🚨 UPDATE 🚨 I don't know why I didn't think of this during production, but I found the intellivisonlives website archived on the Wayback Machine. See the hype! 😁 web.archive.org/web/20050210022140/www.intellivisionlives.com/retrotopia/direct2tv.shtml
Wasn't Intellivision Lives the Blue Sky Rangers' website? I remember in the early 2000s they came out with a free Intellivision emulator for PC and released commercial ports for virtually every system at the time. They still have a website today but it's apparently maintained to preserve the history of the Intellivision.
When my son was young enough to play video games, I bought this handheld for us to play together. It didn’t matter if the sounds were off or music missing, he didn’t know any of that. He’s eleven now and plays VR games, but still loves playing Intellivision on the original and plug n play versions.
I'm glad you showed "Thunder Castle". That was one of my favorites on the classic game system, which was the first for me. I never had the Atari, and didn't want it since I could play those at the homes of friends. My late father and I loved "B-17 Bomber" with the IntelliVoice module. At the time, I pretty much had all of the games, though some not amazing, they still were enjoyable for time period. My second game system was the fantastic Atari Lynx Portable Gaming System, which I still my smaller version 2 unit in perfect condition with all of the games. Actually, I just recently upgrade the screen to a BennVenn LCD unit, which is like night and day to the original. I'll also be getting an SSD-style blank card that I can put every Lynx game ROM on that BennVenn puts out as well. It really is amazing to think that every title released for that system can not be put on one card instead of needed to shuffle through them one at a time.
This is literally how the Atari Flashback 1 was done, as a NOAC. These chips were everywhere, and they were easy to integrate. e.g. the pQube Atari Blaze mini-arcades that I wrote code for, were also NOACs.
One Saturday when I was a kid or family went to the mall. As usual, Mom gave me a buck or two and off I went towards Aladdin's Castle. On this day though, I never made it there. There was a Radio Shack you had to walk by to get to the arcade, and I always poked my head in to see what was there on my way. They usually had one console or another set up to demo a game, and on this day they had an Intellivision playing Snafu. I was completely, totally hooked right away! Loved the gameplay, the music, everything about it. Fast forward about 30 years, and a lucked into a deal on an Intellivision with an Intellivoice and a bunch of games. The first thing I did (after checking to see if it still worked) was to see if Snafu was one of the games. The second thing I did was buy a copy on eBay! It was just as much fun as I remembered, though not as challenging. Apparently 30 years of playing lightcycle games marginally improved my proficiency. :-)
The number one thing that would have completely risen my suspicions about this product is the actual controller. So many Intellivision games used a combination of the multi-directional disk, the side buttons, and the membrane button keypad with an insert over it to show you what each membrane switch did. This just looks like a very very cheap Sega Genesis controller. There's no way that the game experience will be in any way authentic with this thing. I remember seeing these in stores and just thinking, "There's no reason for this thing to exist!"
@@GenXGrownUp I remember a ton of those bootleg games. I had one that came with a knockoff called “Mario 14” and it was just Kid Niki 3 with Mario’s face.
If the original Intellivision came with a controller like this (or almost any controller other than the one it actually came with), then I’d be an Intellivision fan.
Now you are making me revisit the compilations of Intellivision games on the PlayStation, PS2 and PSP systems. I think I do remember this system, but I wasn’t interested at that time. Glad I passed on it.
@@GenXGrownUp Well I never had an intellivision and did not know it was running under an NES hardware. Ignorance is bliss. Just like playing Resident Evil in VR, after that you can no longer play on a flat screen.
I got the Intellivision flashback (61) when it was first released in 2014. Mine still runs & plays great today (and at the time, I even e-mailed the company, to get all the overlays for all 61 games - they shipped them to me in less than 3 days).
@@MLJ7956 Nice! Found a few sites that allow reprints which is good- Not sure if photo paper is best yet. I think the controls are a bit sloppy IMHO- especially in D&D, Night Stalker, and Shark Shark---- I also miss the genuine "EHH" error sound :)
I hope Atari or MyArcade get some Intellvision products out. I'd like to see the forthcoming Gamestation Portable with that keypad include some Intellivision games.
Thanks for this video. I bought this a while ago because I was nostalgic about the Intellivision and I couldn’t tell if these games were not the same or if I had just misremembered the quality. I’m glad to hear that this was a different port and that’s why it was bad. I really appreciate he side to side comparisons of the real intellivision to this plug n play.
The 2000s were a weird time for retro games. It was nice to see Intellivision and Atari games re-released, but i cant for the life of me, cant reason why paddle games were meant to be played on a joystick. Intellevision games just dont transition on a d-pad controller.
As a teenager with a budding interest in retro gaming around this time, I remember picking one of these up from a local discount store (it was discounted down to like $5 or something). The one that I had was slightly different--the controller was shaped more like a Sega Genesis controller and it contained a few less games than this one. I had previously bought the Jakks Pacific Atari Joystick and absolutely loved it (and it was my first introduction to Atari!!). Unfortunately, even my untrained eyes could see that this one wasn't at the same quality level. I specifically remember realizing that there was no way to "pass" in the football game, despite finding information online that it was possible to pass in Intellivision football. I actually even reached out to customer service about it, and they confirmed that yeah, there's no way to do that. Just a football game without a major mechanic of football, y'know :P It still boggles my mind that these companies thought it worthwile to completely reprogram these games in order to make these subpar products. So glad we live in an age where emulation is so much better.
