This is the Intellivision. It was a pretty badass game system when I was a kid. It had a ton of fun games, the controllers were really cool and I played the living shit out of ours. One of the coolest features about Intellivision was that when a game frustrated you to the point of violence, you didn't even have to throw the controller. See the short coiled cord attaching the controller to the console? All you had to do was let go and it would violently fling itself into the machine. Brutal.
Intellivision was my favorite console when I was a kid (pre-nintendo). I thought it was far superior to the Colecovision. Also, the artwork on the game boxes was always the absolute best cover art for any system ever. Here are just a few of my favorite games in no particular order.
1) Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
AD&D was one of my absolute favorite games and had the baddest ass cover art of any game ever made. Go back in time to when you were 6, look at that game cover and try to not scream at your parents that you neeeeed this fucking game. It's impossible.
Notice the map in the beginning of the video. That's where you start. Basically, you gotta get from the left side of the screen to the giant mountain on the right side. The problem is, your little guy can't go through locked gates, rivers, forests or black mountains. You're probably saying to yourself, "Well gee. That's everything on the map. Fun game." Actually, shut up. You can go into the brown mountains at the start. When you get your guy near a brown mountain, it changes color to tell you how difficult a dungeon it has inside. Red being the difficultest. Anyway, running into a mountain takes you to its dungeon and it's in those that you can find an axe that will let you to pass through forests and a boat to travel over rivers. You can never go through black mountains though, so don't even think about it. I'm serious, just don't. Inside the dungeons you also run into a variety of different monsters depending on the difficulty of the mountain. Skinks (little black squiggles), bats, spiders (other little black squiggles), trolls (squiggly blue things), slimes (purple scribbles), snakes and red dragons. Basically, you just run around shooting the shit out of everything with your bow and arrow until you get to the final mountain, where you kill red dragonses and look for the broken pieces of a crappy blue crown. It's not Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or anything, but admit it... you want to play, don't you? ADMIT IT.
2) Astrosmash
Back in the 80's, there were a jillion Asteroids ripoffs and a jillion Space Invaders ripoffs, but this is the only one I can think of that ripped them both off and also happened to be better than anything.
Pretty colored asteroids are being flung at you from outer space. Shooting the bigger ones will split them into smaller ones. You don't have to shoot all the asteroids, but if they hit the ground you'll lose some of your points. Oh shit, not some points! There's also these white spinning pill looking things that come down at you. If you let one of those hit the ground, you die immediately. And sparkly dots that follow you and probably other stuff I've forgotten. The more points you get, the crazier everything gets and the background color changes to let you know when you hit a new level. Very simple, but a very badass game. I could play it for a really long time before I died and then I would cry to my mommy because it was unfair and that sparkly dot totally gypped me.
3) Microsurgeon
After AD&D, this was totally my second favorite. Blood, diseases, lasers, eyeballs, cartoon violence. Fun, fun, fun.
It's basically Fantastic Voyage, which I loved. You're in a little ship and you travel through the body, shooting lasers at cancers and infections and all sorts of cool things. There's a status screen that tells you how the patient's doing and where you need to go in the body to kill stuff. The fastest way to move through the body was through veins and arteries, but you could go directly through tissues. It made you slower than shit and white blood cells would attack you, but you could. The controls were kickass though. You used one of the gamepads to move and the other one to shoot! Holy shit! The only problem I had with this game was the patient never seemed to get better. I'd run around shooting all this cool stuff forever and the stuff always seemed to grow back. I wanted to save the poor bastard. But it didn't matter that much. The guy's innards looked cool as fuck and I got to shoot lasers. That's about all I need to be entertained.
4) Dragon Fire
Unfortunately I couldn't find more than two screenshots (which are from different versions of the game) or any decent videos of Dragon Fire gameplay. But here's the commercial:
Beware, thar be dragons. You start out on a drawbridge. Dragon fire shoots out of the castle at you while a dragon-loving archer tries to kill you from the ramparts. It was basically like playing the last 10 feet of the end castles in Super Mario Brothers over and over. Dodge, dodge, dodge and you get into the treasure room where you try to snatch up all the treasures while a dragon below tries to napalm your ass. And repeat until dead. Dragon Fire was ridiculously fun but after level two or so it was also ridiculously hard. A different level inbetween the drawbridge and the treasure room would have been nice, since the game gets so impossible so fast. But hey, it didn't need quarters and you could restart all day long. I remember having a day every once in a while that I just could not get past the drawbridge. It pissed me off more than anything. I'd be like, "What the fuck? Last week I could get past the first level, yesterday I could get through the first level, tomorrow I'll probably get past the first level. Am I retarded? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?! MOOOOMMMM!!!" I'm still reasonably certain that cartridge was cursed.
5) Space Battle
Despite the unimaginative title, this was one of the coolest space battle type games from the 80's. You start out on a radar screen where you send out three squadrons of your own ships to go out and fight with squadrons of bad guys before they can reach the middle (presumably Earth). Once your guys touch their guys (platonically) it switches to the titular space battle. Now you got some nifty crosshairs and you simply shoot at the oddly cylon-looking bad guys until they're all dead. The bad guys have cool evasive maneuvers and try to kill your crosshairs by shooting slow laser bursts at you. When you've taken care of all the mean people, it's back to the radar until your dots touch their dots again (sexually). It was pretty sweet to have a nice little rest inbetween the space battles. This was one of the only games that gave you a little rest like that. So, radar, battle, radar, battle, kill all the other dots and you win! I forget what happens when you lose. I'm assuming it says something like "YOU LOSE".
There were way more kickass games for Intellivision, but I've either forgot what they were called or I couldn't find any screenshots or videos (Sea Battle, for instance was one of the greatest games ever). Ooh, and there was this one Dracula game where you were Dracula and you had to go around sucking people's blood and then get back to your coffin before the sun came up. It was amazing.
Yeah, have some Dracula action, loser townsperson! POW!
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