I've been waiting for the Intellivision Lives package to arrive for many months. When I heard that they were releasing 65 Intellivision games on one pack for $20, I couldn't imagine a reason not to get stoked for it. Having never had an Intellivision, but always having been curious, I thought that would be the perfect way to find out what I was missing back in the days of the Atari and the Commodore 64.
Unfortunately, the answer is "not much". Even though there are lots of games here, the simple fact is there are only a few (as in four or five in total) that a person would ever want to play more than even one time. And even those four or five aren't as engaging as most of the decent games that were available for the Atari 2600.
Part of the problem is the Intellivision controller - it has 12 buttons, and some games require that even a single player use _two_ controllers. The developers have given it their best shot, but there's just no reasonable way to make an Xbox or PS2 controller work well to emulate the 12-button numeric pad.
Another part of the problem for me is that a lot of the games require that lengthy instructions are memorized to even make them playable. Piggybacking on this is the fact that none of the instructions are printed in the manual, only included on screen (even though some of the games have 5 or more pages worth of instructions on how to play). It strikes me that a lot of the Intellivision games were simply far more cerebral than the Atari counterparts, and while this fits the name Intellivision, it doesn't work very well on a game system with graphics and sound in the sub Nintendo region. For example, while it's all well and good to know that the game "Utopia" is a building block resource-management game, possibly a forefather of Sim City or Civilization, I cannot imagine a person who would find it worth their time to learn how to play it and then attempt to derive enjoyment from it at this stage.
And all of this is a great, great shame, because it's clear that there is an awful lot of love poured into this compilation. The menu system is possibly the best I've seen on a compilation - there's a dreamy Pizza Place with decorative Intellivision neon, and several arcade machines which you approach in first-person to play categories of games. There's a bizarre soundtrack featuring 80's style pop songs either about Intellivision (sometimes rhymed with "incision" or "decision" in the lyrics) or featuring amusingly mutated samples from the games themselves. There are unlockable unreleased games, and commercials featuring George Plimpton which are quite entertaining, and a very nice history video about the system as well as programmer interviews.
But none of this makes up for the fact that the games, sadly and simply, are for the most part just awful. If you're an Intellivision hardcore fan, you've probably got an Intellivision hooked up and would have no need to fight your Xbox or PS2 controller to play them on this pack (maybe rent it for the videos, though you probably know most of the info they provide). If you're not an Intellivision hardcore fan, you'll be at best amused for a couple of minutes, at worst not even that. If you want some good old school games, pick up the Activision Anthology for PS2 (maybe someday for Xbox? Hello, Activision?), the incredibly tasty Midway Arcade Treasures for Xbox/Ps2/Gamecube, or the Namco Museum for any of the systems. They're head and shoulders above "Intellivision Lives".
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