I didn't dislike this game at first. I thought it was alright for a while. I didn't play Centipede much then but knew this was a rip-off. Almost everything was a rip-off then, especially on the Intellivision. If you were in the mood for "things descending from the top", and were burned out on Space Armada, this was adequate.

Is this really the worst Intellivision game? There are games not included on this list and I have a hunch some rank lower. Here's the thing, this would not be in the lowest tier of Atari 2600 games. Without much effort I can name 20 that are worse. I can name a couple 3DO games that are worse with less effort. Something had to be last on this list and it's Buzz Bombers. It starts off OK. There's music, not a standard in games of the era. The graphics look alright, not great, alright. The bees look like bees and are animated, again not shabby for the era. Spraying the bees is when things go downhill. There's about a second delay between a button press and a shot being fired. The bees often stop mid-flight so mastering the timing doesn't help, the bee you're going for might stop. Before long you can't fire fast enough to keep up with the bees. This means bees will make it to the ground and plant flowers. That limits the space you can move making it harder to shoot bees and this quickly spirals out of control. It goes from annoying to impossible too quickly.

I thought this was an innovative game idea with above average graphics. Even as a kid I realized this patient had way more wrong with them than any person actually would. It's a game, I'm not expecting an accurate reflection of the medical industry. I didn't play it a ton, but would have said it was a unique game idea. Side note, this is the only Intellivision cartridge I've owned that died. I don't know what happened, it just doesn't work anymore. I tried cleaning and all that, it's gone.

This is much slower and clunkier than I remembered. I couldn't stand playing it at all. It was tough to figure out whether this or Buzz Bombers would be last. Neither are fun. Microsurgeon is a more novel idea so I gave it the edge. I will never play either again.

The term "rage quit" didn't exist in the 1980s. That's exactly what this game made me do then. You fly around for a bit and shoot fireballs. After enough flying you try to bum rush Skeletor in a stage reminiscent of Dragonfire. After a couple rounds the bum rush stage became impossible to me. Skeletor fires a stream of sparky things that increase and speed up each round. Eventually it becomes something close to "bullet hell", a term that also did not yet exist. It would be merciful if these projectiles killed you. Instead they knock you back, making the stage last forever. I quit playing games because they were too difficult before. This was the first that I rage quit. You never forget your first rage quit.

I've seen reviews ranking this much better than I am. That's cool, I get it. I think games where you do multiple things get a few bonus points. I think I would enjoy this game more if it did fewer things. The flying & shooting stage is decent. I don't get the point of bombing Skeletor. If you were taking out ground weapons or other enemies that makes more sense to me. The running and sparks stage is still not fun to me. I don't know if there's a way to improve it.

I had no idea what I was doing in this game. It was a little fun to blast things but I couldn't figure out the point. This was not through lack of trying. If I couldn't go explore the forests of Lock Haven unsupervised due to weather or time of day I was extremely bored. I truly tried to understand Vectron while bored but couldn't.

I watched videos about Vectron, re-read the manual, FAQs, and so on. I still don't get it. I would rather play it than the previous three games all the same.

I put a lot of hours into this game even if I didn't get it. I liked maze games and still do to some degree. I didn't see a connection to the TRON movie, other games re-created events in it. I was all too familiar with games loosely based on IP, even if I hadn't learned the term "IP" yet. Any character could have been substituted into this game with minimal changes. "Computer escape" with Joe Generic would have worked here. Even younger and more naive me got that.

I forgot the appeal of TRON Maze-as-TRON. It looks nice, the audio is OK. I would have to put in more time to remember what I'm supposed to do. I still prefer running around aimlessly in this game than shooting aimlessly in Vectron.

If you asked me about Sewer Sam in 1984 I would have described it like someone seeing Doom for the first time. It felt like a thrilling 3D shooting race. You take out a freakin' submarine with a pistol, what is more awesome than that? If not my top 10, this would have been at least in my top 20.

I've done a 180 on this. I think this has been spoiled by actual 3D shooters and there's no way to turn the clock back. It's very slow and the shooting is awkward. It's not a bad game idea but it's too difficult to get into a mindset where this is fun. Many Intellivision games hold up extremely well even after being spoiled by newer iterations of the genre. For Sewer Sam there's no going back.

The black cow... the back cow... everything is going great, then black cow. I could never get to it in time. Maybe I'd nab one. That meant my average play attempt lasted no more than four black cows.

After watching the world record playthrough, which of course was not available in the 1980s, I realized I've been playing this wrong. The best players have a strategy of "juggling" the slower moving cows to keep most rows occupied. From there it's a matter of memorizing when & where the black cow will appear. They also continuously lasso the faster white cows and at some interval they clear the screen entirely. I don't expect to go back and try this strategy, but it's nice to know the problem is me.

This had to be the first game I played with a level designer. It was for sure the one I messed around with the most. I played the pre-built tracks too but the level designer was the main event. I tried to fill out the track entirely because, I guess that's how I'm wired. If there's a level designer I'm going to try and break it. This one never broke even if the creations weren't fun to play. The fun came in seeing what was possible more than trying to navigate the resulting tracks.

The level designer is even more impressive to me now. It would take me two years of continuous work to build something half as good. The gameplay is, uh, kinda poor. For a racing game it is incredibly slow, even slower than Hard Drivin' where I could personally outrun the car. This was a tough game to rank because of this contrast. Amazingly impressive level designer coupled with painfully slow gameplay.

This is the first Intellivoice game in this list which also makes it last. I had 3 Intellivoice games, almost a full set. I was blown away by them at the time. Talking games at home, what a wonderful world. Of the 3 this is what I played the least. It's a simple matching game with some trial-and-error to add a little challenge.

This was also tough to rank. I don't think this is a low quality game. It would make a decent mobile game today. The audio and flashing lights nearly caused me a panic attack. It was as if your smoke detector battery and refrigerator were beeping at the same time. I couldn't take it. Too many things screaming "fix me" at once.

I'm not a "car guy" today and certainly wasn't when I was years away from driving. I liked the style of cars from gangster movies. That was the best part of the Safecracker experience, driving around an old car. I didn't think it was tough to steer (it was) and the actual safecracking felt like an insignificant part of the game. This was about driving around and shooting.

