The Angry Video Game Nerd plays Intellivision - Double Vision Part 1

Here you go.

SpiderMwa plays Atlantis

Yep, it's a Missile Command clone. At least it tries to be original.

Atlantis was a Missile Command clone released for the Intellivision. But instead of being more of what you'd expect from the game it was based on, there are pretty interesting things.

You have two turrets, but you have infinite ammo, and you can choose which one fires a bullet with the press of a button. Your enemies have to run into the explosions from the bullets in order to die, and enemies can't take splash damage from enemy explosions, unlike in [i]Missile Command[/i]. Unfortunately, you can only shoot two bullets at one time. 

As enemies fly around, you'll have to shoot them, and if you miss them there's a chance they might attack Atlantis and take out one of the various buildings with a air-to-ground laser beam. When a building is destroyed, there's no way you can get it back like in [i]Missile Command[/i] where you can restore a city after enough points are scored.

Each stage, or "day," is split up into three sections: morning (a blue sky with clouds), evening (a grey sky with clouds) and night (a black sky with search lights moving back and forth). While this is somewhat ambitious for an Intellivision game at the time, it ends up becoming a pain in the ass as well.

The enemies are nothing spectacular, altough sometimes they move slowly and sometimes they move fast. They don't fly in a straight line most of the time, either; instead they move up and down as they move from one side of the screen to the other. There are three waves of enemies in a section of the day, and when you beat all three waves, you go to the next part of the day.

However, some of the enemies will blend in with the clouds and can be hard to see at times. That's nothing compared to the night section, where all the enemies are as pitch black as the sky itself and the only way to see them is with the searchlights. Your only hope is to shoot ahead of them as soon as you see them and pray that you see the explosion that results from a direct hit on an enemy. You can see them if you fire the laser, but by then it's too late.

You do have a UFO that you can sic on the enemies and fly around wherever you want in, but you can only use it for 90 seconds which you can look at on the bottom of the screen, where they will be listed directly underneath where its silo is. After 90 seconds, the UFO will return to the silo and you'll have to wait for the timer to go back up before you can use it again. Thankfully, you can take it back to the silo manually before this can occur. If it gets hit by a ship or a missile, you won't be able to use it again until the next day.

When all the buildings are inevitably destroyed, the game is over, and a giant UFO flies off. Turns out, this is the Cosmic Ark from the Atari 2600 game of the same name, which is considered by many to be the first-ever console sequel. In this sequel, it is implied that the Ark flew off with the survivors.

Is this a good game? Well, if not being able to see your enemies on the night screen really ticks you off, you're going to hate this game. The searchlights do make it easier, but it makes the last third of every day more of a nailbiter than it should be. Other than this, the game is worth picking up and playing a few times, and if you like a bit more challenge in your classic games than usual, you'll be hooked on this one.

For Your Enjoyment: A Tag Team Match (Or Two)

Here's the tag match in action.

Another match, this time with both teams computer controlled.

Very special thanks to IntellivisionDude for making these two videos, which provided quite a bit of the info I used for the previous blog entry. 

ed1269 plays Body Slam! Super Pro Wrestling

You can plays one-on-one...OR tag team? That's pretty deep for this system...but it's actually pretty good past that point. Read on!

The year was 1988. Mattel Electronics was shut down and in its place was INTV Corporation. Even though the Intellivision had fallen out of favor along with Atari and Colecovision after the crash, INTV Corp. still released games for the system until 1991, with a very small output of only a few games a year. Nintendo's Famicom (later the Nintendo Entertainment System) was the big man on campus, and the Sega Mega Drive (known in America as the Genesis) was about to steal the NES's thunder.

Meanwhile, in real life, wrestling was becoming less and less territorialized compared to the old days. The National Wrestling Alliance, or NWA, had been around for years, but the World Wrestling Federation (later WWE) had broken from it and started buying out other independent regional federations to make the first worldwide federation. Jim Cornette Promotions was about to be bought by Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting, and become what is now known as World Championship Wrestling.

