Moving on from the explosive end of the previous episode, we have part 2 of Double Vision. Just as part 1 covered the Intellivision, part 2 covers the Colecovision, a mighty system in its own right.
Released in 1982, the Colecovision came a few years after the Intellivision, and well into the life of the Atari 2600. In fact, it was released just shortly after the Atari 5200, the proposed successor to the Atari 2600 and a machine designed to compete with the Intellivision, but would face its real battle with the Colecovision.
Montezuma’s Revenge on the Colecovision.
The Colecovision was based around hardware very similar to that of arcade machines of the day, most critically the fact that it used a Zilog Z-80 CPU – a CPU common to many arcade games of the day. Combined with Coleco’s brand recognition as a toy manufacturer allowing them to license the rights to many popular games of the era, including Nintendo properties like Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, this system proved to be an incredible competition to Atari’s dominance in the gaming scene – at least, until the 1983-1984 North American Game Crash.
We’re losing focus here – this is an AVGN episode review, after all, and here James starts off in a more classic Cinemassacre style by parodying the monolith from the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey when showing off the absolutely massive power supply for the Colecovision.
Yes, a game pisses him off in this episode.
Following that and quickly covering how similar the controller for the Colecovision is to that of the Atari 5200 and the Intellivision, James wastes no time getting into covering some games. The same criticisms of the controller itself being an issue come in, but here you can at least change out the controller with minimal issue.
The episode hits on some very odd games, like Campaign ’84 – it’s actually kind of surprising how many strange Colecovision games are shown in this episode, but it gives a chance for some decent jokes and criticisms.
The console shown with “Expansion Module 1” which allowed the Colecovision to run Atari VCS software.
The game reviews don’t go on for too long before James goes into the Colecovision Expansion Module 1 – a device which allows you to play Atari 2600 games on the Colecovision! He briefly touches on some of the other expansion modules for the system, taking the opportunities fo typical Nerd humor (read, more ass jokes) before the episode cuts out to that cover of Double Vision that Kyle Justin performed for these episodes.
Final Rating: 4.5/5
This episode is a bit shorter than the Intellivision one and seems to be a little more rushed. It may be my bias towards the Intellivision, but I feel that half of this episode pair was just done a little bit better. Still, this half isn’t bad, and if you pay attention it shows well the capabilities of the Colecovision over the Intellivision.
The point of these episodes isn’t to cover the systems in depth, only to touch on them and get a chance to crack a few jokes. That’s the nature of AVGN, after all, but I feel like these episodes really show these systems in a raw form that doesn’t do them a disservice.