I still enjoy games set in this approximate time period. I didn't even like L.A. Noire but finished it because of the setting. It's not especially fun. I appreciate the effort that went into this too. At this point in the rankings we haven't crossed over into "good" yet. It's not "bad" either. It's that middle ground that so many games occupy where they have some positive elements that are outnumbered by negative ones. Safecracker is right in that spot. Cool environment and different from other driving games. The steering and titular main puzzle aren't so hot.

I didn't play this one a lot. Don't quote me on this but I think we got this for under $1 so it's cool. I didn't understand the rules of Tennis. Go ahead, laugh. I didn't grow up in a family that watched sports. We didn't even watch the Super Bowl. Tennis, forget about it. I didn't even understand why the outer boxes on the court were out of bounds. I have almost no memories of playing this at all.

I'm not a big tennis fan but I am a fan of tennis games. The Wii Sports version is one of the most fun things ever in the history of mankind. Most 8-bit tennis games are incredibly fun too, it's tough to think of one off-hand that isn't. The Intellivision version of Tennis is one of the weaker ones in gameplay. Activision Tennis on the 2600 is substantially better. The developer of the Intellivision version tried for accuracy over creating an arcade style game. That's a difficult trade-off to decide when making a sports game. I'm not going to second guess what is the right call. I enjoy Tennis on the Intellivision today, obviously more than in the past. Even if I prefer other tennis games of the era a bit more.

I didn't completely understand this game. I already mentioned being an Army brat, Army. Naval combat was new to me. We never even lived near water up to that point. I was mostly confused by Sub Hunt.

This moved up in the rankings because I am awed by the effort that went into this. Simulation games aren't usually my thing. When I play Sub Hunt now I'm thinking about how difficult this was to pull off in 1981. I think if you gave the average modern game developer an Intellivision devkit and told them to make a submarine simulation they wouldn't come close to Sub Hunt. I probably won't play it again, I'm extremely impressed with it.

This article is in the wrong order for narration purposes. Then I could talk about how Donkey Kong Jr. expanded on the original. Donkey Kong Jr. in the arcade was a brilliant upgrade from the original. The graphics might not have technically been better, but they were so much better. With minimal artwork you could imagine a lush jungle. The Intellivision port though, it felt like a downgrade from the first game which is saying a lot. Titular Donkey Kong in particular was uglier. Everything looked awful. The key stage, I'm sure there's a different name for it but you know what I'm talking about, was ok. Mechanically that felt more or less close enough to the arcade version.

I can barely clear the first stage of this. I used to be better or I like to think I was. On the Switch Nintendo collection Donkey Kong Jr is currently in my top 5 most played games. I'm pretty decent at that version so the problem must be the Intellivision port.

This was the first console game I played and I swore it was identical to the arcade version. In my defense, I hadn't played the arcade version at this point in life and only saw it in a grocery store. What did I know? I was blissfully ignorant and often wish I could feel that way again.

I don't know if this was intentionally butchered by Coleco as rumors suggest. There are some flaws with this theory. A bad port hurts Coleco's reputation and makes it less likely Nintendo would trust them with future ports. Maybe that was worth it to make their ColecoVision version look superior. If that was their strategy it didn't pay off. The last time I heard the name "Coleco" it was attached to what was generously a poorly thought out console idea (and at worst an outright scam). The Intellivision brand name didn't fare much better but at least has a small chance for redemption. Maybe by the time you're reading this some kind of Intellivision 50 compendium is available. Anyway, I don't think this is terrible. I know I'm being influenced by nostalgia, that's OK. This isn't a perfect port, it's a very easy one though. I cleared both stages in my first try this time, unlike the sequel. That makes this Donkey Kong port OK enough.

This was 100% for sure absolutely a clearance bin game. I think it probably went on clearance very quickly because it's a shallow game, basically a sampler. It features parts of four games, or things derived from four games. It's intended for two players like Atari's Combat and some later games on this list. I didn't play it a ton for this reason. I had friends back in Lock Haven and a sibling. There were other games we preferred to play together.

"Sampler CD" is one of my favorite genres, just barely behind JRPG and action RPG. Over half of my Dreamcast library is sampler CDs. Sharp Shot is the sampler CD of the Intellivision. These aren't technically game demos. The AD&D Cloudy Mountain inspired stage is that, an inspired stage. It looks like AD&D Cloudy Mountain and the arrow mechanics are similar. It has the vibes of a sampler containing beta versions of games. It's fun for a couple minutes.

Have I mentioned being a Gen-Xer? I'm sure I have. That means I was a Star Wars fan by default. That and reminiscing about being unsupervised all the time are our defining traits. I was down for any space shooter game, or anything that even slightly resembled Star Wars. Space Battle was perhaps more inspired by Star Trek or something else. It didn't matter, this was an adequate space shooter.

I completely forgot how to play this. I read the manual, watched some videos and think I have this down again. I dunno, it was kinda boring. The shooting sections are OK, but there's a lot of waiting around. I get this is an advanced game, I just don't care for it anymore. There is going to be some repeat feedback in a few moments.

I don't remember the exact order we bought all these games in. I'll repeat myself many times in this piece by noting it was mostly during mall trips in 1984 when games were being cleared out. I feel confident we bought Space Battle first because it was relegated to the bottom of the pile after getting Space Spartans. I knew these weren't the same game but they were also the same game to me. Space Spartans had a more advanced map and controls that felt more space-y so it won out.

I think this will be the most controversial ranking. I've noted before that every article on this site either gets 3 or 3 million views with nothing in-between. That means either 3 or 3 million Intellivision fans will disagree with how low I ranked this. Are there 3 million Intellivision fans? OK, some unknown number of Intellivision fans will think I am way off in this ranking (especially when they see the next game ahead of it). I hear you, I really do. This is a technically strong game that I find very boring now. If you want to explore the history of strategy/shooter crossover games then play Space Spartans. I can't get back into it. There is too much waiting around for something to happen for me.

I was not aware this existed until I saw it in a collection. There's no "then" for the Intellivision version at least. I was never good at Pole Position on the 2600 or the sequel on the 7800. I am OK at the test track on the latter.

