thrax

For classic mac games i always thought the Dark Castle series was pretty good at being Halloween themed. The Mac version was black and white (as were most macs back then) but the first game was available on the Amiga, IIGS and Atari ST. This was one of the few games i thought looked better in black and white than in lower resolution colour, it would of been interesting if they made this game in the high res mode for the ST instead of the coloured lower res. I don't think Beyond Dark Castle was made for the other platforms though IIRC.

x3 for Dracula on the Intellivision. Truly one of many unique games for the system. How about the 3rd level on thunder castle with the skulls....

The empire strikes back game i thought looked great but it didn't take long to find it boring as compared to regular games on gen 1 consoles. I had intellivision and at the time lots of people thought the game 'star strike' (not a star wars title) was clearly modeled on the trench of the death star. I thought the dark forces games (early 90s?) were pretty good. In general I find with some of the sci-fi franchise games they often may use older engines and thus not get great reviews despite strong sales due to the franchise name.

Better too much then too little.

In general the games made by imagic were all excellent and innovative. Additionally, most of the RPG (Fantasy) games for intellivision were great too.

I had that Infocom game with scratch and sniff. Always liked how they made up for being text only games by having all these trinkets and items in the box.

Apple II. Great everything and unbeatable expandability with all those slots. If you had one in the late 70s it would of lasted you for a decade until 16 bit computers became mainstream.

What is actually more fun, IMHO, is visiting the former buildings where these companies were located. Most are just uninspiring office buildings, but it is still fun to visit the places where the games were developed. You are right about having uninspiring office buildings. I recall passing the old Canadian headquarters of Commodore and it was definitely so.

I'd love to see sequels to popular intellivision games that either had different levels, more enemy types or taking up another notch. FOr example how about a sequel to Night Stalker where the screen scrolls like Maze-A-Tron did. ALso many fans of Sword and Serpents who were good were probably upset that you couldn't fight the big dragon at the end. Maybe S&S2 could take care of that.

I've always wondered if anyone ever filled out one of those "get more info from advertisers" card in the back of vintage computer magazines. These were the cards with numbers you would circle to get pamphlets from companies that advertised. I'm sure a couple still have there original address and maybe they'll send you a vintage catalog!

Awesome find. It will be neat since the case won't be yellowed like many iics out there are.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I recall Space Hawk being universally hated as kid. Wasn't in Mattel's (loosely based) version of Asteroids? Astromash was originally looking more like asteroids too where the ship flied in the air but they changed it. You can still play it on emulation it is called astrosmash meteor.

There were lots of unique games. For example there was Mircosurgeon where you fly in the human body to cure people. That game was made by imagic which had excellent intellivision games in general. D&D Treasure of Tarmin was neat because it was 1st person. Learning curve is high as all the keys were used. Sword and Serpents was cool because one player can be a knight while the other a wizard. Each keypad was a separate spell for the wizard. Very cool for the day. I kinda like auto racing. It was top view and the round controller made manuvering fun. Hitting the dial on the "down" make the car oversteer which is great for throwing the car into tight curves. Just think you were able to "Drift cars" decades before it became a racing lifestyle for the tuner crowd LOL Now that they announced Tron Legacy Movie. There were at least 3 tron games i can recall. Solar sailer, deadly disks and maze-a-tron. Smashing the recognizers in the "eye" is really rewarding for the deadly disk game. IF you ever get the intellivoice module i found the B17 bomber game to be the best one. Very full bombing experience from flying to and from your base, shooting enemy planes and avoiding that flak!

Where i live in Canada there isn't a KB (i only heard of it from this site) but i remember when the market crashed in the 80s and all the department stores were liquidated their cartridges. I pretty well doubled my collection by gobbling up intellivision carts for 2 bucks when they were selling for as much as 60 bucks (which in those days was quite a bit of money!).

Maybe this will incourage people to make more intellivision homebrew games!

Developers usually made software that would also run on the C64, the 128D came out towards the end of Commodore's eight bit days so a software manufacturer would want to maximize sales by making software run on all the systems.

Memory snapshots are the best thing about emulators. Any programs that didn't have the save feature was usefull. I find that feature great on older 8bit computer emulators where save wasn't an option as well as gaming systems like intellivision. You can memory save a high level and resume a different day. You can also keep racking up the scores to see those levels you did not make it too when you were younger.

The O2 as mentioned look cool to me and to this day i've yet to play one. I always recall that keyboard looking cool. I had original intellivision but the intellivision ii looked good when it came out.

The apple II star blazers is not related to this TV series.

Aztec - amazing movement capability, very state of the art for its year Ultima II - all the ultimas were good but i thought UII had a great space travel part Transylvania - by far the most popular of the "graphic adventrue" genre, stay away from that werewolf Infocom games - I know they were only text games but coupled with the paraphanalia in the box sets they were quite good I recall losing countless hours with Gemstone Warrior, Drol, Conan, Star Blazer, Tapper, and Beyond Wolfenstein.

It was usually the beginning of the end when you got to the invisible robot levels and your base is destroyed. Another thing that sucked was the randomness of where the next gun would appear. If it appeared where the robots were loitering than it just made it that much harder to continue.

In the original premiere episode of "The A Team" I noticed Murdoch's lunantic ward room had a PAC-MAN machine in it.

I think the sum of numerous quarters easily out weighs the sum of a single cartridge. The games NARC and Final Lap were popular when i was in high school and the sum of all the quarters for those games easily is more than any cartridge. Probably the most expensive cartridges i purchased would be the first few games for intellivision when it first came out. When you adjust for inflation the cost for one game back then could easily but a few for today's system.

NO. Even before the 1st gen of game machines and 1st gen of home computers people were programming games on "big iron" systems.

I was thinking the Plimpton ads for Intellivision the moment I saw the title of hte thread. The other thing I liked about the Plimpton ads was that there were paradies of it. In Canada, there was an old comedy show called SCTV (like a SNL) that made fun of those commercials.