Up until this point, there actually was a wrestling game on a popular system: Microleague Wrestling for the Commodore 64 and Atari ST. Even though it was an official WWF product, the game was more of a turn-based strategy game. There were other games on the market at the same time, but there were no likenesses of any popular wrestlers in any of them (WrestleMania for the NES wouldn't be in existence for at least another year). Even worse, you were stuck with either one-on-one matches or tag team matches. There was no choice. 

Body Slam! was one of the games from that time that was just a work of pure fiction. There's no name for the federation and all the characters are fictional. However, you can choose to do a one-on-one or tag team match at the beginning of the game. About time!

You pick which controller is either human or computer, then pick the skill level. The higher the skill level you pick, the more moves you can use. After that, you choose who gets to fight each other. In case of a tag match, you choose the first team first, followed by the second team.

The characters don't all fight exactly the same. Some wrestlers have more energy and can take more punishment, while some wrestlers are stronger than others. Despite the graphical limitations causing all the characters to look the same, the developers did make each character a different color as well as give them some sort of face decoration to make it easier to tell them all apart. Doctor Pain wears a surgical mask over his nose and mouth, while Sheik of Slam wears a Muslim headdress on his head. I think whoever did the graphics was a big Iron Sheik fan. You have twelve characters in all, and they all have different stats.

Height (Ht) allows you to cause more damage with your throws, Weight (Wt) makes you faster or slower and dictate the power of your aerial attacks, Coordination (Co) allows you to take control during a grapple, Ego (Eg) dictates how likely you are to taunt after a successful throw, and Strength (St) dictates the power of your blows.

You then get to choose your wrestler's or tag team's moves and map out which buttons do what moves. Choose carefully, as some moves such as Possum Roll and Duck & Cover let you avoid attacks, and Mega Leap and Flying Sit Drop (the leg drop move, obviously) are aerial attacks. You get to choose up to nine moves in all out of a maximum of 26. That's even better than the World Championship Wrestling video game for the NES released back in 1990, which only allowed you up to four grapple moves out of a possible eight or nine that were mapped to one of directions on the D-Pad.

Certain moves can only be done while grappling, while running, or while on the top turnbuckle. You'll have to vary your moves a lot and put certain moves on a certain row of the number keys to make it easier to use them when you need to and remember where they are. Choosing your moveset carefully and mapping your moveset to buttons you can remember are both critical in this game.

The wrestlers enter the ring, and the game begins. Unlike real wrestling, you have a few timed rounds in which to win like in old-school European wrestling, and you also see a ring girl (something you don't see in wrestling today). You can review your moves here before it switches to the gameplay screen in case you've forgotten your moveset.

You have four minutes to do as much damage to your opponent as possible. The timer is in the center of the ring, while the corners of the ring have the health bars. The one on the left is for the left controller, while the one on the right is for the right controller. As you successfully perform moves, your opponents energy starts dropping towards zero. Of course, the same can happen to you unless you're ready for your opponent's tactics and know what the opponent is able to perform move-wise. After four minutes, the round ends and the next round begins. 

The numbers up top are used for the pin attempts, the top rope moves as well as for count-outs. You can knock the opponent out of the ring and beat him up outside of the ring for more damage as well as an attempted count-out victory. If a wrestler doesn't get out of the ring by the count of 20, he loses. As long as either player is outside the ring, the count continues until both players are in the ring. Also, you lose the match if you stand on the ropes for more than five seconds.

There is a button used for running in case you'd like to perform clotheslines and powerful running kicks. If you want to bounce off the ropes and run in the opposite direction, you can do that too.

Some of these moves are pretty unrealistic - you can punch or kick somebody all the way to the ropes or straight out of the ring. I'm pretty sure even Goldberg couldn't do that.

When both competitors walk into each other, they tie-up (grapple each other), it's either man for himself. Mash buttons 1 through 9 to use the grapple moves you've assigned to any of the numbers, and remember your move set to fight your way to victory!

Whenever you get the opponent down successfully, there's a chance your character will also taunt to get a little bit of energy back. Of course this leaves you open to attack, so you have to be careful when you use it.

Move names show up at the bottom when a move is performed. When the left player does a move, it's in green. If it's the right player, it's in blue.

In the tag team mode, you can go to the corner and press 0 to tag. For the left player, it's the lower-left corner. For the right player, it's the upper-right corner. Go to the respective corner and you'll switch wrestlers out, even though the game only shows one person from each time at any given time.