I tried to not be biased when writing this and largely avoided reading other Intellivision rankings. I attempted to research the history behind this port and found that some consider this the worst, or one of the worst, Intellivision games. I think it's acceptable. If it was named something else I think it would rank better. If you're expecting Pole Position you'll be disappointed. If you expect a generic racing game this isn't so bad. I had fun with it and will try it a few more times.

To young me this was a perfect recreation of the trench run in Star Wars.

Wow, this is more difficult than I remember. I'm all too aware that my reflexes are getting worse with age. It's weird how it impacts some games more than others. The super clunky Intellivision version of Donkey Kong, no problem, I might even be better at it now. Star Strike, much worse. Despite that.. I really wish this had a Star Wars license attached to it. This would be one of the best early '80s Star Wars titles if so.

At the risk of repeating myself, I didn't play a lot of sports games when I was a kid. I didn't know the rules of basketball, not the specifics. I broadly knew that a basket is worth 2 points except for when it's worth 3. Later in life I had the experience of turning 21 in the Chicago area during the 1990s Bulls dynasty. That's when I got into basketball, I'm still a fan. After I finish this note I'm watching a Chicago Sky game even though they aren't doing awesome this year.

I'm officially out of ways to say "for the time". I'll quit trying - "for the time" this is an advanced basketball simulation. I'm impressed with it. The speed is a little slow, the controls a little clunky, but beyond what other consoles managed. I like this game now and plan to make up for all the time I didn't play it in the 1980s.

This was a late Intellivision release, 1986, and couldn't have come from a weekend mall trip. I don't recall when we bought it. I read a source that said this was a mail order release and I'm skeptical it was exclusively so. In 1986 we lived within walking distance of a shopping mall with multiple department and toy/game stores. So logic is telling me Thunder Castle, and some other late releases, were in a few stores. I have no way to prove this, simply idle speculation. Whatever the case this was an impressive game even compared to other 1986 releases. The soundtrack in particular stood out.

I'm aware others rank this among the very best Intellivision games. I totally understand that. The graphics and music are outstanding for the system. It's so very slow and frustrating to play. Since the knight and the enemies move at the same speed it's nearly impossible to grab the power up and catch them before it runs out. You have to get lucky and have them stuck by a door. The first stage is OK but it gets not fun very fast, well, very fast but also very slow. The longer the game goes the longer the stages take to complete. Thunder Castle is a technical marvel, but not for me.

Like Thunder Castle this was a late purchase that I don't recall. I'm looking at the cartridge right now and drawing a blank. It had to be post owning an NES, likely a clearance game at a KB Toys. Heck, I might have bought this as late as 1992-1993 when I worked down the hall from an outlet KB Toys location. Dig Dug was one of my favorite arcade games, top 10 for sure. Whenever I bought this, it was to have a home port. This was not an awesome home port. Dig Dug is such a simple premise that even not awesome home ports are fun. That was the case with this one.

With the gift of hindsight I can now compare Dig Dug on the Intellivision to Atari ports. Stack ranking them goes like - 7800, 5200, Intellivision, 2600. None are bad. I realize most will play Dig Dug on MAME or a Namco collection, the latter is my go to. I'm filing this under "acceptable port that I will never play again".

I had a friend with an Atari 2600, maybe even two. Hm, maybe only one. Whatever the case they had Combat because everyone with an Atari 2600 had Combat. I owned Combat before owning an Atari 2600. I played Combat before Armor Battle and knew that Armor Battle was trying to re-create the tank mode in Combat. The graphics were much better with actual scenery. The gameplay was slow in comparison, closer to a strategy game than the action of Combat. I would concede even then that Combat was more fun, Armor Battle was much better looking.

I wasn't sure where to rank this. I did a minimal amount of research and saw that Armor Battle was a 1979 release. 19-freakin-79. I would have guessed 1981 at the oldest. That alone bumped Armor Battle up 5 spots on this ranking. The criteria is "what I feel like" and I think this is the right spot for Armor Battle.

I did not play this until Intellivision Rocks! was released and didn't play it that much then. I was curious to learn that Beauty & The Beast (coming up later) was part of a wider canon but that was it.

After giving this a real try, it's not bad. The difficulty is bonkers which is common for the era. The term "endless runner" didn't exist yet and this is something adjacent to that. Right now I only last a minute or two in Tropical Trouble but will keep trying. I enjoy the premise and the setting. Although I have this in the form of Intellivision Rocks! I don't have a physical copy and would like to.

B-17 Bomber was the Intellivoice game I played the most, I have no way to prove that and my memory is likely wrong. It had the most to manage of the Intellivoice games. You had to plan a bombing route, one that hit the most targets in one trip. Along the way you had to fly the plane and also deal with attacks from 4 directions. That was a lot to juggle in an early console game.

When I'm on a long plane flight, and around the time I started this article was after a pair of 12 hour flights, I put the little TV screen on the flight tracker. I have a phone, Kindle, and some game system in my carry-on. The low-res seat screen is nothing more than a neat little distraction. I kick that thing right into flight tracker mode. B-17 Bomber is that flight tracker with some occasional combat. A ROM hack of B-17 Bomber with all action removed would be indistinguishable from the flight tracker. That aspect of B-17 Bomber is now my favorite part of the game.

I recall playing Dragonfire quite a bit, usually 3-5 stages before frustration set in. There was no home port of Dragon's Lair and in a small way this was a substitute. Dragon's Lair has a bridge stage, stages with various projectiles, and of course a dragon guarding treasure. This was released about a year before Dragon's Lair but with these games mostly being clearance purchases I would have owned it after.

A re-occurring theme of this article is how much worse I am at many of these games now. Maybe I could practice my way back to 1980s reflexes. The controls in Dragonfire are hard to master and it may not be possible to ever be good at this again. In the bridge crossing stage there is too much to handle after a couple rounds. Going back to my previous thought, if Dragonfile was released a year later it could have carried the Dragon's Lair name. Nobody expected arcade ports to be perfect and others took liberties that radically changed the game. Dragonfire is better than the NES game called Dragon's Lair, it's not close. Oh what could have been...