Looking at this video, which again is one of the reason i follow this channel...i have come to get a better appreciation for pre-NES retro gaming because, in all honesty, this video highlights which might be THE REASON why retro gaming from that era is seen as bad as it is. Because of products like this. You look at the accurate footage, and yes, the games don't necessarily get any better, but there's alot more consistency with everything in terms of movement, gameplay and presentation. This thing however, because of how it reworks certain things, not only loses elements such as the sound in Thunder Castle, it makes it look cheaper than it actually is. The animations work under tweens rather than actually changing the frames, which yeah it makes it look smoother, but ironically makes it look worse because the movement doesn't match the game's aesthetic. Which i wouldn't be surprised if alot of other attempts at plug-n-play games, as they might have been people's only experience with these games, play part on why this era of gaming is not seen positively by younger generations. They most likely, LITERALLY SPEAKING, don't know any better :V
I got this when it was being sold at retail in the UK somewhere between 2003-2005 - it didn't work at all and got returned straight away 😅. The Radica produced Mega Drive plug n' play gave me some better memories!
Back when I was collecting plug and plays I had one of these so I first hand experienced lol. I kept some of the plug and plays but this is one of the ones I got rid of. It was so bad you could convince me It was one of those unlicensed plug and plays like the power joy line of famiclones.
Funny thing is these games are theorized to be developed by Nice Code, who MAKES games for shitty famiclone consoles. Frankly, I am pretty convinced because holy hell these conversions feel bootleg as hell.
I loved Keith Robinson's management of Intellivision Productions since compared to the current Amico fiasco his management at least kept the brand relevant in an okay way but yeesh, this was definitely a misstep imo. It did well enough to end up misrepresenting these games to a whole new generation! Yay! Oh and also now they've been hacked up to high hell and put on a bunch of awful famiclone consoles by dreamGEAR without INTV Production's consent. ...Yay?
I found one of these in the trash a few years ago, but scrappers had cut the cords off it, and I was never sure how to figure out which wires went to which plug, so I never tried it.
The only thing I learned is that it doesn’t have… B! 17! BOOOOOOMBER!!!! Seriously play B-17 Bomber. And the Voice Synthesis Module is a must! You will love it! It has EVERYTHING! People! Talking! Furniture! Well you might not like it I dunno.
@@SciurusBelnades Resident Evil was brain-breaking when it first came out. I still remember the first time going outside the mansion and thinking "WTF, these games don't go OUTSIDE; how big is this place??!"
@@SciurusBelnades turns out the umbrella corporation is the bad guys from resident Evil. I don't remember that in resident Evil Revelations but anyways I only ever saw the car the one time so I'm not sure how I recognized the symbol.
Still some mediocre emulation on the sound department (as is common with Atgames units) but still leagues better than this garbage. Notably, the controller on the flashback is pretty damn close to the original and the games at least play (and sound, albeit at times a little messed up) like the originals. This plug and play just looks painful. Still glad I got the original console (a Master Component #2609 unit, aka the original "Model 1" Inty) overall but I think with a flashback I'd be pretty happy. If I was stuck with this plug and play, however...
I'm surprised nobody else has tried to do that. Most people have just used Intellivision Flashback controllers (Which, side note, are really good recreations of the originals) with adapters for PC and it works, but that drove up the price of Inty Flashbacks believe it or not! It became such a popular option among people wanting to emulate the system on PC.
I still have the "Intellivision Lives" CD ROM I bought in the mid 90's. All the games work great but, playing Intellivision games without an actual Intellivision controller just plain sucks, especially for the people who had them growing up, like myself. I use the Intellivision controller to USB adapter from Raphnet. You can buy them or build it yourself, it's all open source. All you need is an Intellivision controller. It can be vintage or repro.
Actually not too bad emulating games back from the day when emulation was very difficult. It’s only in the past 10 years that I’ve seen emulation really jump up in value.
The emulation here is perfect. The problem is, it's emulating an NES rather than an Intellivision, and playing re-writes rather than the originals being promoted.
Without even watching the rest of the video, I love how you opened this junk game you bought from a flea market for $5, so carefully, like it's a treasure. I understand the cutting tape part. But removing it from the box...so slowly. Like it's the holy grail. 😂 Love your content and dedication to our generation.
I collect Plug N' Play games, and came across one of these years ago as a bare bones unit at a Goodwill for a few bucks(It's still in my collection), & the only positive I can say about it being an Intellivision kid very early on in life, is the games do at least function, which more than you can say about some of the ones with cheap no name Chinese games on them.
I bought one of these at Bed, Bath, and Beyond when they were new. Knowing what the original intellivision controllers looked like, I was suspicious of the controller when I saw it. I still have the unit, but honestly, I don't think I've used it more than 2 or 3 times since I originally got it.
Jon, I forget if I told you this. I have plug-n-plays whereas I use an S-video adapter and improve the picture quality. No conversion box, just a cable adapter. Try it.
I also noticed that this system looks like it's running the games at four times the speed that the original games ran at. They made them run way too fast. It's VERY evident in Thunder Castle, Star Strike, and even in Space Armada, where the thing runs so fast that the chip doesn't even have time to make the explosions appear when you shoot the aliens. They just disappear, using that same stock, explosion sound that they seem to be using in all the space games. They couldn't even be assed to make proper sound effects for these games and just seem to have copy-pasted them.
I remember around this same time, I got these vintage arcade games in these little controllers that you plug into the TV like this thing here. Having actually experienced the real games in the arcade, the second I turned the games on, I KNEW something was wrong. Especially in the audio department. The games didn't have anything like the audio they had in the arcade and they sounded like they had replaced all the sounds with NES sounds. And on top of that, the games looked slightly off. At the time, MAME was out and was reproducing the games and their sounds pretty much perfectly. But those TV game unit things... They were obviously an NES on a chip and they had just re-written these games to run on it. That puzzled the heck out of me because at the time, they could have VERY EASILY used an emulator like MAME to run the thing but they chose not to. And because of that, the games sounded and looked NOTHING like the actual games.
Some of the Jakks Pacific plug n plays I actually really cool. My favorite is the paddle controllers because how old are you going to play with a paddle controller?
