Intellivision

"Ah, memories..."

This system is right up there with the Atari 2600 as one of the coolest first generation home consoles of all time. You may not know this, but this system is also the first true 16 bit system ever made. Many fun games were made for this system, and the system was designed in an expandable way to allow the player to experience many types of gameplay.

Graphics Capabilities: 9
For it's time, this system was able to do quite a few things that the 2600 could not. As stated above, the Intellivision had a 16 bit CPU. This CPU actually ran at less than 1 Mhz. This may sound weak and slow, but the system was capable of very smooth animation, which was something most 2600 games didn't have. All you have to do is look at the trademark Intellivision man walking around on the screen to see what I mean.

Audio Capabilities: 8
The sound system of the Intellivision is almost as powerful as the sound system in the NES. In games, it's not hard to hear two distinctive square wave sound channels and one noise channel. The only thing keeping the sound system from having NES quality sound is lack of a triangle wave channel. Some games have quite catchy music regardless.

Controller design: 8
Here is where things get interesting. The controller of the Intellivision had a cycloid direction button (not unlike the one on the NES Max controller), two buttons on each side and a BUNCH of buttons on the front. This sounds tedious and confusing and at times it was, but the large amount of buttons led to gameplay depth not seen on any other system during its time.

Each game came with a controller overlay. It was inserted through a slot above the front buttons and covered them with instructions. Yes, it was a pain to keep switching the overlays all the time, but they made games more fun (and sometimes you couldn't play without them). Think about it this way...the NES is powerful enough and has enough RAM to have on screen menus. The Intellivision was trying to supply menus like these on the controller instead of on screen, since the system wasn't strong enough to. Many games utilized overlays in this way.

The only drawback to the controller system was that both controllers were permanently attached to the unit (and docked in special holders built onto it). This meant that if both controllers broke, your system was unusable.

Game Library: 9
Many innovative and fun games were created for this system! The Intellivision was known for great strategy games (like Sea Battle, which allowed you to build your own customized army of war ships, each with different strengths and weaknesses), as well as awesome action games (Tron Deadly Discs, which is one of the games that shows off the above mentioned smooth animation powers of the system...this game was also made for the 2600, but it wasn't as good). There were also simple, addicting games (like Snafu, a good example of an Intellivision game that had quite cool music for a home console game of its time), as well as arcade ports (Donkey Kong and others). An interesting fact...both Nintendo and Sega made games for this system before their own console wars began!

Other peripherals?
There was one upgrade you could get for the Intellivision called the Intellivoice module. It allowed for digital speech in games through the use of phoneme samples (remember Dr. Sbaitso?). I myself have not been able to use one, unfortunately, so I can't tell you much more about it.

Bottom Line?
If you can actually find a working system and games, I suggest you buy them. You will have a very rare, very classic home system with games that are still fun to play even today. If not, there is an official emulator for this system, but not all the games are emulated yet. The ability to have very innovative game play styles at such a young age of the video game industry is what made this system great, which is why I give it a 9.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/01, Updated 07/09/01