I am somewhat obsessed with the Intellivision Amico and I’m genuinely sad that it looks like it will never come out. It was this beautifully misbegotten project that harkened back to the days of the CD-I and the Jaguar; badly thought-out systems that didn’t catch on, and didn’t deserve to, but built their own weird urban legends. I used to read about them in magazines, things like how there are 3 real Zelda games not made by Nintendo and they’re all kind of terrible. In these days of video games as big business, where companies are more risk averse than ever, the Amico was that rarest of treasures, a truly bad idea being put together by a small plucky team with a lot of heart and no viable business plan. Of course my enthusiasm dulled significantly when they raked in millions of dollars from unsophisticated investors on very bad terms, and when they sold thousands of copies of games for a system that is likely to never launch, but I remain as fascinated as I am repelled.

Fascinated enough to play Fox n Forests, a game being reworked as Finnigan Fox for the Amico, and now to spend $5.50 to buy Rigid Force Redux for PS4, which was slated to become Rigid Force Redux Enhanced for the now unlikely Amico launch. I should note that I never pre-ordered an Amico so my total financial investment in my Amico obsession is under $20, and I got two actual playable games for systems I own out of the bargain.

What is Rigid Force Redux, a frequently advertised marquee title for the Amico system that’s pushed as a family games machine where all games are casual friendly and fun for all ages? It’s an R-Type clone. A blatant R-Type clone. You control a ship and fly horizontally through a level shooting enemy ships and dodging bullets until you meet a big boss and destroy them. You pick up power ups that power up a ball-like structure on the front of your ship that you can reposition behind you (as well as fan out for a wider but less powerful shot) and other icons that change your main weapon (spread shot, ricochet shot, that kind of thing) or give you a subweapon like homing missiles or bombs. It draws on a few other games for its mechanics. You collect green energy traces that emerge from destroyed ships like the geoms that drop in Geometry Wars, and those charge a meter at the bottom of the screen. That meter can then power either a super shot or a little sword that destroys enemy bullets, like the sword in Radiant Silvergun. There are environmental hazards that push your ship up or down on the screen and blocks of ice you need to tunnel through with your laser like in Gradius. There’s a blue AI lady named Psye who looks kind of like Cortana and calls you a failure when you die.

If you’re like me you’re wondering at this point how they made an R-type clone that’s fun for the whole family, since R-type is not only a core gamer game, but a niche core gamer game, generally popular among fans of retro games and shmups but not exactly mainstream and accessible to the hundreds of millions of people who own a Switch, PS4, or Xbox. The answer, dear reader, is that they didn’t. Not at all.

I’m definitely on the casual side when it comes to shmups. I grew up with Gradius being one of my favorite NES carts, but I never beat it, and I’ve messed around with plenty of shmups since then but rarely get through the end unless I’ve got infinite credits, like in those Neo Geo arcade releases they put out over the last 5 or so years. I did beat Jamestown+, a trophy with a 14.5% attainment rate of the people who played that already niche title, so I think that I can rate myself as at least competent at the genre by normal person standards.

Rigid Force Redux is not the hardest shmup I’ve ever played, but it’s far from the easiest. Knowing that this was picked up as an important Amico title (it’s one of the 8 games selected to have physical products) I thought it would be a cake walk because it is on a system designed for young kids and people who find normal games are too difficult. The first stage is pretty simple (I died a couple times getting used to the controls and from hazards that aren’t obvious your first time through) but the second stage ramps up the difficulty to be actually challenging. I used up both my continues and didn’t even make it past the second boss my first time through (you start from the beginning of the current stage when you continue.) Around level 4 is where the game really cranks up the difficulty. It’s not ridiculously tough but I needed to play through the levels a few times to learn the tough spots and how to respond to them. It also has the Gradius issue that when you die you lose your power-ups so you start each fresh life in a weakened state and likely to die again. There are areas that you can easily breeze through while fully powered up that are very difficult with your default ship weapon. My biggest complaints with the game start with the fact that the difficulty swings so wildly when you die and lose your power-ups that areas are often either nearly impossible or so easy you barely have to touch the controller depending on whether you died to an earlier hazard. My second biggest complaint is that there are some areas where enemies or projectiles come at you from the background and it can be tough to tell when they’re in the background (and thus both invisible and unable to hurt you) or on your plane where you can interact with them. This doesn’t happen often but it’s very annoying, as is the fact that the visual design can sometimes be so busy that it’s hard to tell at a glance what is a wall and what is just a background object even on the level architecture. There are also a few very cheap places in the game where an enemy or hazard zooms on screen with no time for you to react if you don’t know it’s coming (so you will die there on your first time through the level almost no matter what.) Finally I think the fourth boss is way too hard. I had a lot of trouble with it, while the fifth and sixth/final bosses only took a few tries each.

Visually the game looks okay, but it’s very unimpressive for a game released in the last couple of years. It looks like an upscaled Wii game or an early XBLA title. It sort of reminds me of an old XBLA game called Omega Five, which I really liked, or the Soldner-X series from the PS3, though honestly I don’t think it’s as visually appealing as either of those examples. Omega Five in particular has much better use of color, lighting, and smoke effects. Meanwhile Rigid Force Redux has objects that should be circular but have obvious sides and corners, which is a telltale sign of a low polygon game. I wouldn’t say it’s ugly, just bland and Wii-like. I would even say that R-Type Final on the PS2 is more detailed, though obviously it’s not HD. I would also give the nod to R-Type Dimensions, which is a 2009 3D remake of R-Type 1 and 2 where you can switch the graphics between the HD 3D graphics and the originals with the press of a button.