This was the first game I recall where you played as a villain. Is that really the case though? From the ghosts' perspective Pac-Man is the villain. Pitfall Harry is stealing artifacts from indigenous people. Q*Bert is... I don't know what his deal is but it can't be good. Dracula needs blood to survive. Is he more evil than any other carnivore? A wolf isn't evil, it's just what they are. I don't think I understood relative morality as a kid. I thought it was a fun change of pace to play as the "bad guy". Mechanically this game is fine, and the environmental graphics were new & interesting.

This is still fun to fire-up for a few minutes around Halloween. It's not a masterpiece. It's a seasonal distraction like Elf Bowling.

I didn't understand the developer was (likely) committing a double entendre with the game title. Maybe they weren't and I'm a warped person today. I was bad at the real sliding block puzzles and not much better at this. I think I made it through maybe 5-6 stages.

I file this under "game that is technically good but it's not my thing". This would be alright as a mobile game and there has to be a knock-off named something like "Sliding Cowboy Puzzle Saga". It has in-game ads and uses blockchain.

This is nearly the same game as Happy Trails. I played Loco-Motion more because it was a more interesting idea. Happy Trails is about trying to grab treasure while sliding tiles around. The order doesn't matter although there is usually only one way to solve each stage. It plays like an action game. Loco-Motion is about trying to complete a circuit. There's action, but it's more like a puzzle game. That was more appealing to me then.

Neither of these are my thing now and I'm sticking with Loco-Motion being my favorite of the pair. The puzzle element is still interesting. If I had to choose in the abstract between a "train game" and an "old west" game I'd go with the train.

As previously noted, I knew Armor Battle was inspired by Combat. I extra double knew that Triple Action was inspired by Combat. It includes three games, two are extremely identical to modes in Combat. The auto racing game was the unique one and also the one I played the most. With some additions it could have been a good standalone racing game. The car crash animations were funny to my young mind, before I was aware what that would do to my insurance rates.

The ranking criteria in this article is completely arbitrary. I could bump Triple Action down because it is a knock-off game or bump it up because the two knock-off games are really fun (and the third is also a winner). Nearly every game is a knock-off of something else. Why should Triple Action be any different? This is the right spot for it.

I don't think I saw a Lady Bug cabinet in the 1980s, I'm not sure I have by now either. It's so similar to Mouse Trap that I confuse them easily. I knew this was an arcade port at the time, probably through magazines. I had no idea if this was an accurate port. I suppose it didn't matter, it was a fun Pac-inspired game with some similarities to Lock 'n Chase.

I wanted to try the arcade version of Lady Bug for this article. I don't think there's a legal way to do that outside of owning the cabinet. I own dozens of arcade game collections for home and portable consoles. Lady Bug is not on any of them. I wonder if it is totally lost to time? The rights holder is primarily in the casino game business with a small portfolio of video game IP from the 1980s that is likely forgotten to them. This situation is a great example of the ethical debate about pirating old games. Anyone can buy a legal arcade version of Pac-Man - whether in a collection, reproduction cabinet, plug-and-play system, and so on. Lady Bug is completely unavailable in arcade form except as a ROM. This makes the Intellivision version one of the few legal ways to experience Lady Bug.

This is another late release for the system. I definitely bought it long after owning an NES. This is a good time to note that owning an NES didn't retire the Intellivision for me. Owning a Sega Genesis didn't either. Clearly I'm not one to toss out a game console because it's old. I had a large Intellivision library and fired it up often. Make new friends but keep the old right? Diner wasn't something I played a lot. To this day I've cleared a small number of stages. It was an odd sequel to BurgerTime.

Ignorance is bliss they say. I didn't know Diner was a He-Man game that was abruptly converted due to a licensing problem. I thought it was a novel attempt to reimagine BurgerTime.

I did not own this and thought it was a truck driving game. I mentally combined it with Truckin' which is also an Imagic game. To this day I have not played the latter.

I scored a physical copy of this in 2017 but tried it on a collection before then. This is a Stampede rip-off with horrible audio. I'll get the bad out of the way early. I think the scenery is majestic, by early 1980s standards. The challenge level is exactly right. I might be suffering from a newness effect. There are few "new to me" Intellivision games left. The feeling of trying a new Intellivision game might be bumping Ice Trek up higher than it deserves.

I don't know why, but of all the weekend mall trips and cheap Intellivision scores this is one I remember most clearly. This was definitely a post-crash purchase because on that trip we bought a sack of games for what I believe to be under $10 (it was probably more but not much more). White Water was the game I was most excited to play. It looked different from anything I tried before… and it was. It was a combo game - rafting through what was gorgeous scenery and a sort of puzzle game that you could cheat at, angering the gods along the way.

The scenery is still nice. If I ranked Intellivision games by graphics it would be high. The player sprites have zero detail unlike other Imagic games, that's the only knock on it. The river and forest scenery is quite good. This retrospective makes me appreciate the look of Imagic games so much more. I think Microsoft owns all their IP at this point (via Activision acquiring it in liquidation). I doubt they will repackage it all into a grand Imagic collection or do anything with it at all. It's a shame that these games are effectively lost. White Water is fun to me today. The difficulty levels provide a nice range from absurdly easy to absurdly difficult. Despite all my previous comments I tried White Water at the max difficulty and did OK. I won't play that setting again because I prefer playing this like it's a casual rafting experience (where you also occasionally win artifacts from the locals).

If this list was ranked by my 1980s opinion I'm sorry to say that Demon Attack would be low. I don't know why but I didn't like it that much. Maybe I was bad at it, maybe I preferred other shooters, likely I lacked the perspective.

This was another tough game to rank. This has some of the best animation on the system and a wild boss fight. The latter of which still looks amazing today. Actually it looks more amazing to me today than it did in the 1980s because I didn't understand the effort. I think it's a solid shooter, reminds me a lot of Gorf which is a compliment. Here's the thing though, the boss is awesome. Getting there is OK. There aren't a lot of enemies on the screen at a time but they are tough to hit. So I don't know, this feels like the right spot. I won't argue with anyone who thinks it should be higher.

From what I can find, Defender for the Intellivision was released in December 1983. That's an unfortunate time for a few reasons. December releases are too late for the holiday shopping season. From my experience the biggest games of the year hit the shelves in September. Games released in December often go unnoticed. I don't recall when we got this, but I would gamble on summer 1984 when it was likely being cleared out. I wasn't a big Defender fan, I found it too difficult and still do. The Intellivision looked crude and played well enough. Not needing to steal quarters it was a tad easier, just a tad, not easy enough for me.