CLEAR allows you to picked up a downed opponent, while ENTER allows you to go for the pin. Your opponent will be stunned when picked up, giving you a second or two to get a free attack in. Also, there are no rope breaks in this game, so you can pin somebody anywhere and not get in trouble for it. If you get pinned, move the Control Disk repeatedly. That's your only hope. The side keys also let you escape a pin, but you'll lose stamina as a result.

Is this a good game? Believe it or not, the game allows you to choose between singles and tag matches. Considering that other games for home consoles during the mid-to-late 1980s didn't allow you to do that, that's a big deal. This game let you pick from a wide variety of moves, and unlike the WCW game for NES, you're not limited to just grapple throws and submissions; you basically get to choose how you do everything as top rope moves, punches, kicks, and defensive maneuvers that you have are all dictated by you.

I have a couple of gripes for a game that pushes the Intellivision to the max, though. One, there aren't any submissions, so the matches can only be won by pinfall or count-out. Finishers also don't exist either, so unless you're pretending your character is Hulk Hogan or Randy Savage, you're out of luck. Also, there's no way to employ any heel tactics such as foreign objects or manager interference, so this is a fair fight all the way. The only way to unleash your inner heel is to use the Possum Roll if you've got it assigned to your move set.

As I said before, the ability to voluntary take action in tag team matches is a nice touch, but even then you and your friend can't be on the same team. Instead, you're forced to fight against each other. At least you can choose between two game modes, but still...

Also, be prepared to use all the buttons on your controller...even the side buttons. This game will give the controllers a work out, and even potentially break them after a while. Thankfully, the game is available on the PlayStation 2 compilation Intellivision Lives, which makes this a moot point, especially when you know how to use the controller on that version.

Anyway, despite the system and controller limitations, this game blows away some of the games from the other systems of the time and is well worth playing. There is probably no other game on the system that has this much depth to it, and with depth comes a good amount of replay value. If you see this game sitting at a yard sale or flea market somewhere, don't pass this up.

Special thanks to IntellivisionLives.com for this recreation of the manual. This really helped out a lot when it came to figuring which button did what!

The Duncan's Thin Ice Intermission

Here's some information on the game from IntellivisionLives.com. Voochko on Ice was meant to be its own game, but Mattel Electronics shut down before its own cartridge could be manufactured. Thankfully, it exists and is playable via a secret code. Press Enter on the left controller, press Clear on the right controller and press Reset on the console.

The game was originally meant to have an introductory screen. Not surprisngly, Voochko on Ice also had one. (Voochko was the mascot for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.) The penguins were changed to Russian cossack dancers and got Russian names.

Gee Tee plays Duncan's Thin Ice

Here's a game that's not too bad.

I later learned that Duncan's Thin Ice was actually a theme change of Disco No. 1 from Data East. By the time the game was brought to Mattel Electronics, the disco theme was horribly dated and the disco and roller skater was changed to one of the Poles and a penguin, respectively.

Duncan's Thin Ice (also known as just Thin Ice) was mentioned on the Angry Video Game Nerd's "Double Vision" episode for all of ten seconds. That's too bad, because the game is halfway decent.

You play as Duncan the Penguin, who apparently likes to play pranks on the other penguins by skating circles - or in this case, squares - around them and cause the ice to collapse around them. By doing just this, you get points. However, there is a seal who hates Duncan for whatever reason who will bounce him around like a ball and off the ice if he gets his fins on him. He'll move around the playing field in an attempt to home in on Duncan's trail and catch him.

If the walrus happens to lock on to your skating trail, you'll have to jump into the water to shake him off. The walrus will be moving around the playfield again in his renewed attempt to find you again.

The torches increase your speed, and while it makes it easier to break the ice around the penguins, it can also make it easier to accidentally run smack-dab into the seal.

You'll notice that the number of igloos in the background indicate what level you're currently on. As you play through the game, you'll also see polar bears who aren't any friendlier than the seals. They'll toss you straight out if they catch you.

How To Play Bomb Squad

Here it is: somebody made a pretty good guide of what to do in Bomb Squad and how to do it.