3:48 Oh god. In big, giant, bold letters, "25 in 1!" which just SCREAMS "Cheap, Chinese-made, knockoff, crap." All their vintage game stuff is usually emblazoned with "100 in 1!' of "10000000000000 in 1". It's not the number of games so much as the wording that just triggers the dread for me because I've been conditioned to dread them.
The Tommy Tallarico Intellivision Amico debacle came after this device and before the Atari purchase. Though many would like to forget it. Especially those who paid deposits.
I got this from my aunt as a gift one time! I saw the select screen and was flooded with awful nostalgia. I played for probably less than an hour and realized (even at 12) that it sucked
Remember this at the mall , 2003 i was siked for "World of Warcraft" and buying Dragon's Lair 3D and WWE Wrestling GameCube games . intellevision plug n play was a downgrade in 03 . Nowadays this a excellent novelty find , retro games are more hype than modern gaming currently 😅
Its like the 1st Atari Flashback...I hate the NEs on chip type devices... oddly enough, I found an NES cart with all these roms slapped onto it that does play on real hardware 😅
Yep, your review sums up my exact thoughts back years ago when I got this thing as a stocking stuffer. Had never played anything Intellivision prior to this thing and it left a BAD impression. Until I played a _real_ Intellivision, that is, and realized that its games were way way better than this thing. As for the fate of this controller thing? Ended up in a drawer, and it’s been sitting there for 20 years. Sad thing is, _Thunder Castle_ and _Thin Ice_ could’ve had some excellent music on the NES. I know because I’ve remade their soundtracks in Famitracker! 😅
Intellivision emulation has always been kind of lacking. Most didn't work well (if at all), or were extremely difficult to get working. About 15 or so years ago I bought a Intellivision cd for the PC (can't find the name, might be Intellivision lives). I was able to use the installed executable from that cd to play any INTV games on my computer (not just ones installed from the cd) without any hassle like other emulators at the time. Modern emulators like Emulation Station, or Batocera do this pretty well now (just have to configure the controls). I have never owned any plug & Play units like this, they always just seemed to cheap to me, and never really have the games I like.
Same time, Mattel/Intellivision was a _brick wall,_ when it came to ROMs on the Internet, in the ‘90s/‘00s. They made Nintendo look friendly toward ROM sharing. So you couldn’t find them, anywhere, even if you had an emulator... Meantime, I’ll give you $6 for it! 😅
Thanks. Never seen that one, but I'll skip it if I ever do. I have mixed feelings about plug-n-plays. They were one of the only ways to get some retro games back in the day without going through a lot of effort, but some of them were just so cheap. Quality was all over the place. I still have a box full of them that I'm unlikely to ever use again, but I don't want to get rid of them despite having better options.
The shoulder buttons bring up an onscreen keypad. The games on the collections don’t really use the keypad except to start the game, choose difficulty, etc, so it works pretty well
I bought one of these back in the day, I thought it was a bit strange as for as far as I can make out the Intellivision was never that big here in the UK. Didn't think much of it, I thought the Intellivision Lives compilation for the PS2 was much better...
I came really close to buying one of these for 20 bucks at a pharmacy back in the day. I'm really glad I didn't. Something about the controller just threw me off. Nobody knew about it being just a bunch of NES ports. But I always suspected something and your video settled it in my mind once and for all... See, I also watch a guy named Vinny. He runs a channel called Vinesauce. He does videos where he plays those bogus, bootleg plug-n-play systems and reacts to them. He's hilarious, btw, check him out if you haven't. Anyway, he's done a lot of those systems and I'm convinced that a lot of the horrible games he's encountered are ROM hacks of games from this Intellivision one. The Space Armada footage proved it to me, but there are many, many more reskinned games ripped off from just these few lackluster games. Most of the other games are bootlegged from old NES games and they're all crappy NES-on-a-chip pieces of crap, so it all checks out. So thanks for solving this particular mystery. Please enjoy this 'Like'. Great channel!
Didn't know Atari bought them out. Hope they release something similar to the Atari 50th Anniversary for PC. I'd buy it just to overplay The Dreadnaught Factor again like when I visited my grandfather and uncle back in the day. lol
Oh, I see... _They did it!_ BTW, the AtGames Intellivision (and ColecoVision) were awesome. Hopefully Atari licenses one like that to MyArcade, or someone else good. I happened to be looking for stuff to buy, when I stumbled across the Flashbacks, when they were $60, but I had no idea those would be the only ones (with so many 2600 Flashbacks) and would later command a couple hun. Glad I bought ‘em, straight away, despite the Flashback rep (esp at the time). Great video, as always, yo! Thanks!
I have the other version with 10 games. I remember buying it at Dollar General when I was in early high school. No income yet, so I had to scrape money together to get it. I did NOT enjoy it at all. It still sits in my top 3 biggest gaming regrets. Still have it complete in box for some reason though.
Just a thought, but could the lack of original music be a copyright issue? Sort of like WWE having to change music for old matches and events so they don't have to pay Jim Johnson or Jimmy Hart royalties. Copyright is a big issue, especially when music is concerned (think of all the games the US didn't get because they might have a Beatles sound alike that they felt might have been too close to the original), but I don't know.
How fascinating! Reprogramming everything to NES hardware is interesting but ... yeah, these ports are BAD. But it's also a pretty tough technical challenge. There's a huge mismatch in resolution and pixel aspect ratio, and there's no pleasant way to deal with it. The original horizontal resolution is 160 pixels, which is both significantly less than 256 pixels and significantly more than 128 pixels. Going with doubled pixels, for 128 pixels wide, looks a bit closer, but then they run into the problem that the NES can only handle 32 pixels wide of sprites on a scanline (normally 64 pixels wide, but halved with doubled pixels). The Intellivision could handle more width of sprite pixels on a scanline. So, I can see places where they used tiles for pseudo-sprites, because otherwise the NES couldn't handle it without flickering like crazy. This means chunky movement for those things.