As this list progresses there will be more arcade ports that are substantially easier on the Intellivision. This is not one of them. This is an alright port, it could be better which makes me think it was rushed to avoid a post-December release. I'm ranking it above quite a few good games though, mostly because it is a nice port for the time. I could probably get decent at it with some effort.

The Intellivision didn't have a port of Sinistar. To me, Space Hawk was a close enough copy. It takes place in space. You can fly around in any direction and there are no obvious limits to how far you can go. Along the way there's a large enemy to fight. An actual home port of Sinistar to the Intellivision wouldn't have looked much different. For young me this was an acceptable way to play something like Sinistar at home.

While researching this article I found that this is a generally disliked game. I skimmed the feedback and the words "boring" and "controls" appeared often. Hmm, I agree and disagree with this. Space Hawk can be very boring if you choose to avoid combat. If you fly off at a high speed it takes the game a while to get the enemies back to you. It is easy to get into a place where you are flying around aimlessly. The controls are not like Sinistar or Time Pilot or other games in this free roaming shooter genre. Space Hawk would control better with a spinner like Tempest. So the controls are different than expected, not bad, different.

I already mentioned not coming from a sports family. I played Little League exactly one summer, or half a summer. My father thought it was something I should do. I was the worst player on the team and quit when he was away from home. At a minimum I understood the rules of baseball. The Intellivision version of baseball was very accurate, more so than any other home baseball game. The controller worked perfectly here, you could throw in any direction using the numeric pad. You could bunt a home run, I am not kidding.

As time goes on I'm only more impressed by Baseball on the Intellivision. I suppose it's technically possible to make a more advanced version of Baseball on a 2nd generation console. It would be an interesting project, maybe a homebrew developer has already tackled this. From a historical perspective, this is as good as it gets.

I knew this was a knock-off Space Invaders. How could anyone not? I doubt I played Space Invaders before Space Armada. Actually, let's say I didn't. I had seen it and Space Armada looked 100x better. Something about the border color changing was super cool to me then. I could get up to the stages where enemies were invisible but not for long. This was a frequent go-to game.

I don't play this style of game much, Galaga '88 or Galaga Arrangement are my pick when I do. How does Space Armada compare to Space Invaders? That's a tough one. Space Armada wins in the graphics quality department, Space Invaders in the graphics nostalgia department. I prefer playing Space Armada over the arcade version of Space Invaders. The real winner - Space Invaders on the Atari 2600, AKA the OG console killer app. That is the most engaging Space Invaders variant of the time.

I was never brave enough to try Centipede in the arcade. I knew I'd lose my precious quarter too quickly. The trackball control frightened and confused me. Also Centipede just looked hard. There are so many things trying to kill you from every direction. I wish I hadn't totally skipped it.

Thank you easier home ports of Centipede. The Intellivision port was another late acquisition but one I played often since there was no Centipede on the NES. I'm as shocked as you. Until I owned an Atari 7800 this was my favorite home version of Centipede. There are no outright bad ones. It's a fun game concept and dialing it down a notch improves it for me.

I used to play this often. Not for long periods of time. It was something I'd play for a single round then put away until the next day. I thought the scenery looked very nice and so did the sprites. There are two control options. One where the frogs are on a fixed path every jump and another where you have minimal control. I'd alternate between both but chose the fixed path more often.

The gameplay isn't deep, I get it. This is a tranquil game. I don't mind playing it from time to time to chill out. It's a zero stress game since there's no way to lose. Did I have anxiety as a kid? Is that why I played it so often? This article is getting too serious now.

I played this game way too much, to the point where it was comically simple. I had more fun racing to the top then plunging all the way down than advancing the game. Of course I would also advance to higher difficulty levels but it was never much of a challenge. "Donkey Kong but goofy" was how I regarded Beauty & the Beast, still an accurate summary.

I'm not quite as good now but still find this easy. I think this is one of the games that defines the Intellivision. First off, it's an exclusive. I had to double-check that, seems like something that would have a 2600 port. The aesthetic of Beauty & the Beast is unmistakably Intellivision. It's all weird and obscure, which is the legacy of the Intellivision itself.

I think this would have been in my top 10 list in the 1980s. I watched horror films way younger than I should have. Thank UHF and minimal adult supervision for that. Night Stalker was like a midnight UHF movie. It was probably inspired by a horror movie or book. I liked how it mixed themes, killer robots and creepy critters. I could make it up to the final robot and then swiftly die. With no exit, the poor Night Stalker guy is trapped in an eternal torture.

Night Stalker is a remarkable game concept and something inseparable from the Intellivision. There are other versions but this is an Intellivision game, I think you get what I mean. I am never going to play it again. Today it's a bit boring, blasphemy I know. I should be more clear - it takes a while for Night Stalker to be exciting. You've got to reach the third robot, the one that looks like a kitchen appliance, before it's a challenge.

I used to find this game very frustrating and difficult. Hitting the smallest worms in particular stumped me. I tried Worm Whomper a few times and never did well, eventually losing interest.

When I drafted this article Worm Whomper was very low, like bottom 5 low. My opinion completely changed when playing it again. Wow, this is a blast now. The difficulty takes a while to crank up, longer than I recall. In a way Worm Whomper reminds me of Smash TV. They are totally different themes and mostly different perspectives. They are both frantic shooting games that grew addictive to me the more I played them. I don't know what changed in me that suddenly I'm much better at Worm Whomper (while overall being worse at games).

This is one of the first Intellivision games I played, had to be in the first five. It was similar to Space Armada, another first five, in a few ways. Obviously they were Space Invaders adjacent shooters. They also had background color changes as the difficulty advanced. Astrosmash changed it a little by letting the difficulty drop if enough falling asteroids were missed. It was also much easier, extra lives were plentiful. It had auto-fire, very nice considering the fire button on the Intellivision. I don't think I was very skilled at Astrosmash but could play for a long time before hitting a game over.