Bomb Squad - as played by NecroVMX and as seen on VideoGameQuickClips

Yep, that game.

Well, by watching this game I can understand how to play it better...kinda.

First of all, you're going to need the Voice Synthesis Modulator in order to play this game, or you're going to be completely in the dark when it comes to what to do. Of course, if you've seen the first part of The Angry Video Game Nerd's "Double Vision" two-parter, this is a given.

You'll then get a series of symbols marking all the circuits of the bomb. Pick a circuit and be ready to defuse.

When you reach the bomb defusing screen, you'll be told which part to get rid of first, second and third...in no particular order. And if you forget? Wait a few seconds, and the game will tell you what to do next. Once you get it into your head what to do when, it's down to knowing what to use on which part of the bomb. The more you can remember for a longer amount of time, the easier this game can be.

You have wire cutters, clamps, a soldiering iron, and a fire extinguisher as your tools. You'll use the wire cutters to cut the connections.  Then, you'll have to get the clamps out, grab the part you cut out, drop it away from the bomb, replace it either with a big gray wire or an icon, and then weld it in place with the soldering iron. As you work, the game will tell you if you need to move your tool a little more in a certain direction or if you've used the wrong part. If you make a big mistake, the music gets faster and the timer's speed accelerates until you rectify the problem.

The part replacement is trial and error, as sometimes you may be able to get away with replacing it with an icon that looks like what you just removed. Other times, you'll have to use either a big gray wire, a part that looks like what you just removed or a completely different part of the same color. You'll have to know how to pull off what you need to do as quickly as possible in order to get through the game, especially on the harder difficulty settings.

Every once in a while, a part of the bomb will flash. You'll have to spray this part down with the fire extinguisher in order to keep it from catching fire and speeding up the countdown.

As you defuse parts of this massive bomb, some spots will be empty while others will be a green square. These green squares make up numbers, and you'll have to correctly guess the numbers in order to figure out the code and defuse the bomb once and for all.

As you're doing this, you have a time limit where you have only have so many minutes to figure out the code before the bomb blows up the entire city and the game ends. You'll have to figure out what to do and quickly in order to cut off the circuits, find the numbers, guess them correctly, and save the entire city from apocalypse. If you win, you'll get a parade in your honor that consists of a one-screen ending showing the city from far away as well as fireworks.

You can have between one to three digits for the code, and there are also three difficulty levels, so you actually have some replay value once you beat the game on the easiest setting just to see how high you can go. It's an interesting game as much as it is challenging, even for the technology at the time, and if you like those two adjectives to describe your games, this one just might be for you...just know what you're in for.

The BurgerTime Intermission

Here's the animated advertisement, with other versions "coming soon" at the time.

Italian/Italiano

Here's a UK TV spot for the game. I can understand the whole "join the bandwagon" thing going on here, but if I were dressed like that, I'd either be in a Burger Time convention, a Halloween party or a mental institution.

The original advertisement for the game. Once again, the Intellivision version was already out by this time, with more ports in the future.

Croooow plays Burger Time for Intellivision

Not only is this a Let's Play, but also a review of the game as well.

Imagine making burgers at some place like McDonalds or Wendy's or Jack-In-The-Box. Now, make it more fun. Yeah, that's better. Now, add enemies like sentient pickles, fried eggs and hot dogs that want you dead. Congratulations, you have an arcade game that would be ported to many systems, including the Atari systems, Intellivision, Colecovision and also the NES.

Since this is obviously the Intellivision Fab Five, I'm going to go ahead and cover the Intellvision version, especially since I've given this bad boy a shot myself.

Here, you're running around doing...what else? Making some gigantic burgers. Just walk over the buns, the burgers, the lettuce, and the meat until it's completely flattened. They'll go down one level or to the first level that has something on it. You can also knock down all the toppings to the bottom like dominoes. As you're doing this, sentient pickles, eggs and hot dogs want you dead. You'll have to slip past them as you do your job and get people fed.

An interesting note about this version of the game. When you either start the game or when you die and get taken back to the screen that shows what level you're on, you can tell what the five enemies are for the level as they're all coming at you only for you to be whisked away to the gameplay screen. At the beginning, it's four hot dogs and an egg. When you hit Level 5, it'll be two hot dogs, two pickles and an egg. When you lose all your lives, the enemies finally destroy you on the Game Over screen.

