It’s not bad enough that Activision bent us over and gave us Activision Classics, another mis-represented “emulator” with 30 Atari 2600 games miserably plastered together. They have to stick it to us again—and this time it’s much much worse if you can even imagine that’s possible. Intellivision Classics does everything wrong.

To begin with, the sounds are just way off. The lively Intellivision music has been dulled and muted to extremes. If you’ve played any of these games on the real machine recently, you’ll find yourself saying “what was THAT noise?” quite often while sampling these games. Of course, you may not be sampling very many at all unless you get beyond the miserable control scheme.

For some strange reason on many games, the buttons on the Playstation controller haven’t been “mapped” to an Intellivision counterpart. Instead, you have to bring up a “menu”, which freezes the game, so that you can select a button on a visual Intellivision controller that overlays the game screen. Why the designers didn’t throw some kind of toggle & select routine in here I don’t know—because this is the worst control idea I think I’ve ever seen.

Save yourself a few bucks and get the PC emulator Intellivision Lives! by Blue Sky Rangers.