Intellivision Reviews M-R

Way back in 1982, I remember drooling over a screenshot of Microsurgeon in a Sears catalog. This game was a tour de force of graphics, depicting the internals of the human body in remarkable detail. Its fascinating premise has you navigating a scrolling human body with a tiny probe, administering ultrasonic rays, antibiotics, and aspirin to diseased areas. The control scheme utilizes both controllers at once, and while it seems daunting at first, it's really not that bad. Basically, you just navigate using the left directional pad, and shoot at viruses, bacteria, and tumors (to name a few) with the right pad. You can move freely (albeit slowly) around the body, but traveling through blood vessels and veins is the quickest route. Leaving their boundaries will not only slow you to a crawl, but unleash tenacious white blood cells that drain your power. The Intellivision's 16-point directional pads really come in handy, letting you finely adjust your shooting angle. A status screen keeps you posted on the patient's vitals and the condition of each major organ from the brain to the intestines. I'll give Microsurgeon all the credit in the world for its originality and rich visuals, but while its gameplay tends to hover around "interesting", it never quite creeps into "exciting" territory. To be frank, I found it slow and tedious. While traveling within the arteries sounds reasonable, they tend to be extremely narrow, and usually don't offer a decent route to the next nasty. It's not hard to shoot stuff - there are targets all over the place - but your range is very limited, and certain maladies tend to reappear in other areas just as you destroy them. In addition, sometimes it's hard to figure out what you're supposed to do. In a few of my games, the heart was listed in "serious" condition, yet I couldn't find any baddies hanging out there. The game offers several difficulty levels and two players can cooperate, but Microsurgeon simply doesn't have the "fun factor" most gamers crave. Still, collectors and Intellivision fans should probably track this one down for its novelty value alone. © Copyright 2006 The Video Game Critic.

Motocross looks like a precursor to Excitebike (NES, 1984), but it's more of a simulation than an arcade title. You get an isometric view of the dirt courses that wind and scroll in all directions. The angled perspective lets you make out hills and valleys, and this sense of depth is a pretty big deal for the Intellivision. Motocross incorporates realistic physics, which is impressive in theory but frustrating in practice. The good news is, when you ride up a hill at high velocity, you're going to catch some major air. The bad news is, when you approach a turn you'll need to slow down considerably or risk sliding into the foliage. That's a real problem when you take into account how unresponsive the brake controls are. The game does its best to reposition you on the road after a crash, but it's still a struggle to get back up to speed. Two control schemes are available, and I prefer the directional over the left-right option. Your score is the time it takes to complete the course. You can race against a second player or the CPU, but playing head-to-head is confusing. When one player falls behind, the leader stops dead in his tracks until the other guy catches up. The leader's clock halts in the process, but it's still a herky-jerky nightmare to watch. The windy tracks are entirely too long and each lap feels like a never-ending ordeal. You can set the number of laps, but anything more than one is pure punishment. One feature I nearly overlooked was the ability to create your own track! The interface is simple, and in less than a minute I was quickly able to constuct a simple track far more forgiving than any of the pre-fabricated ones. Motocross is still laborious to play, but this groundbreaking feature really improved my opinion of the game. © Copyright 2010 The Video Game Critic.

The Intellivision always boasted an impressive roster of sports titles and the late-arriving Super Pro titles provided an exclamation point. Skiing (Mattel, 1980) was a superb game in its own right, but Mountain Madness: Super Pro Skiing is truly sensational. The number of options is nearly overwhelming. After entering the number of players you select between downhill, slalom, and no-gate variations. Downhill is recommended although the narrow gates of slalom will keep expert players on their toes. For arcade action try the no-gate variations which let you freely weave around the trees. There are 32 courses to choose from and you can even preview them ahead of time! Choosing variation 33 ("helicopter" mode) randomly generates a course for you. This is an intriguing option as you'll encounter plenty of rugged, unpredictable terrain during each run. If that's not enough option 34 lets you design your own course. When choosing a slope value (1-16) I find that 8 delivers the brisk pace you want for downhill, but stick to 1 for the slalom. The controls feel fluid as you carve through the snow with the top side buttons letting you perform tight turns. Pressing the keypad buttons allow you jump and I love that. Since that's not mentioned in the manual I suspect it may be a feature of the ROM I'm using on my LTO Flash cart. Super Pro's graphics are nearly identical to Skiing, but there are also patches of loose snow (slowing you down) and ice (can't turn) to contend with. With sophisticated gameplay and a mountain of options, Super Pro Skiing is almost as good as the real thing. © Copyright 2018 The Video Game Critic.

