Any decent shmups on Intellivision Lives! ?.....

dave4shmups · Post by **dave4shmups** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 12:26 am

Other then Astroblast?

Andi · Post by **Andi** » Sat Apr 02, 2005 3:35 pm

Other than Astroblast? No. And Astroblast is only tolerable. It's a very flawed compilation. The problem is that the controls for the Intellivision (a rotating knob) do not transfer well to the controls of the Gamecube (I'm not sure if it got released on something else, but I can't imagine it being any better). It sucks during its best times, and it unplayable during its worst.

dave4shmups · Post by **dave4shmups** » Sat Apr 02, 2005 6:14 pm

Yeah it was ported to the PS2. Well, thanks for the feedback Andi; I definately won't be buying this one!

BrianC · Post by **BrianC** » Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:23 pm

If you want shmups from a classic system, you are probably better off getting Activision Anthology for PS2. That collection has a good amount of shmups from one of the best third parties for the Atari 2600. It has a ton of other great games too. I only have the GBA one, but that one is great too.

CMoon · Post by **CMoon** » Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:27 pm

Andi wrote:Other than Astroblast? No. And Astroblast is only tolerable. It's a very flawed compilation. The problem is that the controls for the Intellivision (a rotating knob) do not transfer well to the controls of the Gamecube (I'm not sure if it got released on something else, but I can't imagine it being any better). It sucks during its best times, and it unplayable during its worst.

The intellivision did not have a rotatable knob. It had a 16 way pad (a disc you pressed down on in whatever direction you wanted to input). The real problem is that the system had a 0-9 numeric entry pad + 2 additional buttons and 4 side buttons.

Now if you think about that, standard directional input is 8 way, and even a psx controller (which has a lot of buttons) hasn't got enough to cover all the entries for the intellivision pad.

But the real problem I found with 'Intellivision lives' is that many of the games are in fact absent! Although there are dozens of games that were never actually published, some of the highlights (like the d&d and tron games) are gone--undoubtedly due to loss of rights.

For me there is also the issue of how well these games hold up--and the truth is, simply not that well. I understand the nostalgia for the 8 bit systems, but the only thing that really holds my interest in this set is nostalgia. Beyond that I find many console games from this period nearly unplayable...

Andi · Post by **Andi** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 3:45 am

CMoon wrote:The intellivision did not have a rotatable knob. It had a 16 way pad (a disc you pressed down on in whatever direction you wanted to input). The real problem is that the system had a 0-9 numeric entry pad + 2 additional buttons and 4 side buttons.

Most of the games don't use more than 3 buttons at maximum during game play (the menus are handled terribly with a on screen Intellivision controller that you must manipulate but that is livable) so the button count isn't so much the issue. I was apparently wrong about the rotatable knob, but SOMETHING is severely wrong with the directional control on those games (be it translating 16 positions to 8 or whatever).