The music and sound in Rigid Force Redux are fine. It has a decent though not particularly memorable soundtrack. It’s not unpleasant but it’s not up there with the many greats in the genre. Weapon fire and explosions are fine. Even your AI companion isn’t too annoying, though she’s a bit overly chatty in the tutorial and the (thankfully skippable) level intros. The story is just vague sci-fi nonsense. In fact there really isn’t much of a story at all; not-Cortana tends to just describe the various locations you go through like a bored tour guide telling you about local weather and the main industrial output of the area. It’s kind of odd in a game about a desperate space war, but if you’re playing shmups for the story I don’t know what to say to you except that you should find another genre.

I thought Fox n Forests didn’t make a lot of sense as an Amico game, because it’s a pretty demanding European-style platformer that would only really appeal to people nostalgic for early 90s Amiga titles. I would say the same for Rigid Force Redux, except even more so. Fox N Forests at least had an appealing animal mascot that kids might like. Or at least they might have if the game had come out in 1993. Rigid Force Redux is just a straight up R-Type clone for hard core gamers. The Amico was going to get an “Enhanced” version with a few changes, including multi-player, and perhaps some retooling to make it more approachable. The “Redux” version already has a bunch of these features, including increasing the number of credits you get per try as you spend more time with the game and letting you start the campaign on the last level you made it up to the boss in. But let’s say they gave the player unlimited credits, extra hit points (you get 2 on medium presently) and let them retain their weapons when they died and restart wherever they were when they used a credit. What you’d have is a very easy to finish R-Type clone that most people would breeze through in 45 minutes…and then? There’s a scoring-combo focused arcade mode and a boss rush, but like many shmups this game is designed to be tough and require you to learn the levels and persevere. That’s where the value and fun come in. There’s a reason that there’ no genre of super easy shmups that people can just breeze through. That’s not a thing that anyone wants. Rigid Force Redux has a 30% completion rate (including on Easy) on Xbox and 16.5% on PSN. And that’s among people who wanted to play an R-Type style game in the first place.

That’s the main issue of this game in relation to the Amico. It’s for a specific niche of the population and the people in that niche already have a way to play it. It’s not retro enough to appeal to retro enthusiasts, who are not looking for modern shmups with Wii-level graphics. It has nothing to appeal to kids and families, and has plenty of violence and ugly alien bosses to repel moms and youngsters. Core gamers might have a decent time like I did, but they already have plenty of platforms to play it on. They don’t need an Amico. I’m sure that if Tommy Tallarico were still talking about the Amico publicly he would say that they’re going to fix the game by making it way easier and maybe changing the music and some of the graphics, but Rigid Force Redux is already an updated version of the original Rigid Force Alpha, so I’m not sure how much you’re going to improve this game by futzing with it further.

I’m not here to run down Rigid Force Redux as an awful game. It’s not. It’s fine. A solid B-/C+ with a 71% on Metacritic. It would have been a good early PS3/XBLA downloadable title. Even as a PS4/XBone game it’s okay. I think the $16 asking price on PSN ($20 on Xbox and Switch) is too much, but that’s a matter of personal taste. What is less of a matter of personal taste is that this game does not mesh at all with the claimed strategy of the Amico. It’s too hard for moms (as Intellivision sees them) and kids, too modern for retro gamers, pretty violent with some grotesque alien enemies, and nowhere near good enough to buy a $300 games system to play, if you needed one to play it on, which you don’t. The counter arguments are that it would have been made into a great game before being released on Amico (How?) and that not every game on a system has to be great; there’s room for decent filler titles as long as they’re not shovelware. Rigid Force Redux is not shovelware. The problem with that argument, though, is that part of the Amico pitch is that it was going to offer a tightly controlled curated group of good to great games you couldn’t get anywhere else. Rigid Force Redux being a just decent game that’s available on every major platform and is also completely inappropriate for the target market shows that they were never going to meet that promise. And this is not just a random “filler” title. Both it and Fox n Forests (in the form of Finnigan Fox) were among the 8 games that Intellivision sold thousands of physical copies of in packs of 4 or 8 for $20 each. Other than the free pack-in games these were the most promoted titles in the lineup.

The Amico was selling underpowered hardware with a gimmick controller on the theory that it didn't matter because they were going to recapture the Wii market, but the actual software they promoted was either rehashes of forgotten games like Astrosmash and Shark Shark! or games already available elsewhere and considered mediocre. They claimed to be aiming at the family market but they just didn't have the goods.

You know who did? Nintendo. The Switch. That system launched with Snipperclips, 1-2-Switch, Bomberman and Fast RMX (a racing game that's much more accessible than something like Rigid Force Redux.) The Amico was just going for the Switch market but with gimmicky controllers instead of legitimately useful portability (and Nintendo's own gimmicky controllers) and without the software to back it up. It was never going to work. It would have been fun to actually watch it try, though. It kind of was anyway with how things ended up. I'm just sad for the people who invested millions of dollars on a project that never got off the ground.