Alien Creatures in the Home

As anyone who has watched the gogglebox over the past six months knows, the television networks sold almighty quantities of advertising time to the makers of home video games. During the pre-Christmas buying frenzy, George Plimpton and that anonymous smug kid argued between halves of everything except the disarmament talks over whether the viewer should spend his last dollar on Atari or Intellivision. The commercial blitz paid off for all of the home console manufacturers. Mattel shipped more than 600,000 Intellivision units, a 300% rise from 1980. And Atari's Chairman, Raymond E. Kassar, said sales were "a magnitude beyond" earlier figures. Said he: "We all go to bed dreaming we'll have the kind of Christmas sell-through that we had this year." This triumph of TV adsmanship seems at first hoot almost suicidal for the networks: for every one of the games that is in play, one television set, to which it must be hooked, is unavailable to receive General Hospital, The Dukes of Hazzard, and much needed information about what kind of snow tire and no-qual beer to choose. Has the tube at last succeeded in strangling itself?

Or do the network ponderosos know something? Are the home video games really not that good?

The view here, meticulously opinionated and scrupulously unscientific, is that the home game systems and the cartridges that plug into them range from fairly good to fairly disappointing. None is within a light-year of the best arcade games in color, sound or action. Manufacturers seem to be aware of these shortcomings; add-on voice simulators and cartridges to work them are on the way, and Atari promises a $349 unit that will give its console powerful additional circuitry.

Three firms now dominate the console market. None of them accepts game cartridges made for the other two. Magnavox's Odyssey 2 costs about $200 for the basic console and $15 to $50 for cartridges. It has good joystick controls, but otherwise is not very satisfactory. The console incorporates a typewriter keyboard, but not much use is made of it in the game cartridges. Graphics seem perfunctory, and the games generally are too shallow to interest adults. Dynasty, a promising maze puzzle based on the Chinese game Go, is too easy to be interesting. Cryptologic is a not-very-mystifying letter substitution code. Alien Invaders--Plus shows one imaginative quirk, a tiny figure that flees in terror when its fortress is destroyed, but otherwise is an uninspired copy of Space Invaders.

The brightest and most imaginative graphics and sound effects in the industry are Intellivision's. The most rousing sight in home video is the between-innings sequence of Intellivision's Baseball, in which, to the sound of cheers, one team trots in to the bench and the other sprints out to the field. The game soon becomes tedious, however, partly because of awkward hand controls (which hamper a good skiing cartridge) and partly because not enough of baseball's delightful complications are programmed in. It is not possible to catch a fly ball. A Poker and Blackjack cassette is fun to see once, but poor in concept, since neither game works unless money is at stake. Intellivision always puts on a handsome show, but a random sample shows that it has not yet learned to play a really good game.

Atari's hand controls, too, are poor for a console that costs $150. Cartridges are $18 to $38. But they raise blisters on both adults and teenagers, and that does not happen unless a game is fascinating. Atari has good simplifications of Space Invaders and Asteroids, and a good Missile Command.

A firm called Acti-Vision makes $23 cartridges that fit Atari's console, and will soon make them for Intellivision. Acti-Vision's Laser Blast is a good fast-reflex game in which the player himself is the space invader. Its Tennis has a couple of good illusions--the ball bounces realistically on the court--but no effective simulation of hitting the ball, and no distinction between serves and ground strokes. Like too many cartridges for all three systems, Tennis is likely to be played twice and forgotten.

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