There aren't a lot of Intellivision collections, compared to the Atari 2600 it's tiny. For each one I've bought, Astrosmash is one of the first games I try. If Astrosmash is well-implemented, then I'm optimistic about the rest of the collection. If Astrosmash is butchered, as it was on at least one plug-and-play system, then the rest of the collection is going to be bad. It's a particularly good game to see if the collection has the Intellivision palette correct. It's also tremendously fun and sets the mood for the Intellivision marathon that's about to begin. I wonder about the planet that Astrosmash occurs in. It is clearly uninhabitable, why is it so urgent to protect? If I started to ask these questions about other games I'd run into similar conundrums. I'll stop now.

This feels like the 10th time mentioning how big space games were to me then. It's funny that I hardly play anything that could be described as a "space game" now. Beamrider was an unusual space game because it was on a grid instead of allowing free movement. That upped the challenge but not tremendously. As shooters go, Beamrider scales up the difficulty well. It's about a dozen levels before it's really tough.

I never played Tempest in the 1980s. If it was in an arcade I visited then I missed it. There wasn't a home version. I didn't know then how much Beamrider was like Tempest. Had Beadrider been developed by Atari they probably would have called it Tempest. I still rank Beamrider fairly highly. It's derivative, like nearly everything else. If it's a stripped down Tempest that's OK, real Tempest wouldn't be possible on a 1980s home console. An eventually surfaced prototype of Tempest for the Atari 2600 adequately demonstrated this. Beamrider is more than a capable substitute.

There wasn't a Pac-Man port on the Intellivision until late 1983. Keeping with the trend of buying most of these games on clearance, I wouldn't have owned Pac-Man until 1984 or even 1985. Until then I had to get by with imitations. Mouse Trap was not a weak imitation. It added movable doors and power-ups that could be activated at will.

I am now a grown adult who listens to the Pac-Man Fever album unironically about once a year. OK, twice on average. I'm not ashamed. About half the song lyrics are descriptions of how to play the game. The Mouse Trap song explains the premise of the game. I wish that was still a trend. I've heard about a game called Destiny a lot but don't really know anything about it. A song explaining what Destiny is, maybe with some tips for getting started, would be appreciated. Anyway, I'll rank Mouse Trap as my 3rd favorite maze game on the Intellivision.

I didn't understand how skiing worked. Not the video game, the real sport. I thought the goal was to hit the flags. Unless the goal was to descend as fast as possible and avoid them. I didn't watch the winter olympics and even if I did the equivalent skiing event happens too fast. I thought Skiing looked nice, but didn't know what I was doing.

On one of the Intellivision collections I got into Skiing. Knowing the rules helped of course. Skiing is a lot more fun and challenging when played as intended. I will never ski in real life, far too accident prone. I've tried many skiing games instead, many more if snowboarding counts. Intellivision Skiing is simple and fun. If I ranked all the skiing/snowboarding games (I won't) it's going to land in a high spot.

This was the second Intellivision game I played. It also became a regular family game night thing. Taking turns among 3 of us was required. My father is in his 80s now and has yet to play a video game. This is an "honor system" game because everyone shares the same screen. We would never play cards normally. Something about having it on the TV made it more interesting.

I can't get over how much better this looks than other card games of the era. Side-by-side next to the Atari 2600 it's hard to believe they are from the same generation. It's little differences that add up. The card animation, brief but non-existent on other console card games. I've only been to Las Vegas twice and didn't play poker or blackjack there, mostly went to shows and drank slightly too much. However, from what I saw they completely nailed the look of a card dealer there.

Pinball was so yesterday. I barely saw a single cabinet in the arcade. Maybe they were in a bar somewhere, I wouldn't know. Video games were it. Sorry pinball, your time is up. Now, pinball in video game form? That's acceptable. It allowed for multiple screens, real pinball couldn't manage that. I played this quite a bit because it was simple and fun.

By now I've learned to appreciate pinball. A simulated version just isn't the same. Some real pinball games are cheap, by which I mean unfair. Others are way too easy, most are somewhere in the middle. Pinball on the Intellivision skews toward being way too easy. It is a very basic recreation of the pinball experience. It still is a good time though. I can now admit real pinball is (usually) a better experience but that doesn't make Intellivision Pinball bad.

This wasn't a Star Wars game but it was a Star Wars game. There is a ship resembling a star destroyer advancing on your home planet. If you fail to stop it, your planet will be destroyed. Your ship looks enough like an x-wing to pass. It's one pilot against a whole battle ship. Can this be any more Star Wars? All that was missing was the license and I sure didn't care then.

I am convinced the opening scene of The Last Jedi was inspired by Dreadnaught Factor, or they both share a common cinematic inspiration I am ignorant of (the more likely explanation). The third Star Wars trilogy was not good. The final film being the worst piece of media in the entire Star Wars franchise. The Last Jedi was my favorite of the three, to this day the only one I re-watched. I don't plan to do that again. Did the Dreadnaught Factor rip-off Star Wars? Yes. Did The Last Jedi rip-off Dreadnaught Factor? I like to think so.

I was dimly aware of River Raid. I might have played it once or twice at most. I knew that Mission X was inspired by River Raid. I didn't know how close, or not close, it was. It was a simple bombing and occasionally shooting game. Perhaps it was more inspired by Xevious in gameplay and River Raid in setting. I always thought Xevious looked cool but didn't have a home port. Mission X was close enough. It seemed impossible to get a game over in Mission X, I'm not sure I ever did.

Over the years I've read a lot of Intellivision reviews. I tried to suppress them all when drafting this article. I had a tough time blocking out negative feedback on Mission X, it stuck with me because I can't agree with it. A common theme is that Mission X is boring, a lot of flying & bombing without much resistance. This means it's easy more than boring, unless you consider easy to be boring. Many Intellivision games are extremely easy but fun to me. I'll take that over extremely difficult and exciting. Mission X is a fun little distraction today, one Intellivision game I enjoy from time to time.

There are some excellent arcade ports on the Intellivision and this is one of them. It looks nice and turns down the difficulty by about 50%. Compared to the Donkey Kong games this was an A+ port. This was another one I played quite a bit.

I've tried just about every home port of Frogger. Back in the 1980s I tried about zero others. I won't say the Intellivision version is the best, it's up there though. I think it's the easiest, or maybe most accessible is a better term. I'm more likely to play a different version of Frogger but the Intellivision version is still excellent.

