harder for them. (Or lay out a pile of money on a rare tactical
RPG and a Saturn to play it on, BUT I’M FINE WITH THAT.) So it might not be that much
of a shock to say that “Intellivision Lives!,” because it never really stopped living. The
difference today is that it lives on the DS, perhaps the one system most capable of emulating
that iconic number-pad controller paddle... thing. Well, aside from the Jaguar, but the
less time spent talking about that thing, the better.
Intellivision Lives! - well, this version of Intellivision Lives!, released 11 years
after the first PC compilation - brings together 60-ish games from the venerable beast, though
a number of these are multiplayer-only offerings. Fortunately, this DS version supports single-cart
multiplayer through the DS Download service. The navigation menus discard all of the pizza-parlor
antics of previous incarnations: you’ve just got a controller, and you use that to
choose a game. Simple. Once in the game, the second screen turns into whatever overlay
you’d stick on the number-pad portion of the paddle, and is used in tandem with some
assortment of the D-pad and buttons. I say “Some assortment” because you can’t
really tell without consulting the manual, which is rather distractingly broken up between
the top and bottom screens in a font that does no one any favors. I realize the DS wouldn’t
be able to handle, say, scans from the original game manuals as were offered in Activision
Anthology for the PS2, but this is kind of a pain. Especially if you’re trying to figure
out the eleven thousand different steps you need to manage Bowling effectively. Oh well.
Astrosmash is, was, and always will be the same. So we’ll stick to that for now.
You’re going to get the bigger names in the Intellivision catalog, you’re going
to get some also-rans, and you’re going to get some strange outliers like previously-unreleased
titles (developed in 1990, for crying out loud) and some of the voice-synthesizer games
that blew minds back then. But unless you’ve got some deep-seeded memories that need scratching...
I don’t think you’ll be too gripped to put this one down. The Intellivision was an
interesting and unique beast, but outside of a nostalgia trip, you’re probably not
going to sink the kind of hours and days into it like you did in the 80’s. It’s tough
to hold this up to, say, Metroid Prime Pinball in terms of killing time. But if you’re
of the kind who just absolutely has to have a shot of Vectron or Space Spartans in the
morning to function... then this is the best you’ll be able to do shy of getting your
hands on the original hardware. I, myself, prefer coffee.