I have seen this on Ebay several times and passed because I had not heard anything good about it. I have never played on an actual Intellivision before , but I have played the 2600 version of Astro Smash and that version on the P&P seemed slow and clunky.
Yes, the games are quite terrible this way, but they're not bad considering they had to be redone from scratch, on totally different hardware, likely on budget. However, the real cool thing an Intellivision fan can get out of this for their $5 is a very interesting conversation item and a piece of history.
I remember these. They sucked! One of the things I am really hoping the new Atari does is release a bunch of the intellivision games it now has rights to mapped to modern control schemes. Even back in the day, the controllers on all models of the intellivision were terrible. The library is fantastic though. So many good games on there, and the homebrew scene it legit as well.
I suspect this is using an NES-on-a-chip, like so many cheap clone emulation consoles from that period were. It kinda has that look to it in the menus. So the games were probably some sort of quick and dirty NES ports, so to speak.
I run down all the details here: ruclips.net/video/61xo9ePeZsM/видео.html In short, Atari didn't purchase the Amico, so it's not involved in that console at all.
This plug and play makes me glad I grew up on the Lives collection (Yes, the one on Console, even if the PC version is better) because at least the games play like the originals, strange button mappings on that version aside. This would've sucked and given me a horrible impression on these games, even ASTROSMASH looks butchered! HOW does that happen? (And I now own an original Intellivision Master Component because I can hehe)
About a week late, after Atari purchased Intellivision I had a craving to play some. So I purchased one online. Pure junk, I actually just purchased an Intellivision 2 off eBay, hopefully everything works as promised
The Intellivision II is not perfect, but one thing it really had going for it was detachable controllers so it's possible to get better aftermarket ones.
Oddly enough this seems to have smoother graphics but in doing so it looses ALL the charm of Intellivision. This looks like a cheap console ripoff, whereas Intellivision always seemed like they harnessed a PC of the day into the system. And the number pad controlled only added to that element to me. In making “improvements” they took all the life out of it. Keep the good stuff coming, as I’m down for Coleco, Atari and all that 2-bit to 32-bit goodness. Cheap Game: $5 Jon’s Content from it: PRICELESS!!
🚨 UPDATE 🚨
I don't know why I didn't think of this during production, but I found the intellivisonlives website archived on the Wayback Machine. See the hype! 😁
web.archive.org/web/20050210022140/www.intellivisionlives.com/retrotopia/direct2tv.shtml
Cool I'll check it out 🙃
Wasn't Intellivision Lives the Blue Sky Rangers' website? I remember in the early 2000s they came out with a free Intellivision emulator for PC and released commercial ports for virtually every system at the time. They still have a website today but it's apparently maintained to preserve the history of the Intellivision.
@@GenXGrownUp Intellivision 25! NOW WITH FLAVOR!
Bad flavor ☹️
Now to 2003 is the same as 2003 to 1982. Holy cow do I feel old now.
Yep. I'm right there with you. 👴
I just felt my hair turning gray...
Oh god...
I don't need maths to tell me I'm old. My knees are doing that.
When my son was young enough to play video games, I bought this handheld for us to play together. It didn’t matter if the sounds were off or music missing, he didn’t know any of that. He’s eleven now and plays VR games, but still loves playing Intellivision on the original and plug n play versions.
I'm glad you showed "Thunder Castle". That was one of my favorites on the classic game system, which was the first for me. I never had the Atari, and didn't want it since I could play those at the homes of friends. My late father and I loved "B-17 Bomber" with the IntelliVoice module. At the time, I pretty much had all of the games, though some not amazing, they still were enjoyable for time period. My second game system was the fantastic Atari Lynx Portable Gaming System, which I still my smaller version 2 unit in perfect condition with all of the games. Actually, I just recently upgrade the screen to a BennVenn LCD unit, which is like night and day to the original. I'll also be getting an SSD-style blank card that I can put every Lynx game ROM on that BennVenn puts out as well. It really is amazing to think that every title released for that system can not be put on one card instead of needed to shuffle through them one at a time.
Saw you at Infinity Con over the weekend, great panel!
Thank you for attending, Willy. And Welcome! 😁
This is literally how the Atari Flashback 1 was done, as a NOAC.
These chips were everywhere, and they were easy to integrate.
e.g. the pQube Atari Blaze mini-arcades that I wrote code for, were also NOACs.
You did those? Nice. Pretty sure I had one while back.
I think it's pretty cool it's a nice enough copy to show your kids what the games were like.
At least the game list is pretty solid. Snafu is still one of my favorite Intellivision games to play with a friend.
snafu and lock n chase for me!
One Saturday when I was a kid or family went to the mall. As usual, Mom gave me a buck or two and off I went towards Aladdin's Castle. On this day though, I never made it there.
There was a Radio Shack you had to walk by to get to the arcade, and I always poked my head in to see what was there on my way. They usually had one console or another set up to demo a game, and on this day they had an Intellivision playing Snafu. I was completely, totally hooked right away! Loved the gameplay, the music, everything about it.
Fast forward about 30 years, and a lucked into a deal on an Intellivision with an Intellivoice and a bunch of games. The first thing I did (after checking to see if it still worked) was to see if Snafu was one of the games. The second thing I did was buy a copy on eBay!
It was just as much fun as I remembered, though not as challenging. Apparently 30 years of playing lightcycle games marginally improved my proficiency. :-)
Totally. This device would be worth picking up (I actually considered doing it at some point) if only the games weren't butchered
The number one thing that would have completely risen my suspicions about this product is the actual controller. So many Intellivision games used a combination of the multi-directional disk, the side buttons, and the membrane button keypad with an insert over it to show you what each membrane switch did. This just looks like a very very cheap Sega Genesis controller. There's no way that the game experience will be in any way authentic with this thing. I remember seeing these in stores and just thinking, "There's no reason for this thing to exist!"
