Intellivision Lives is a collection of more than 60 classic Intellivision titles, and utilizes the top screen of the DS for gameplay and the touchscreen as a replica of the classic Intellivision number pad.  While players control the action up top, each game features different options that can be selected on the bottom screen.

Intellivision Lives separates the titles into five different categories: Space, Arcade, Battle & Simulation, Sports and Gaming & Strategy.  Unless you had an Intellivision a long time ago, it’s likely that none of these game will seem very familiar to you or your family.  But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth checking out.

Due to the sheer number of games, it will take a couple hours to go through each one and find out which games might appeal to you.  It’s helpful to have the game split into categories like it is, and the game’s menus make it very easy to navigate.  Most of the time, you are thrust into the title screen with no real direction on what to do, so it’s helpful to press the Start button and read the instructions, which usually only take up about one page of reading.

For our family, we found ourselves enjoying the puzzle games a bit more than the action oriented shooting games.  We particular liked the simple title Snafu, which sees four players drawing lines at the same time, and the goal is to block off your opponents to make sure you can keep covering clear space.

Families will also find games that seem vaguely familiar, as many Intellivision titles were originally designed to be similar to other popular titles at the time.  For example, there’s a game called Space Armada, which is very similar to Space Invaders.

One of the things that Intellivsion Lives does very well is tracking high scores for players, and allowing those who earn a high score the ability to enter their three-initial name.   If your family does find the right game in this collection, it’s fun to be able to keep track and battle against each other’s high scores.

Lots of times, with a collection of games like this, the appeal of the title is the nostalgia factor, as gamers remember playing the titles a long time ago.  However, since Intellivision was never as popular as Atari or Nintendo, many families may not be familiar with the games.  But it’s still great fun to explore the different titles, and although feel extremely dated and not that fun now, there are a few games on the cartridge that have held up over time, if you can get past the old-school graphics.