#oneaday Day 1010: Intelliwhatnow

Remember a while back when I was contemplating investigating the Intellivision Amico, the modern-day reboot of the Intellivision brand with its fancypants touchscreen controllers and its aim to bring back couch-based multiplayer as a default?

Yeah, forget all that; I've defended Tommy Tallarico in the past because I thought people were being unnecessarily harsh on him and his plans for the system — but the email I received today gave me an extremely sour taste in my mouth.

You see, for a while they've been teasing the fact that there will be physical releases for the all-digital system that doesn't have a cartridge slot or disc drive — and today they revealed exactly what form those physical releases are going to take. They're going to be boxed copies, limited in number, that contain a lenticular card, a collector's coin… and an RFID card with a code to download the game once it's available. Oh, and the games themselves will be NFTs.

So basically, these "physical releases" are nothing of the sort. Not only that, they're contributing to what is commonly agreed to be one of the most harmful and/or stupid things in the digital sphere right now. Tommy and co are touting these boxed copies as being "fully transferable" due to them being NFTs — as if that was something revolutionary. Except it's not, is it; we've been able to loan or give games to other people since the very dawn of the industry.

I guess the fact that it's a digital copy which can be given to someone else is noteworthy — at present there's no means of transferring ownership of an individual title on any other digital gaming platform — but the fact that this is implemented using the controversial NFT technology is likely to put a lot of people off. NFTs have a dedicated and alarmingly zealous online community behind them — but a considerably larger proportion of the population staunchly against them, since they're 1) stupid and 2) massive energy hogs.

I think the most galling thing for me, though, is that these are advertised as "physical releases" when they're nothing of the sort. They're boxes of tat, with a code to download a game from a digital platform. And once that platform's gone, the game is gone, too. It's not like all the boxed copies I have on my shelves behind me as I type this; each and every one of them can be put into its respective console and enjoyed until their physical components decay. Yes, some of the more modern releases require patches to be "optimal", but for the most part I can just put in a game and play it.

That's simply not the case with these ridiculous physical releases for Amico, and this absolute stupidity has been enough to discourage me from wanting anything to do with the platform. I still like the idea of what the Amico stands for and what they were hoping to achieve with it — but this silly bandwagoneering does nothing to endear a system that is already something of a laughingstock in certain quarters of the gaming community to the people they should be courting. No gaming collector worth their salt is going to be fooled by this crap.

At least I hope not.

Do yourself a favour and grab an Evercade VS; those folks know how physical releases work.