The Intellivision 25 Video Game System was a cheap plug and play system featuring a compilation of what I like to call "demastered" Intellivision games, and was actually licensed by Intellivision themselves. The games run on some stripped-down NES hardware, otherwise known as "Famiclone" or "NES-on-a-chip", all contained within the controller. Rather than develop new hardware from the ground up to suit the original games, remaking the games to run on existing NES-on-a-chip hardware was the far cheaper option at the time. Many of the games in this collection are believed to have been made by Nice Code Software.
- Genre: Action/Shooter/Strategy
Some differences from the Intellivision version
- Starting properties of the enemy squadrons do not vary
- Only two player squadrons can be dispatched instead of three
- Engaged squadrons do not simulate fighting outside the battle screen, and is thus why we cannot end input insanely early like we did in the Intellivision TAS
- Time on the mother ship screen freezes when entering the battle screen
- Enemy shrapnel cannot destroy other enemy ships
- Multiple ships cannot be shot at once
Strategy
When the games starts, 5 enemy squadrons approach the center of the screen (i.e., the mother ship). The enemy squadrons always have the same starting positions. Ordered from closest to furthest from the mother ship, these positions are roughly in the:
- 2:00 position
- 11:00 position
- 9:00 position
- 7:00 position
- 4:00 position
Given this, there are really only two routes that are candidates for being the fastest. They are:
- Squadron 1 attacks the 2:00 then 11:00 positions while squadron 2 attacks the 9:00 then 7:00 then 4:00 positions
- Squadron 1 attacks the 2:00 then 11:00 then 9:00 positions while squadron 2 attacks the 7:00 then 4:00 positions
After rigorously testing both, option 2 was found to be 60 frames faster than option 1.
Ending
When you defeat all enemy squadrons, the game has no ending fanfare, screen, or anything of that sort. A new game just automatically starts with no differences in difficulty or starting conditions from the first playthrough. Thus, this submission only completes one loop of this otherwise endless game.