Intellivision update! Plus actual gameplay of Shark! Shark! It's bad! bad! ETA: GAMES CONFIRMED FOR STEAM+MORE

Intellivision has issued an update and in sticking with tradition did so via email instead of putting it out on the web somewhere like a real company that's actually trying to inform and attract customers. You can read about it here on Reddit.

While this update is very short on actual details of the kind that you would want, it is pretty long on vague promises and also continues Intellivision's proud tradition of announcing future announcements.

However there is some actual content here. While Intellivision claims that it still intends to ship a console (probably due to contractual obligations in my uninformed opinion) it admits that the whole console thing was actually a bad idea and instead says it's going to put its software out on platforms and hints at some kind of non-console home game implementation through what is most likely an app using cell phones (which is what this whole thing should have been in the first place if it was not just a publishing label for other systems or, even better, just an idea that went nowhere because nobody wants to play this stuff in 2020, let alone 2023.)

There is also a video of a 10 minute father/son play of Shark! Shark!. I am not going to make fun of this video too much. I question the wisdom of putting your kid on camera in front of a community as toxic as that around the Amico but at least the father/son interactions seem loving and I hope the kid doesn't get any playground (or Internet) teasing for this.

What I will make fun of is the game itself. It looks absolutely terrible. Like shockingly terrible. Like somehow worse than I expected terrible.

It would be overly complimentary to say that it looks like a flash or mobile game. Most cell phone or flash games look better than this. It looks like an upressed version of a bad 3DO or CD-I game. There is absolutely no attempt to match the lighting of the backgrounds (which are entirely non-interactive like a bitmap from an old CD ROM game) with the in game assets, which gives things a weird green screen look. Seriously the Final Fantasy games from the PS1 did a better job of making it look like the models were in the environments. When the fish or sharks eat something they just pass close to it and make a chomping animation while the thing disappears. At around 7:07 of the linked video a hammerhead shark eats a fish that's literally behind its head. The oysters with pearls just appear at the bottom of the screen, again like a bad PS1 game, and everything is just kind of ugly.

In terms of gameplay it looks like it plays like Shark! Shark! a literal early 80s game that's had several iterations since then including 2 Feeding Frenzy games that are already available on Xbox and PC.

This game just does not have a significant place in the modern market. Maybe as a marginal game for $5 or less it could find some way to be profitable; there seem to be a number of companies with that business model that do okay, but not as a hit. As a console pack in it is almost counter productive. The closest analog I can think of is Hexic, which is a B-tier puzzle game at best and hardly pushed what the 360 could do. But Hexic was probably the first HD video game a lot of people saw, which was important, and it also introduced the whole concept of downloadable console games (it wasn't the first of these but it was not the norm) and honestly it has its charms. But most pack in games are meant to either showcase the system's features or just wow as tech demos. This does neither. The closest they get to talking about console features is when at the beginning they say that the controller tells you which color fish the other player chose so you can't choose that one. That info is also on the main screen. In terms of tech it looks like an ugly game from 15 or more years ago. I suppose it does give you something to play in multiplayer right out of the box, but so do the mini consoles that cost about 1/3 the price and have better games.

If Intellivision's plan is to sell games like this on the Switch or PC market I hope that they spent the money they were supposed to use on a console to invent a time machine because my calendar says 2023 and outside the resolution this game screams 1994.

ETA:

THE GAMES ARE COMING TO PLATFORMS YOU MIGHT ACTUALLY OWN LIKE STEAM, SWITCH, XBOX.

Honestly I might pick up Astrosmash if it's $10. It won't be good but I am SO curious. I can't bring myself to pay for Shark! Shark! though. That game looks like trash. Maybe if it's $5 or when it goes on deep sale.

@bigsocrates:

If we're being honest the only shocking thing that could have come from a campaign as wholly ill-conceived as this one is a game that was actually good.

After perusing that video the only way I could see this becoming a win is if that shark game turns out to be a Frog Fractions level head fake and it takes a sudden turn becoming an underwater FPS horror game and the father continues to makes video after video about the shocking discovery he's made and we get to see his gradual descent into madness as the game takes ahold of his life.

But, yeah, this is likely just the most predictable flop anyone could have seen coming.

The video with the father and son playing that basic mobile like game almost makes me feel sorry for the people trying to make Amico and the games a thing. It's like a person with an invention everyone knows is bad, but the creator refuses to give up on it. Its sad to watch.

@paulwgraham: Man if this were some huge multi-year AR masterpiece that would be fantastic. Kind of like when Joaquin Phoenix went off the deep end publicly in service of some movie I've forgotten the exact name of.

It would also potentially be a crime in multiple countries since they've publicly raised money for this and taken German grant money, and neither the investors nor the German government would likely be super happy to find out their cash was spent on some big performance art piece. On the other hand I guess it's better than your money being spent on a half finished console and some 80% or less finished games.

@av_gamer

I don't feel sorry for them at all. They've taken literal millions of dollars in crowdfunding and grant money, spent it in incredibly shady ways (renting office space from board members and all kinds of loan shenanigans) and produced nothing. At the beginning everyone was shouting at them "what are you doing spending like this, you don't have a product yet, and your product is a bad idea!" and they ignored it.

