 The world of video games has been laden with carpetbaggers from the start. For those unfamiliar with U.S. History, carpetbaggers were scam artists from the North that moved to the South after the Civil War to hawk inferior products in the war-torn southern states in an effort to make a quick buck. In a fine American tradition that began almost 150 years ago, Activision has smacked together an inferior product and is hoping to sell it to an unsuspecting audience. This is especially sad for those of us who recall our Intellivisions fondly and were looking forward to experiencing those great games again.
It's easy to tell what a lazy effort this collection is simply by looking at the list of games contained on it. Golf, Pinball, Soccer, Tennis, and Chess are all on this disc. Chess? Freaking Chess?!? Chess is boring enough in real life, who wants to play a video version? A worse idea couldn't be conceived if the UN formed the Committee to Think Up The Lamest Video Game In The History of the World. Instead of allowing Chess to fester in forgotten Intellivision oblivion where it belongs, Activision has decided to reintroduce video Chess to a hungry public. This alone is unforgivable, but is made even worse by the fact that really great games must have been passed over to include complete losers like Chess. B-17 Bomber, The Dreadnaught Factor, Lock 'N Chase, and even the classic Utopia are among the excellent Intellivision titles that are inexplicably absent from this compilation.
 Moronic game selection is only the tip of the iceberg on this waste of aluminum. The next level of disappointment lies in the emulation. Classic games appear on newer consoles through a process known as emulation. Programs called emulators trick the processor into behaving the way the original processor did and the actual original source code (ROM) from the games is run through the emulator. The trouble is, it is very difficult to do this perfectly and it is common to see differences in the way the ROMs are run when the emulated version is compared to the original. Anyone who has used Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) on the PC knows that perfect or near perfect emulation is possible; but it is much easier to trick a versatile processor like a Pentium chip than it is to trick the PSX's CPU. Even MAME can't run everything perfectly and sound files sometimes have to be downloaded separately to guarantee authenticity.
Similarly, sounds and other files can be stored separately on a PSX disc for the game to pull from when it needs them. For example, the once great music for Snafu on the Intellivision sounds just plain terrible on this disc. The emulator just can't handle sound accurately. The original music could be sampled directly from an Intellivision and stored on the disc, but this would require some additional programming. Activision didn't want to go through that trouble and thinks that you should have to listen to the inferior emulated music. The trouble with this disc is an emulator was simply written, and the original ROMs run on it. Nobody ever bothered to locate and correct the things in the games that do not work correctly. So what you end up with is Shark! Shark! with virtually unrecognizable ending music and Night Stalker with colors that are incredibly off. This is due simply to laziness and is completely inexcusable.
 As if poor emulation wasn't bad enough, Activision also decided to include one of the clumsiest interfaces I have ever experienced on any game. Let's say you selected game 2 in Snafu and now you want to play game 8. Sorry, friend, you're going to have to exit the game and reload it. There is no way to change your settings once you have made them. This may not sound bad, but consider the steps you have to go through. First, you have to exit the game and wait for the title screen to load. Then you have to tell the system you want to play a new game and wait for the game selection screen to load. Then once you have selected your game, you have to wait for that to load. You must go through this incredibly annoying loading process every time you want to play a new game or even to change the configurations on the game you are already playing. The very concept of even having to load menu selections in the final generation of PSX software is ludicrous. Who green-lighted this?
Gameplay: 3
 On many of the titles I thought they completely messed up the control. Then I realized that they had done just the opposite - they ignored the control issue altogether. Intellivision used an original controller known as the DISC. Many people didn't like it even back then, but it worked well and most titles were designed with the idiosyncrasies of the DISC in mind. This control scheme does not transfer well to the PSX controller. Play control should have been tweaked, but wasn't. Maybe Activision did this on purpose hoping that you would be so busy fumbling around with the controller that you wouldn't notice how terrible the emulation is.
Graphics: 3
It is important to note here that I am not considering the fact that even if emulated perfectly the graphics would still look dated. In other words, this game would have gotten a high score if the graphics faithful to the original versions. Most of the graphics actually do look like the originals, but simple things like some of the colors being off really detract from the experience. I don't think that I'm alone in expecting hardware as powerful as the PSX to be able to perfectly duplicate titles from hardware as primitive as the Intellivision. Just sloppy.
Sound: 2
 Ugh, the biggest sore spot. Most of these games sound nothing like the originals. Sound can be the most difficult thing to emulate, but the truth is there just isn't that much sound in Intellivision games. What little sound there is could have easily been sampled and manually injected into the games, especially given the fact that the CD medium contains 650 Megs to play with. Even if it meant having to leave off the open FMV (it wouldn't), it should have been done. Period.
Value: 2
Even at $30 this is a rip-off. Although it's fun to experience these old games again, that fun wears off quickly when you have to sit through all the load times and realize that your old favorites either don't sound right, don't look right, don't control right, or aren't contained on the disc at all. If you do end up buying this, it will go on your shelf and start collecting dust after the first day.
Overall: 2
I can't recommend this game to anyone. If you never played with an Intellivision, this is not how you should experience it for the first time. If you are an Intellivision fan, the imperfections in this compilation will drive you insane. Who did they make this disc for? As far as I can tell, nobody. They're just trying to capitalize on the retro gaming fad. This is digital carpetbagging at its best and I hope that you don't fall for it.
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 Reader Reviews
- N/A
| Score: |
| 2 |
| Gameplay |
| 3 |
| Graphics |
| 3 |
| Sound |
| 2 |
| Value |
| 2 |
| "Even at $30 this is a rip-off. Although it's fun to experience these old games again, that fun wears off quickly when you have to sit through all the load times and realize that your old favorites either don't sound right, don't look right, don't control right, or aren't contained on the disc at all" |
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