The enemies have some AI here. They always seem take the shortest path to you no matter what, but in actuality have their own pattern. This can be predictable at times but unpredictable at others. You can be cornered and not know it until it's too late, and you'll be dead in a matter of seconds unless you have a pepper spray shot you can use to stun them. You only have a few shots of pepper before you're completely defenseless, and you'll need to pick up some french fries, ice cream cones, cups of coffee, ketchup bottles and other non-sentient foods in order to add one shot to your pepper spray.

It's not perfect, however. If the enemy is right next to you - and I mean, right next to you - the pepper shot will appear behind the enemy and you're dead. If the enemy is in front of you but not up in your grill, you're in perfect range. If he's able to breathe into your face, you're dead and there's nothing the pepper spray can do to save you. It's like you have to shoot it a fraction of a second ahead of time.

Even worse, if any part of the enemies touch you, you're dead. The enemy's head touched your feet? You're dead. Their feet touch your head? Yup, you're dead there, too. I know that this is common with first and second-generation consoles, as well as some games on third-generation consoles, but come on.

There is one good thing about the AI, though. You can basically have the enemies running around in circle if you know how to string them along, as the enemies can't double back in case you somehow get the slip on them and end up right behind them. They'll have to circle around in order to see you again.

If you really want to give them the big brush-off, wait for them to be on or below one of the various burger ingredients. When the ingredients fall, they'll either take the fall with it or gets squashed by whatever gets pushed downwards. Different enemies give you different amounts of points. Not sure how hot dogs would taste with hamburgers, but at least it makes sense because they go together because of how America is with hot dogs and hamburgers. Can't have one without the other. They just go together, because this is America. Pickles make perfect sense, since they've been on burgers since forever. Fried eggs? Well, there are some places that serve fried eggs on burgers, with Denny's being the most common example.

Doing this is somewhat of a science depending on which enemies you're trying to do this with. Sometimes, enemies are seemingly easy to manipulate into falling for your traps, but other times instead of going straight for you, they'll go in a different direction such as up a ladder at the last second. Either way, this is a good strategy for getting extra points, because you're need them to get the extra lives and survive into the later levels. It's even more impressive when one topping falls on the next, which falls on the next, which falls on the next until the one at the bottom is at the bottom of the screen and enemies get killed in the process. It's so wonderful it's almost sadistic, and it almost makes you wonder why these foods just grew legs and came after you.

If you do that, though, you'll have to remember where the enemies disappeared when they either fell to their deaths or got crushed by burger toppings before they gave you points, because sometimes this is the exact area where the enemies will respawn after a few seconds, if not from the sides of the screen at the top of the stage.

The levels have simple layouts at the beginning, but as you progress they become more complex at times. This leads to situations where you may get completely surrounded by both sides on a platform and the ladders that lead up and down are pretty far away from you, which will cause you to use a pepper spray shot in order to get out of it. Also, the graphics are bigger, so don't expect a lot of floors and ladders to move around in like in the arcade original.

Another big gripe I have is with the controls. Now, you may be thinking, "PrinceWatercress, the controller is just telephone buttons and some circle for a D-Pad!" Here's the kicker. When you're going from a floor to a ladder, you can't just stopping holding Left or Right and then press Up and Down like with the cross-shaped D-pads modern gamers are used to. Instead, you have to roll your thumb from the side to the top or bottom like you're trying to pull off Hadokens in Street Fighter II. This is off-putting at first, but as you get used to this and see what makes the AI in this game tick, you'll be able to breeze through at least the first few screens.

You get an extra life at every 10,000 points. While this is expected, it would be slightly better to appreciate if you weren't dying all the time because of preventable mistakes being made because you're not used to the Intellivision controller or the AI. Once again, this is a moot point once you get used to the controller and the game's nuances.

Is this a bad game? No, not really. As a matter of fact, this is definitely one of the better games of the first half of the 1980s. It's worth picking up, but if you're not used to the Intellivision controller, be prepared for a heck of a learning curve.