The father in that video has been a hard core supporter who has said some very nasty things to critics and generally been pretty crappy during this whole saga so I have zero sympathy for him, especially since he's still out there covering for the project.

The son, of course, is innocent and has just been dragged into his dad's weird thing, so I do have sympathy for him.

People also scoffed at the Wii, but the Amico is taking the theory of their success and adding some secret sauce: nightmarish-looking games that seem awful to play.

Once again, thank you for your service. I had feared we reached the end of this saga, but Intellivision is hellbent on rising from the dead to take more beatings.

There are still ppl in the comments on that video.... like.... "cant wait"......

The fuck

@allthedinos: My favorite part of the whole thing is that their pitch is that they are bringing local multiplayer back to gaming. If you look at the top 10 selling Nintendo Switch games you see

1) Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

3) Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

8) Super Mario Party

9) New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe

And other than Zelda and Ring Fit Adventure the other games all have a major online multiplayer component, like Animal Crossing and Pokemon.

But please, rescue us from this hell of having zero multiplayer games!

@splodge: Some are trolls. Others are people who have invested either money or their personal internet credibility into the project. The Amico aware community is tiny (not great for a product that has to shift hundreds of thousands of units to be sustainable) but very passionate.

"Sir, there's an iceberg ahead."

"Ramming speed."

WE'RE GOING TO GET TO PLAY THESE GAMES SOON ON REAL CONSOLES! SEE MY EDIT TO THE TOP POST! I AM UNREASONABLY EXCITED! THIS IS AMAZING.

Also there will be online multiplayer which is the cherry on top. THE WHOLE PITCH FOR THE SYSTEM WAS THAT TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE JUST PLAYING ALONE/ONLINE!

No Cornhole, no sale!

(Also no sale even with Cornhole, because I haven't even spent the money on a Switch yet...)

I am almost happy this train is still crashing, I feel like I looked away because nothing was happening for months

@cozmicaztaway: I feel like Pat Contri latched on to saying nice things about Cornhole because he didn't want to come off as entirely negative but that Cornhole game was a terrible idea and it looked bad.

I bought Carnival Games VR at some point when I was buying too many VR games for the PS4 and I recently played it purely because it was the closest thing I could get to Cornhole without spending more money on Carnival Games Switch (yes I am very obsessed with the Amico.)

It doesn't have Cornhole but it does have games kind of like it, the most similar possibly being ring toss (or skee ball, which full disclaimer I did not unlock yet.)

This is in VR with the PlayStation move controller, which is more accurate than any pure gyro controller I have used outside of the expensive VR specific ones, and it works okay. It's not unfun but the thrill lasts like 10-15 minutes at most. Then you want to play something else. Which is fine in Carnival games because that whole game is built around skipping between minigames like being at a carnival. They understand that it's not fun for more than a few minutes.

I submit that Cornhole would not possibly be as good as Carnival Games, which despite being seeing seen as shovelware has a large publisher backing it and has had a number of iterations to get better. It would have multiplayer unlike the VR version, but it would not have all the VR atmosphere and novelty.

It would be fun for like 1-3 rounds at a time at most, and a total of maybe 1-2 hours of play. And that's IF it looked better and played better than it almost certainly did.

Wii Sports was magic because it had Nintendo polish and was the first time many people were exposed to motion control gaming at home. You can't recapture that magic in 2023, which is why Nintendo's Switch Sports came out quietly and isn't really discussed.

Cornhole was not a killer app. It was marginal. MARGINAL! AT BEST!

@bigsocrates: Yeah, their insistence that Cornhole was somehow the big thing was always baffling to me. I can't play golf, bowling or tennis at home, but I sure can throw bean bags, or buy a cheap plastic outdoor boccia set for a similar experience at a gas station for almost no money. Like almost all Amico decisions, it just feels completely baffling, like they inhabit a completely different reality than this one. Maybe if they all just wished for it hard enough!

@cozmicaztaway: Okay but it was a brilliant idea compared to Farkle. Imagine making a simple dice game that you'd need some dice, a pad, and a cup to play at home into a full fledged piece of software in 2023! That idea legitimately belongs on the original Intellivision since the 2nd gen is the last console gen where they sold simple software like that as a full game. Even by NES days you needed something like Casino Kid with a story and some idea behind it to sell these simple games.

It's a 99 cent game at best and the idea of making that one of your marquee pack-in value games is hilarious to me. It only gets funnier when the price goes up to $300. Congratulations, you spent the price of a Switch to play...Farkle!

Hey, these people aren't in it to just ride the crazy train. They're gonna drive that fucking thing.

Yeah, got the email and was surprised it was still a going concern.

I preordered it early on since I had a lot of people coming over at the time, so Jackbox and Drawful and all that was fun. Then they had their first big gameplay showcase, I downloaded their demo game on my phone, and instantly canceled. Hard to believe that they're still showing off games that look so bad.

I was rooting them for awhile, mainly due to Tallarico nostalgia and the underdog position they were in. But nowadays that certainly won't work and I just get sad when I realize people are still investing in a situation that's a no-win scenario for anyone.