When it comes to arcade action on the Intellivision, this cartridge is more than respectable. Mouse Trap takes the basic Pac-Man formula and incorporates a number of interesting wrinkles. You play as a mouse (actually a mouse head) being pursued through a cheese-filled maze by an army of cats. Pressing buttons on the keypad allows you to toggle blue, yellow, and red doors, altering the maze on the fly. You'll really need to get a few games under your belt before you can anticipate how the doors will swing. You'll also collect bones that allow you to transform into a dog at the touch of a button. I'd recommend keeping your thumb over this "dog" button, because eating cats racks up big points. Since they regenerate, you can even snag more than four (although their value maxes out at 900 points). Just remember to keep an eye out for the dangerous hawk that flies over the maze. Another interesting feature is the "in box" in the center of the maze that teleports you to one of the four corners. I really love the arcade look and feel of this Intellivision version. The colors are gorgeous and the characters are well-defined and flicker free. The tail-shaking cats and wing-flapping hawks look great, but I hate how the mouse constantly winks his right eye. I'm sure it was meant to be a clever animation, but it looks like he has a serious medical condition. As usual, the Intellivision controller doesn't do you any favors, but since your movements are slower and more deliberate than most maze games, it's not a serious liability. Once you get a feel for it, you can actually "tap" the disc to move one square at a time. Mouse Trap's minor key musical score has a certain "cascading" quality that's quite appealing. The sound effects are less impressive however, and when you eat a piece of cheese it sounds like static. Still, with four skill levels and thought-provoking gameplay, Mouse Trap should clock a lot of time on your Intellivision console. © Copyright 2007 The Video Game Critic.

The original Night Stalker was an intriguing maze shooter hampered by a plodding pace and awkward controls. This homebrew attempts to rectify those issues and replaces the generic main character with a Lara Croft-style heroine. With her lithe body and flowing hair, she's probably the sexiest chick I've seen in an Intellivision game (granted, there's not much competition). I love the title "Ms. Night Stalker" which manages to pay homage to the old school while being patently absurd at the same time. Ms. Night Stalker is a lot faster and more fun than the original. Bullets are larger, there are more enemies on the screen, and you don't have to wait for the action to heat up. Bats put you to sleep and a spider roams the screen constructing random webs. Robots fire aggressively and some even have shields. I was excited about the nine selectable maze layouts, but it turns out they are all very similar. It would have been nice if the maze changed between rounds, but instead you play the same one for the entire game. Attempts to improve the controls were largely unsuccessful. Firing via the keypad is still awkward and not very responsive. I hate how she has to stop to fire her weapon. You now have the option of using the four side buttons to fire, but that's confusing and buggy (can't fire downward). If you let a friend do the shooting via the second controller the game is much easier. Despite its flaws Ms. Night Stalker is a pretty intense shooter, especially when two enemies converge and you have to make split-second decisions. I love how your bullets penetrate multiple foes, and your adversaries can even shoot each other. The explosions are terrific. This may not be the end-all-be-all Night Stalker, but it's a step in the right direction. © Copyright 2014 The Video Game Critic.