I first saw Discs of TRON in the arcade. It was the enclosed cabinet version. To this day it's my favorite cabinet aesthetically speaking. The game play looked incredible, it kinda wasn't but it looked it. Regardless I was psyched to try Deadly Discs, hopeful it would recreate just a tiny bit of the arcade experience. It didn't but was something very fun anyway. I've said this about many games already and I'll say it again - this was an easy game, too easy. This was another title where a game over took effort. The computer AI isn't bright. The play style was innovative, there wasn't anything else quite like it.

I'll go ahead and rank this highly even though I think it hasn't aged well. Deadly Discs plays much slower than I recalled. No wonder it was so easy. The concept is still solid. I don't know what else to compare it to.

This is going to sound very pathetic. I almost only played Utopia alone. I know that's not the point. I didn't have a ton of friends in Lock Haven and as few as one who understood the point of Utopia. So I could never lose at Utopia. I could do badly but never lose. Although not intended to be a single player game it does alright as one. I suppose a variation could exist where one player manages both islands with the extra challenge of making each thrive. As it stands, one island (usually) thrives while the other is overrun with rebels. Perhaps a too realistic simulation.

By now I think the rest of the gaming universe figured out how groundbreaking Utopia was. Any article about the best games for the Intellivision or the influence of the Intellivision will mention Utopia. I can't add on to any of that. I wonder now if anyone has thought about playing Utopia as a cooperative game? I know this is a random thought, most of my life is random thoughts. The point of Utopia is to crush the rival island. What if instead the goal was to maximize the total score? I would find a playthrough like that interesting. Anyway, it is potentially controversial to not have Utopia in the top 10. If this list was "the most important Intellivision games" or "the technically best Intellivision games" it would be in the top 3. That's not this list. The next 11 games are all games I just plain would rather play.

I somehow was unfamiliar with other snake games. In an odd way, I would have been more impressed with SNAFU if I was. It would be like seeing Ms Pac-Man for the first time. Here's a good concept taken to the next level and improved in every way. SNAFU is zany and never gets old thanks to dozens of game variations. SNAFU is intended for two players, and is also fine with only one.

If somehow you've completely missed out on the Intellivision I think SNAFU is a good starting point. It has the Intellivision "look", especially the obstacles. It has the Intellivision color palette, the snake colors more distinct than other consoles of the era. It has music, actual music, backed with authentic snake sound effects. It should leave you thinking like "OK, Intellivision, now I get it".

Alright, top 10. There are other rankings in this list I'm second guessing but I think I nailed the top 10. I don't like leaving SNAFU out of the top 10 but can't bump another game. I didn't own an Atari 2600 when it was a new system but played it on many sleepovers. I did not think the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man was bad and I still don't. It was a fun game even if it didn't look that much like Pac-Man. The Intellivision version, that looked like Pac-Man. It's too bad it was released so late in the timeline.

This is an excellent port of Pac-Man. The maze looks about right, the ghosts look about right, and it plays like the original. They managed to include the little cut scenes. That's more than good enough. This is a very fun game to fire up for a minute between meetings or other mundane happenings. I've never thought of seeing how far it goes before breaking until this moment. I bet it's not too rough because this is easier than the original, which is right for a home version.

After Pac-Man we're getting into a number of arcade ports where I prefer the Intellivision version over the original. There's some bias as these are the versions I played first in most cases. For sure that's a factor. A bigger factor is that arcade games are designed to consume quarters and home games are not. Q*Bert on the Intellivision is a perfect example. In the arcade version I can manage a couple stages. On the Intellivision I could play for quite a while. The graphics looked great too. The Intellivision color palette shined here. This was one of my favorite Intellivision games in the 1980s.

I would still rather play the Intellivision of Q*Bert than the arcade version, or any other. Complain about the Intellivision controller all you want, Q*Bert is better on the Intellivision than any other home console because of it. Most home versions of Q*Bert fail in the control department. I still think it looks great too. Number 9 overall feels about right.

Confession time, I didn't know that Lock 'n Chase was an arcade port. I never saw the cabinet, don't remember seeing it in a magazine or on Starcade. I can only assume this wasn't a widely distributed cabinet. This was a Pac-Man knock-off when the Intellivision lacked a Pac-Man port. Young me assumed it was nothing more than that. What a clever knock-off though - Pac-Man but with traps. The Lock 'n Chase equivalent of the power pellet was useless, but you had two traps you could trigger instead. Trying to snare one of the cops was my favorite part of the game. Similar to Pac-Man, I also wanted to see what the new stage bonuses were and how far I could get into them.

By now I tried the arcade version of Lock 'n Chase, on the Data East Arcade Classics collection specifically. I gotta say, I prefer the Intellivision version for the same reason I prefer many of these home ports - it's easier. Although it's not as wide a gap in difficulty as Q*Bert or others. Some time ago I picked up a copy of the Game Boy version too and it's a nice conversion. The Intellivision port is still my favorite.

I didn't think deeply about the premise of BurgerTime. Either the chef is tiny or his customers are giant. Both have terrifying implications. Person sized hot dogs or people the size of skyscrapers. Had I thought too much I would have missed out on one of the best Intellivision games. It took a while for me to figure out that defeating the enemies right away was a mistake. They'd keep respawning. Instead the strategy is getting them to follow you, while also avoiding dropping them until the final burger. This was more complicated but not difficult. I don't recall how far I could get into BurgerTime - over 5 stages, probably under 10.

I doubt my wife will read this article. She likes a very small, very specific set of video games. Also she has to put up with my constant thoughts in real life. I have it on good authority, hers, that BurgerTime is her favorite Intellivision game. Her family didn't own an Intellivision but a friend or someone she babysat did. It was in one of those places she became a fan of BurgerTime, the Intellivision version specifically. She does not care much for any other version. You know what? She's completely right about that. I fully agree this is the best version of BurgerTime and I've tried many.

There are a lot of positive things to say about this game. When I was a kid I was most impressed by the map. It looked so detailed and even inspirational. Plotting my route through the map was something I enjoyed more than the dungeon exploration, which by itself would be a top 10 Intellivision game. For me it was all about planning the journey - would I go via forest or river? What if the mountains past the forest are difficult? That's what hooked me on AD&D.