I love how the shooting sound in Star Strike is the game select sound effect in those cheap Chinese NES bootlegs, AKA Famiclones.
Right?
@@GenXGrownUp I remember a ton of those bootleg games. I had one that came with a knockoff called “Mario 14” and it was just Kid Niki 3 with Mario’s face.
Snafu had awesome music when the game was over.
If the original Intellivision came with a controller like this (or almost any controller other than the one it actually came with), then I’d be an Intellivision fan.
Now you are making me revisit the compilations of Intellivision games on the PlayStation, PS2 and PSP systems. I think I do remember this system, but I wasn’t interested at that time. Glad I passed on it.
Intellivision Lives! was both Keith Robinson (RIP 2017) & Stephen Roney of the Blue Sky Rangers. 😎
I bought that thing back the and i liked it. Gaveit to a friend who had an intellivision as a kid. He was really happy
Whatever you were on, I'm glad you shared with your friend.
@@GenXGrownUp Well I never had an intellivision and did not know it was running under an NES hardware. Ignorance is bliss. Just like playing Resident Evil in VR, after that you can no longer play on a flat screen.
I have this still from 20 years ago. The modern controller with no keypad makes half the games unplayable, but at least Astrosmash is on here. 😁
Good evening Jon ! Have you tried Intellivision lives on the GameCube or the PS2 ? It would be very interesting to watch your review on this product
I haven't, Yan. I may see if I can find it for Gamecube through Dolphin. Thanks for the suggestion.
Oh thank you!!!! I had this and the Flashback BOTH in my shopping cart and went with the FLashback (61, arrived Saturday) - thx!!
I got the Intellivision flashback (61) when it was first released in 2014. Mine still runs & plays great today (and at the time, I even e-mailed the company, to get all the overlays for all 61 games - they shipped them to me in less than 3 days).
@@MLJ7956 Nice! Found a few sites that allow reprints which is good- Not sure if photo paper is best yet. I think the controls are a bit sloppy IMHO- especially in D&D, Night Stalker, and Shark Shark---- I also miss the genuine "EHH" error sound :)
"probably should have kept my 5 bucks" truer words have never been said.
Keep up with Intelivision, I never played one so it's cool to see.
I hope Atari or MyArcade get some Intellvision products out. I'd like to see the forthcoming Gamestation Portable with that keypad include some Intellivision games.
Thanks for this video. I bought this a while ago because I was nostalgic about the Intellivision and I couldn’t tell if these games were not the same or if I had just misremembered the quality. I’m glad to hear that this was a different port and that’s why it was bad. I really appreciate he side to side comparisons of the real intellivision to this plug n play.
The 2000s were a weird time for retro games. It was nice to see Intellivision and Atari games re-released, but i cant for the life of me, cant reason why paddle games were meant to be played on a joystick. Intellevision games just dont transition on a d-pad controller.
As a teenager with a budding interest in retro gaming around this time, I remember picking one of these up from a local discount store (it was discounted down to like $5 or something). The one that I had was slightly different--the controller was shaped more like a Sega Genesis controller and it contained a few less games than this one. I had previously bought the Jakks Pacific Atari Joystick and absolutely loved it (and it was my first introduction to Atari!!). Unfortunately, even my untrained eyes could see that this one wasn't at the same quality level. I specifically remember realizing that there was no way to "pass" in the football game, despite finding information online that it was possible to pass in Intellivision football. I actually even reached out to customer service about it, and they confirmed that yeah, there's no way to do that. Just a football game without a major mechanic of football, y'know :P
It still boggles my mind that these companies thought it worthwile to completely reprogram these games in order to make these subpar products. So glad we live in an age where emulation is so much better.
I love how the controller evokes absolutely nothing about the original console or controllers! 😮🤪🤔
I know! 🙄
Good video!
Congratulations on 50k!
Thanks, John!
Awsome job Jon 👍👍
Great video! Thanks again Jon! 👍😎👍
My pleasure!
Looking at this video, which again is one of the reason i follow this channel...i have come to get a better appreciation for pre-NES retro gaming because, in all honesty, this video highlights which might be THE REASON why retro gaming from that era is seen as bad as it is. Because of products like this.
You look at the accurate footage, and yes, the games don't necessarily get any better, but there's alot more consistency with everything in terms of movement, gameplay and presentation.
This thing however, because of how it reworks certain things, not only loses elements such as the sound in Thunder Castle, it makes it look cheaper than it actually is. The animations work under tweens rather than actually changing the frames, which yeah it makes it look smoother, but ironically makes it look worse because the movement doesn't match the game's aesthetic.
Which i wouldn't be surprised if alot of other attempts at plug-n-play games, as they might have been people's only experience with these games, play part on why this era of gaming is not seen positively by younger generations. They most likely, LITERALLY SPEAKING, don't know any better :V
I got this when it was being sold at retail in the UK somewhere between 2003-2005 - it didn't work at all and got returned straight away 😅.
The Radica produced Mega Drive plug n' play gave me some better memories!
Back when I was collecting plug and plays I had one of these so I first hand experienced lol.
I kept some of the plug and plays but this is one of the ones I got rid of.
It was so bad you could convince me It was one of those unlicensed plug and plays like the power joy line of famiclones.
Funny thing is these games are theorized to be developed by Nice Code, who MAKES games for shitty famiclone consoles. Frankly, I am pretty convinced because holy hell these conversions feel bootleg as hell.
