 It is Christmas Day and I've got one of these, the Intellivision Flashback Console from Dollar General. The other day on a Facebook on the Intellivision Invasion group people were talking about how Dollar General was selling these for half off for $20. So first thing yesterday morning 8 a.m. Christmas Eve I biked over to the local Dollar General. I knew I had seen these there and they had one. They had this one copy and they had one of the Colecovision consoles as well. Had one of each. Sure enough they were going for $20 so I snapped them up. I'm going to open it up and take a look. It's an instruction booklet. On the first look I'm impressed with how it looks. It looks very authentic. It has a very authentic retro look to it. It looks like a midget in television mark one. It's got the phony woodgrain sticker. It's got the bizarre brown and gold coloration. The shiny gold stickers. And it feels good too. I mean I expect toys from Dollar General and from the other dollar stores to feel too lightweight and too thin. But it's light but it feels... it doesn't feel like shoddy construction. It feels good. And then the controllers. The controllers look very authentic as well. But the buttons actually have better action to them than the authentic old school and television controllers do. The controllers on the old school and televisions were always problematic. Especially the buttons on the side. They didn't have any action to them. You can never tell if you were getting a good push on the buttons. And these rocker disc controllers on the old school consoles are so strange. This feels better. They look authentic. And this feels better than the authentic controllers. So I'm really curious to see how this plays. And here's an envelope just packed full of overlays for the controllers. Astro Smash, Buzz Bomber, Crown of Kings. I don't know that game. Night Stalker. Yeah classic. Space Hawk, Utopia, Baseball, Word Fun. Okay. Well I'm gonna hook this thing up and we'll play some games. Okay here we are. I've got it hooked up to my little remote monitor for my camera. There's no point in trying to hook this up to the computer and getting direct 720p output. This is no point. Let's just do it like this. It'll be fun. I've got the microphone closer to the little speakers on here than to to my mouth. So I probably sound like I'm across the room anyway. Let's turn this on and see what happens. There it is. We immediately got a picture and sound. I have a seven pages, seven page menu here with only one, only one item on page seven. Let's look for an easy one. The controller is working great. It's very sensitive. Astro Smash is pretty basic if I remember. Good color. Okay let's go. Am I supposed to? Okay there we go. The controller is nice and responsive. Like I was saying before about the the buttons on the sides of the controllers on the old school in television were always problematic. You could never get a good feel for the button press. But this works really well. Oops. I'm gonna reset. Don't play something else. Trog bog. Okay whenever I hit left or right it goes to the next menu instead of moving from one column to the next. How do I? Okay. Alright. Going up and down takes you to the next column. Going left and right takes you to the next page. Let's go to a breakout. I never had an Intellivision when I was a kid. I had a friend who did. Let's see. So I was familiar with Intellivision. I had an Atari and a Coleco vision and he had Intellivision and then later in the 80s he's the one who got all the Nintendo's. And the Intellivision console and the control scheme were never well suited for paddle games. But again these controls are working really well. The picture is good. The sound is good. Let's play something else. Hover Force? I don't know that one. Night Stalker. Night Stalker is a deceptively difficult game. I'm gonna play the yellow guy in the middle who starts off basically in jail. Then you have to take this really slow run while avoiding the robot to get your gun down in the corner. And how do I fire the gun? I don't remember. Okay. Outrun the bullet. Outrun the bullet. I'm pushing all the buttons and I'm not getting it. Let's see if I can kill that spider. I killed a couple things here. I think I'm supposed to get... I lost my gun. I have to get the gun again. Okay so the firing happens directionally with the number keys. There we go. Space Armada. That's what I want. That's the Space Invaders clone game. Yeah this is what I remember. Really, really poor Space Invaders clone. This is something you would expect to see on like a VIC-20. This is pretty bad. Well there we go. The Intellivision Flashback. I got this at Dollar General for $20. It's my understanding that that sale price was only through yesterday. I have seen these at Family Dollar for the regular $40 price. I know they're at Family Dollar. They have stacks of them. So it's not a Dollar General exclusive like it says on the box. Anyway I'm impressed with it. I think it's well built. The games work. I think the controller is actually a little bit better than the old school controllers. So there you go. Intellivision Flashback. If you can get it at that $20 price or anything below that $40 price, which I think is actually too much, then go for it. I think it's a good little console. Bye.