How I play AD&D is different now. The map is still my favorite part, it's my approach for the dungeons that's changed. Originally I tried to slay every creature in each dungeon. That is sensible on easy difficulty and nearly impossible on hard with arrows being limited. Now I realize that cowardice is the better part of valor. Run through the cave, grab every item, and let the enemies chase you. Save up enough arrows to take blind shots in the final mountain. That never occurred to me as a kid.

This was another arcade port that I didn't know was an arcade port. Maybe I did, if so I didn't see the cabinet in person. This was my favorite driving game, the only one I played substantially until the 16-bit generation. Smashing cars is neat and all that, what I found cool was the season changes. It's small details like this that turn a good game to an excellent one. I swear that effect alone moved Bump 'n Jump up a couple spots in this list.

When I decided to finally try writing a game demo for real, my first idea was something called "Iowa driving simulator". It was going to be like Bump 'n Jump minus both of those, a demo limited to driving with season changes only. My first Sega Genesis programming article shows signs of this idea. I finished a demo, three by now, but not a scenic driving game styled after Bump 'n Jump. Anyway, freakin' fun game, will play again and often. I wonder if my later binge run through the Burnout series is related to playing Bump 'n Jump so much?

I did not play Shark! Shark! in the 1980s... or 1990s... or 2000s. I wasn't even aware of it in the 1980s. The first time I played Shark! Shark! was on the Intellivision Flashback all the way in 2014. I tried to go in with no expectations but kinda thought a little that it was a game for young kids. I think that was a hit and miss. Shark! Shark! is a simple game, no doubt a very young player could figure it out. Many Intellivision games have the same initial difficulty. Shark! Shark! never grows too difficult if your goal is to avoid the titular shark. Turning the tables and hunting the shark, by biting it in the tail enough times, is a real challenge. It didn't take long for this to become one of my favorite Intellivision games.

There is a little recency bias in this ranking. Ice Trek is probably higher than it should be. What about Shark! Shark!? Is it #4? Yes, absolutely. This is an enduring game with a simple premise. Hear me out, Shark! Shark! has the same appeal as Katamari Damacy. The extremely high level premise is the same - keep trying to grab things smaller than you. They are both games I go back to often and haven't come close to being tired of either.

This was another post Lock Haven game, another one bought after the NES was an established console. By the time I got Thin Ice I already played Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, and Metroid. Thin Ice looked crude in comparison, sounded crude in comparison, and was a much smaller game. None of that mattered. Thin Ice is hilarious and addicting. It takes about two seconds to learn. All the buttons on the Intellivision controller are rendered useless, Thin Ice requires no buttons except to start the game. Pac-Man could pull this off, not many other games could. Of all the late Intellivision releases this is the one I logged the most hours on.

I never wanted to play Qix in the arcade, I saw it often. It had some serious longevity, I recall it in Aladdin's Castle into the 1990s. It looked too difficult, I would eventually learn that it was. Thin Ice is a notable advancement in the drawing boxes genre. Anyone that prefers Qix is not wrong, this is all opinion. Thin Ice takes the idea of Qix, turns down the difficulty, and adds funny cartoon characters. I play Thin Ice fairly often, a few times a year, more if the IP holders of Intellivision released a clone system by the time you're reading this.

Alright, here is where the Intellivision is clearly superior to the Atari 2600. See on the Intellivision you have two buttons - jump and drop off vine. The meek Atari 2600 has to get by with just one. Totally unacceptable. Those differences aside, Pitfall! is the same game on these systems. Games on both the Intellivision and Atari 2600 generally look better on the former. So Pitfall! being equal means it stands out in other ways. Older games required some imagination. Pitfall! looked a lot like a jungle and you had to fill in the details. It was the 1980s, the only thing potentially bigger than Star Wars was Indiana Jones. Pitfall! evoked the opening scene of Indiana Jones. It was a better Indiana Jones game than the Indiana Jones game. You're an explorer seeking hidden treasure, that's out in the open, don't worry about it.

I was wrong about one thing. OK, many things, I'm talking about a specific thing. Pitfall! is kinda better on the Atari 2600 because the controls are simpler. I play Pitfall! often but only the Atari 2600 version. Lately on the Atari 7800+ which is one of my favorite clone systems. I keep it hooked up near my desk for ~5 minute breaks during the day. Next to it are 6 cartridges - my 5 favorite 7800 games and Pitfall!. Now Pitfall! is hardly a 5 minute game if you're trying to get far, I'm usually not. Pitfall! is also my #2 Atari 2600 game, behind Adventure.

This was my favorite and most played Intellivision game as a kid. I liked Dungeons & Dragons, or the idea of playing Dungeons & Dragons. I don't think Lock Haven qualifies as "rural" but it qualifies as "town without a significant nerd community". There weren't stores in town that sold Dungeons & Dragons books. I wasn't aware of any clubs and would have been too young for them anyway (or I think so). I had some of the gamebooks, Choose Your Own Adventure but not called that, and wished I could try the real game. I knew the first D&D branded game wasn't a good substitute. Great game, not all that close to D&D. Treasure of Tarmin felt like something closer to actual D&D. You could focus on being a fighter, or magic user, or hybrid. There was a wide variety of monsters, weapons, and special items. Best of all, every game was different. The first D&D game had random dungeon layouts with fixed enemies and items. In Treasure of Tarmin the enemies and items were more randomized, with the strength increasing the farther you descend the dungeon. It's hard to express how big & complex Treasure of Tarmin felt at the time, or how many hours I put into it.

Favorite Intellivision game then, favorite Intellivision game now. I thought maybe going through all these games would change my opinion. Treasure of Tarmin is responsible for my interest in randomly generated dungeon games. I try just about everything in this genre and yet Treasure of Tarmin remains my favorite. It's about the right level of complexity, more advanced than the previous random dungeon D&D branded game, and without requiring an entire keyboard to play. It managed jump scares before they were a common event in games. I know now that the dungeons aren't entirely random. They are a set of predefined segments jigsawed together. I'm OK with that, there are probably thousands of possible combinations. Treasure of Tarmin inspired me to try new programming challenges. All the time I wonder how games managed one idea or another, this was one of few I followed through on trying. It is the only Intellivision game that I can say legitimately inspired me and influenced what games I tried in the future.