I think it's a nice curiosity but really not the way to play Intellivision. Great video as always :-) Keep up the awesome work!
man i hated anything that used NES on a chip...but according to the late Keith Robinson this sold in huge numbers believe it or not
I loved Keith Robinson's management of Intellivision Productions since compared to the current Amico fiasco his management at least kept the brand relevant in an okay way but yeesh, this was definitely a misstep imo. It did well enough to end up misrepresenting these games to a whole new generation! Yay! Oh and also now they've been hacked up to high hell and put on a bunch of awful famiclone consoles by dreamGEAR without INTV Production's consent. ...Yay?
I found one of these in the trash a few years ago, but scrappers had cut the cords off it, and I was never sure how to figure out which wires went to which plug, so I never tried it.
Intellivision is my fave pre-Nintendo console. The old collections on consoles were good!
I never bought this because I had those, thankfully
As soon as I saw the rocks flying diagonally as soon as they appear on Astrosmash, blechhhh
The only thing I learned is that it doesn’t have…
B!
17!
BOOOOOOMBER!!!!
Seriously play B-17 Bomber. And the Voice Synthesis Module is a must! You will love it! It has EVERYTHING!
People! Talking! Furniture!
Well you might not like it I dunno.
Your profile picture looks like what I saw on the side of a car once I think it said umbrella corporation on it but I could be wrong.
@@bland9876 Good catch! That’s exactly what it is! 😁
@@SciurusBelnades Resident Evil was brain-breaking when it first came out. I still remember the first time going outside the mansion and thinking "WTF, these games don't go OUTSIDE; how big is this place??!"
@@granitepenguin yes it was. And the jump scares were great. It also helped to get me over my fear of zombies.
@@SciurusBelnades turns out the umbrella corporation is the bad guys from resident Evil. I don't remember that in resident Evil Revelations but anyways I only ever saw the car the one time so I'm not sure how I recognized the symbol.
you should really review the Flashback Atgames Intellivision from 2014, much better representations.
Still some mediocre emulation on the sound department (as is common with Atgames units) but still leagues better than this garbage. Notably, the controller on the flashback is pretty damn close to the original and the games at least play (and sound, albeit at times a little messed up) like the originals. This plug and play just looks painful.
Still glad I got the original console (a Master Component #2609 unit, aka the original "Model 1" Inty) overall but I think with a flashback I'd be pretty happy. If I was stuck with this plug and play, however...
I keep hoping that someone comes out with a modern INTV controller you can use on your PC with your favorite emulator.
It's gotta just be a matter of time now, right?
I'm surprised nobody else has tried to do that. Most people have just used Intellivision Flashback controllers (Which, side note, are really good recreations of the originals) with adapters for PC and it works, but that drove up the price of Inty Flashbacks believe it or not! It became such a popular option among people wanting to emulate the system on PC.
This plug n play was my very first approach to gaming, i was 6 at best
I still have the "Intellivision Lives" CD ROM I bought in the mid 90's. All the games work great but, playing Intellivision games without an actual Intellivision controller just plain sucks, especially for the people who had them growing up, like myself. I use the Intellivision controller to USB adapter from Raphnet. You can buy them or build it yourself, it's all open source. All you need is an Intellivision controller. It can be vintage or repro.
Actually not too bad emulating games back from the day when emulation was very difficult. It’s only in the past 10 years that I’ve seen emulation really jump up in value.
The emulation here is perfect. The problem is, it's emulating an NES rather than an Intellivision, and playing re-writes rather than the originals being promoted.
Without even watching the rest of the video, I love how you opened this junk game you bought from a flea market for $5, so carefully, like it's a treasure. I understand the cutting tape part. But removing it from the box...so slowly. Like it's the holy grail. 😂 Love your content and dedication to our generation.
Haha! Yeah, I only know one way to open stuff. Even opening garbage, I suppose. Thanks for watching and for your kind words! 😁
@@GenXGrownUp Garbage or not, it's still a piece of gaming history. You can still learn a lot from fossil poop. 🙂
I collect Plug N' Play games, and came across one of these years ago as a bare bones unit at a Goodwill for a few bucks(It's still in my collection), & the only positive I can say about it being an Intellivision kid very early on in life, is the games do at least function, which more than you can say about some of the ones with cheap no name Chinese games on them.
I bought one of these at Bed, Bath, and Beyond when they were new. Knowing what the original intellivision controllers looked like, I was suspicious of the controller when I saw it. I still have the unit, but honestly, I don't think I've used it more than 2 or 3 times since I originally got it.
Makes sense.
Jon, I forget if I told you this. I have plug-n-plays whereas I use an S-video adapter and improve the picture quality. No conversion box, just a cable adapter. Try it.
I also noticed that this system looks like it's running the games at four times the speed that the original games ran at. They made them run way too fast. It's VERY evident in Thunder Castle, Star Strike, and even in Space Armada, where the thing runs so fast that the chip doesn't even have time to make the explosions appear when you shoot the aliens. They just disappear, using that same stock, explosion sound that they seem to be using in all the space games. They couldn't even be assed to make proper sound effects for these games and just seem to have copy-pasted them.
I remember around this same time, I got these vintage arcade games in these little controllers that you plug into the TV like this thing here. Having actually experienced the real games in the arcade, the second I turned the games on, I KNEW something was wrong. Especially in the audio department. The games didn't have anything like the audio they had in the arcade and they sounded like they had replaced all the sounds with NES sounds. And on top of that, the games looked slightly off. At the time, MAME was out and was reproducing the games and their sounds pretty much perfectly. But those TV game unit things... They were obviously an NES on a chip and they had just re-written these games to run on it. That puzzled the heck out of me because at the time, they could have VERY EASILY used an emulator like MAME to run the thing but they chose not to. And because of that, the games sounded and looked NOTHING like the actual games.
Some of the Jakks Pacific plug n plays I actually really cool. My favorite is the paddle controllers because how old are you going to play with a paddle controller?
I have this plug-n-play. Only Shark Shark and AstroSmash were decent enough to play. The others were unplayable.
