New Jersey
Laser Blaster
54 Posts | Here's the complete list of M Network games
http://www.atariage.com/company_page.html?CompanyID=3
Some of these never made it past the prototype stage but of the ones that were released, they were some of Mattels' most popular games and also games that Mattel used heavily in advertising to show off the differences between the two systems. The sports games in particular were worked to death in Mattel's advertising campaigns There were also cross platform games released by third parties for both systems and even on the "superior" Intellivision, none were arcade perfect.
The advantages of the Intellivision are largely exaggerated. The CPU may have been 16-bit internally, but the cartridge port was only 10-bits wide and the instruction set was also only 10-bits.The CPU was also clocked slower than the 2600. The Intellivision had a ROM that contained many subroutines that the programmer could access with calls that saved space on the cartridge so longer programs could be written in the same memory space, but accessing those subroutines would cause the game to run more slowly than if they were contained on the cartridge ROM.
Some people like to say there were games released for the Intellivision that can never be done on a 2600 but look at some of the homebrew stuff we have today. Freed from the constraints of having to squeeze a game into a very limited memory space and not having deadlines or budgets to deal with, and not having to build a game to a price point, homebrewers are doing things with the 2600 today that the programmers at Atari in the 70's, 80's, and 90's could never have dreamed of. I do not believe for a second that there are any Intellivision games that could not be recreated on the 2600 today. So what does the Intellivision have left that makes it better? Better sound? Maybe in some games, but not all. More peripherals? Yeah, but third party support for peripherals has always sucked because nobody wants to take a chance releasing a game that requires a peripheral that not everyone is going to be able to afford to buy. Even peripherals that are common as dirt today, like the voice module, only had limited games support. The only Intellivision peripheral that had substantial support was the 2600 adapter. So, what's left for Intellivision to boast about? |
