Space Battle

System: Intellivision

Cheats Used: None

Considering the era in which it was released, Space Battle is a remarkably complex game for its time. The main goal of the game is to defend your mothership against five groups of invaders. You have three squadrons you can deploy and when one of your squadrons encounters a group of invaders, you move to a battle screen which plays like a first-person shooter. If a group of invaders reaches the mothership, they begin attacking it and if you don’t fight them in time (for example, if all your squadrons are deployed elsewhere), the mothership is destroyed and it’s game over.

There are five difficulty levels to choose from, but even on the easiest setting, the game is very difficult. This is due primarily to the fact that the invaders seem to move faster than your squadrons do and it’s hard to get a squadron back to base in time to defend it. Despite this, the game is still a lot of fun to play and I imagine that if I spent some time practicing, I could get better at it. This is indicative of the types of games found on the Intellivision, which were often more involved than Atari games in an attempt to be better than the 2600, which was the reigning champion at the time. In fact, that you had to use your brain was the system’s chief selling point and it was advertised as “intelligent television”. This is certainly truth in advertising and as a first impression of playing on real hardware, I’m very impressed.