3:48 Oh god. In big, giant, bold letters, "25 in 1!" which just SCREAMS "Cheap, Chinese-made, knockoff, crap." All their vintage game stuff is usually emblazoned with "100 in 1!' of "10000000000000 in 1". It's not the number of games so much as the wording that just triggers the dread for me because I've been conditioned to dread them.
At least the intellivision lives compilation on the GameCube is pretty cool. Much better than this junk
The Tommy Tallarico Intellivision Amico debacle came after this device and before the Atari purchase. Though many would like to forget it. Especially those who paid deposits.
Understood
I got this from my aunt as a gift one time! I saw the select screen and was flooded with awful nostalgia. I played for probably less than an hour and realized (even at 12) that it sucked
Remember this at the mall , 2003 i was siked for "World of Warcraft" and buying Dragon's Lair 3D and WWE Wrestling GameCube games . intellevision plug n play was a downgrade in 03 . Nowadays this a excellent novelty find , retro games are more hype than modern gaming currently 😅
Its like the 1st Atari Flashback...I hate the NEs on chip type devices... oddly enough, I found an NES cart with all these roms slapped onto it that does play on real hardware 😅
Where'd you come across that. I can't seem to find anywhere that these versions have been dumped.
Yep, your review sums up my exact thoughts back years ago when I got this thing as a stocking stuffer. Had never played anything Intellivision prior to this thing and it left a BAD impression. Until I played a _real_ Intellivision, that is, and realized that its games were way way better than this thing. As for the fate of this controller thing? Ended up in a drawer, and it’s been sitting there for 20 years. Sad thing is, _Thunder Castle_ and _Thin Ice_ could’ve had some excellent music on the NES. I know because I’ve remade their soundtracks in Famitracker! 😅
Oh, I bet! Did you happen to post that work anywhere online to hear? 🎧
@@GenXGrownUpI have not, but as soon as I can get to my desktop I will. It’s in storage at the moment after moving.
Was the ROM on this ever dumped? I'd love to add it to my collection.
Not to my knowledge.
Intellivision emulation has always been kind of lacking. Most didn't work well (if at all), or were extremely difficult to get working. About 15 or so years ago I bought a Intellivision cd for the PC (can't find the name, might be Intellivision lives). I was able to use the installed executable from that cd to play any INTV games on my computer (not just ones installed from the cd) without any hassle like other emulators at the time. Modern emulators like Emulation Station, or Batocera do this pretty well now (just have to configure the controls). I have never owned any plug & Play units like this, they always just seemed to cheap to me, and never really have the games I like.
Same time, Mattel/Intellivision was a _brick wall,_ when it came to ROMs on the Internet, in the ‘90s/‘00s. They made Nintendo look friendly toward ROM sharing. So you couldn’t find them, anywhere, even if you had an emulator... Meantime, I’ll give you $6 for it! 😅
3:32 It looks like they sent you a nice little dead fly or insect of some type in the tray under the product too! Bonus!!!
That was no extra charge. Gotta love flea maret junk! 🦟
@@GenXGrownUp❤huge the wizard fan saw it on VHS I was 6 in 1990 I quote that movie every time I see a terrible controller
What WOULD you recommend for Intellivision games? (you forgot to add the links!)
Which links?
I love the power glove its so bad 😊
Thanks. Never seen that one, but I'll skip it if I ever do. I have mixed feelings about plug-n-plays. They were one of the only ways to get some retro games back in the day without going through a lot of effort, but some of them were just so cheap. Quality was all over the place. I still have a box full of them that I'm unlikely to ever use again, but I don't want to get rid of them despite having better options.
Do you have an Evercade device? They have two Intellivision collections they did a really good job on
I do. How do they tackle the keypad conundrum?
The shoulder buttons bring up an onscreen keypad. The games on the collections don’t really use the keypad except to start the game, choose difficulty, etc, so it works pretty well
I bought one of these back in the day, I thought it was a bit strange as for as far as I can make out the Intellivision was never that big here in the UK. Didn't think much of it, I thought the Intellivision Lives compilation for the PS2 was much better...
It most certainly is!
I came really close to buying one of these for 20 bucks at a pharmacy back in the day. I'm really glad I didn't. Something about the controller just threw me off. Nobody knew about it being just a bunch of NES ports. But I always suspected something and your video settled it in my mind once and for all...
See, I also watch a guy named Vinny. He runs a channel called Vinesauce. He does videos where he plays those bogus, bootleg plug-n-play systems and reacts to them. He's hilarious, btw, check him out if you haven't. Anyway, he's done a lot of those systems and I'm convinced that a lot of the horrible games he's encountered are ROM hacks of games from this Intellivision one. The Space Armada footage proved it to me, but there are many, many more reskinned games ripped off from just these few lackluster games. Most of the other games are bootlegged from old NES games and they're all crappy NES-on-a-chip pieces of crap, so it all checks out.
So thanks for solving this particular mystery. Please enjoy this 'Like'. Great channel!
The WebSite was Functional until the Self Made Leader of rthe Blue Sky Rangers passed away a few years back
🤔
Has anyone done a tech video on porting 2600 and intellivision games to the NES-on-a-chip? That would interest me.
Didn't know Atari bought them out. Hope they release something similar to the Atari 50th Anniversary for PC. I'd buy it just to overplay The Dreadnaught Factor again like when I visited my grandfather and uncle back in the day. lol
Don't quote me on this but I heard supposedly they were going to add some of those games to the Atari 50 for free.
@@bland9876 I can live with that. Keeping fingers crossed! 😀
@@Corsina check this guy's other videos. He has some on the update coming to the Atari 50 collection.
it cant be that bad .... a coffee is more than $5 ... well it was 50cent when we were kids!
