Las Vegas Poker and Black Jack, Tron Deadly discs, Triple Action, Astrosmash, Football, D&D.
Intellivoice:
B-17 Bomber in a Southern accent,
Bomb-squad in a Transylvanian? accent
Can you believe I lent it and dozens of games to a friend at work and it never came back. Finally cornered the guy and he said, "my wife threw it out :-(." Had no recourse.
I have fond memories growing up playing Dungeons and Dragons Advanced on the Intellivision.
The controllers were shit, the button pad had these hard to press plastic-y bubble buttons with a touch-tone phone style layout. Laughably bad ergonomics and design, but back then nobody was laughing or even complaining about such matters.
I enjoyed snafu, armor battle, football and hockey with my brothers. And mind strike (which is clever enough someone should remake it)
Even though the controller where charitably meh (I disliked the side buttons) The hardest part of playing those games in emulation is getting a controller with a number pad and 16 directions. I tried a couple versions and modern controllers just don’t deal with the keypad well. I have bunch of carriages with the plastic overlays that slide over the number pad that told you what some of the buttons did.
What was the purpose of these phone style layouts in these early game console controllers? Atari 5200 also had a number pad with * and # and everything, so unnecessary.
Many games you start by entering a numeric difficulty.
Some games barely used them, but for others they were required.
for football, you entered the play/formation information. Utopia (an island civilization sim) you used it to select what you wanted to build. Math learning games the keypad is self explanatory and for a lot of games it took the place of an on screen menu system(the resolution was low and the fonts quite big)
I had the Intellivision computer ( keyboard component) when I was a kid. We loved the intellivision but the “add on computer” was truly awful. It had a couple interesting games though.
As an adult I find out they released it because they had too (fines for advertising it, but never releasing it we’re adding up)
Looks like this project almost got there.