The Intellivision has a pretty solid sports lineup, but NHL Hockey is the ugly duckling of the litter. The sport of hockey is fast and smooth, and let's face it, those are two qualities the Intellivision is not known for! The rink only consumes about a third of the screen, and the tiny players look like three-legged bugs crawling around! There's a tan home team and a green visiting team, so what's the point of the NHL license? Speaking of colors, I understand the need to highlight certain players, but could they have devised worse color scheme? There are tan, green, brown, and purple players scattered around the rink. The controls are initially uncomfortable, but after extended play, they are just painful! Even when you manage to gain control of the puck, your player is so slow that your thumb will be sore by the time you drag his listless ass across the screen. And as if shooting wasn't difficult enough, an impenetrable goalie blocks everything, so you can only score with a quick follow-up shot. Passing is pretty much out of the question. After getting called for a penalty, it takes forever for your player to meander over to the penalty box, and once there, he slouches like a fat slob in an easy chair. Can we please get this guy a beer and a remote?! I also find it amusing how the instructions boast of the game's "computerized scoring". Am I supposed to be impressed? C'mon - even Pong had that! Like real hockey, the game is played in three 20-minute periods, but even a single full period of this would be hard to endure. My friend Eric had a funny story about NHL Hockey. The first time he played it against a friend, they played an entire game before realizing they had been scoring on their own goalies! © Copyright 2009 The Video Game Critic.

I've taken a lot of flack about Night Stalker over the years, but I'm still not convinced it's a great game. I'll concede that there's more to it than meets the eye, but slow gameplay and unresponsive controls put a damper on the fun. There's only one maze layout, but I like its asymmetric design with the big spider web in the top left corner. You control a man running from robots, so who exactly is the Night Stalker anyway? Robots come in several varieties, including a gray one that's a dead ringer for the robot in Lost In Space ("Danger Will Robinson!"). Complicating matters are annoying bats and spiders that paralyze you temporarily. Night Stalker is challenging but it takes forever for the difficulty to ramp up. To "run" you must apply steady pressure to the directional disk, and you're constantly getting caught up on the corners of the maze. You shoot by pressing keypad buttons, but inexplicably you can't move and fire at the same time. After every six shots you'll need to retrieve a gun which randomly appears in the maze. Night Stalker's cat-and-mouse gameplay isn't bad, but its plodding pace is a serious liability. Everything moves at the speed of a turtle - including the bullets! Night Stalker does have a few things going for it. Shooting a robot causes debris to rain over the screen, which looks pretty awesome. Advanced robots possess additional powers like shields which change the dynamics of the game. The black robot can even destroy the protective "bunker" in the center of the screen. There's considerable depth here, but your hands will pay the price for long play sessions. Notes: It's possible to play the game using two controllers at once. Also, you can "cheat" by firing at robots as they first appear in the lower left corner. © Copyright 2011 The Video Game Critic.

This was originally programmed back in 1983 but only recently made available to the public as a cartridge. If you're wondering why Rocky & Bullwinkle was never released, you've obviously never played it. For a game based on a cartoon, it is entirely too complicated. The screen layout consists of an airplane and a helicopter flying across the top and a train traveling across the bottom. Each game begins with a lengthy song that you need to sit through before you can do anything. You get to control Rocky the flying squirrel who can freely buzz around the screen - with some difficulty. The idea is to catch specific objects being tossed upward by Boris from the train, delivering them to Bullwinkle in the airplane above for points. The rules for collecting items are complicated. The normal variations require you to collect combinations of ill-defined objects like bracelets, necklaces, crowns, and gems. The math variations force you to build equations using a series of numbers and math operators. Yeah - you read that right. It's about as fun as being kicked in the crotch repeatedly. Rocky is a struggle to control, and you need to exert constant pressure on the side buttons to "grab" anything (hurting!). Adding insult to injury, the helicopter disperses white dots that cause Rocky to lurch in random directions for 10 seconds at a time. The game has plenty variations, but I couldn't find a single one that was worthwhile. Rocky and Bullwinkle is only likely to appeal to collectors, and even they might want to think twice. Clearly some games are best left "undiscovered". © Copyright 2012 The Video Game Critic.