How could it be worse than that disc and those awful rubber buttons that were almost flush with the sides of the controller? Lol
Oh, I see... _They did it!_
BTW, the AtGames Intellivision (and ColecoVision) were awesome. Hopefully Atari licenses one like that to MyArcade, or someone else good. I happened to be looking for stuff to buy, when I stumbled across the Flashbacks, when they were $60, but I had no idea those would be the only ones (with so many 2600 Flashbacks) and would later command a couple hun. Glad I bought ‘em, straight away, despite the Flashback rep (esp at the time).
Great video, as always, yo! Thanks!
they were thinking of you in the future and removed the music so you would not get any copyright strikes ...
Ha!
Still better content than what you are going to get out of Tommy and the Amico!
Ouch!
I have the other version with 10 games. I remember buying it at Dollar General when I was in early high school. No income yet, so I had to scrape money together to get it. I did NOT enjoy it at all.
It still sits in my top 3 biggest gaming regrets. Still have it complete in box for some reason though.
Sorry to hear. 🥲
"Suspiciously Generic" LOL i love that label
Just a thought, but could the lack of original music be a copyright issue? Sort of like WWE having to change music for old matches and events so they don't have to pay Jim Johnson or Jimmy Hart royalties. Copyright is a big issue, especially when music is concerned (think of all the games the US didn't get because they might have a Beatles sound alike that they felt might have been too close to the original), but I don't know.
Maybe, but like in the case of Frogger, when a song can't be used it's often replaced with something else. This is just silence! 😉
LR6 is just another "code" for AA Battery 🙂
Dang. That a real disappointment. I have never heard of that unit. And, I am not sad about that. But, still an enjoyable video! 👍🏻
How fascinating! Reprogramming everything to NES hardware is interesting but ... yeah, these ports are BAD.
But it's also a pretty tough technical challenge. There's a huge mismatch in resolution and pixel aspect ratio, and there's no pleasant way to deal with it. The original horizontal resolution is 160 pixels, which is both significantly less than 256 pixels and significantly more than 128 pixels.
Going with doubled pixels, for 128 pixels wide, looks a bit closer, but then they run into the problem that the NES can only handle 32 pixels wide of sprites on a scanline (normally 64 pixels wide, but halved with doubled pixels). The Intellivision could handle more width of sprite pixels on a scanline. So, I can see places where they used tiles for pseudo-sprites, because otherwise the NES couldn't handle it without flickering like crazy. This means chunky movement for those things.
I have seen this on Ebay several times and passed because I had not heard anything good about it. I have never played on an actual Intellivision before , but I have played the 2600 version of Astro Smash and that version on the P&P seemed slow and clunky.
How the heck do you play Baseball with that controller? If ever an Intellivision game required an overlay, it was Baseball.
So would these ports run on an actual NES if someone dumped the roms?
Theoretically, yes!
Yes, the games are quite terrible this way, but they're not bad considering they had to be redone from scratch, on totally different hardware, likely on budget.
However, the real cool thing an Intellivision fan can get out of this for their $5 is a very interesting conversation item and a piece of history.
I remember these. They sucked! One of the things I am really hoping the new Atari does is release a bunch of the intellivision games it now has rights to mapped to modern control schemes. Even back in the day, the controllers on all models of the intellivision were terrible. The library is fantastic though. So many good games on there, and the homebrew scene it legit as well.
I hope Atari will produce some Intellvision products, I'd like to have an Intellivision+ after my beloved Atari 2600+
Me too!
Wish versions of the games
You should try the Atari plug and play system from Jakks Pacific.
I'd pay $5 to play Vectron with those controls.
i'm kinda shocked at the bad sound implementation
Right? We know NES has remarkable sound capabilities.
HOLY CRAP 2003? ffs
Someone at the first or second year of too many games gave me this for free
I had the 10 in 1 version of this and yeah....,..
I've seen picutres. It's less of a boomerang shape and more of an oblong controller.
I suspect this is using an NES-on-a-chip, like so many cheap clone emulation consoles from that period were. It kinda has that look to it in the menus. So the games were probably some sort of quick and dirty NES ports, so to speak.
No need to suspect. Verfied and discussed in the video.
@@GenXGrownUpThis is what happens when my attention is divided, lol. But thanks for confirming!
So if Atari owns Intellivision, are we gonna actually see the amico? Or is everything going to be ported to the V.C.S ?
I run down all the details here: ruclips.net/video/61xo9ePeZsM/видео.html
In short, Atari didn't purchase the Amico, so it's not involved in that console at all.
@@GenXGrownUp Sweet, thank you. Watching now.
This plug and play makes me glad I grew up on the Lives collection (Yes, the one on Console, even if the PC version is better) because at least the games play like the originals, strange button mappings on that version aside. This would've sucked and given me a horrible impression on these games, even ASTROSMASH looks butchered! HOW does that happen?
(And I now own an original Intellivision Master Component because I can hehe)
About a week late, after Atari purchased Intellivision I had a craving to play some. So I purchased one online. Pure junk, I actually just purchased an Intellivision 2 off eBay, hopefully everything works as promised
The Intellivision II is not perfect, but one thing it really had going for it was detachable controllers so it's possible to get better aftermarket ones.
Ohhhh, I'm sorry I missed the window of opportunity to help you dodge a bullet! 🥲
Oddly enough this seems to have smoother graphics but in doing so it looses ALL the charm of Intellivision. This looks like a cheap console ripoff, whereas Intellivision always seemed like they harnessed a PC of the day into the system. And the number pad controlled only added to that element to me. In making “improvements” they took all the life out of it.
Keep the good stuff coming, as I’m down for Coleco, Atari and all that 2-bit to 32-bit goodness.
Cheap Game: $5
Jon’s Content from it:
PRICELESS!!
Haha! Thanks for watching and for the kind words, Ted! 😀
Bought one at a thrift shop. Still in the drawer where it belongs.
checks out
💜