Welcome back to the third and final selection of games in the sports genre from Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 released on the Nintendo DS back in 2010. This is also our final article covering the games in this collection but we will close this all up in a future post. Today we visit the four games that did not fit either into the self-titled All-American sports (baseball and football) or the court sports (tennis, volleyball, basketball), so today we will be visiting alleys, fields, courses, and rings.
Bowling
Hmm. This is likely to be the barest bones version of any bowling game I have ever played, and while I appreciate that there are not overly complicated controls regarding ball spin and force thrown, it still felt a little dull. Aside from playing either single-player or two-player, there are three different modes depending on how you want to control the ball. Game 1 I played with a curve-able ball, meaning I could add a spin to the ball at any point after I had let go of the bowling ball. I only found this useful if I wanted/needed to adjust the angle of the ball as it approached the remaining pins, although I am not sure if the game is so developed that throwing a little curve at the end before it hits the pins at a particular angle actually has any real effect.
Game 2 felt like a bit of a cheat because you could control the ball, moving in up or down the lane as it rolled. Granted you only have a few seconds of rolling to move the ball and it does only move a bit before it hits the pins and is directed based on how it hits the pins, so the controlling of the ball throughout the entire throw is somewhat negligible. That being said, it was my highest-scoring game.
The last mode was a straight throw, so however you have the ball moving after throwing it straight is how it will hit the pins. The biggest downside to this mode was that if you only knocked over a handful of pins in the middle and left any standing that was not next to each other, say the 7 and 10 pins, then I did not feel that the pin physics would allow you to get a spare.
In general, I do like a good, and fun bowling game, but this was just kinda meh, even with the different modes.
Verdict: No.
Game 1 (1 Player, Curve Ball): 144
Game 2 (1 Player, Steerable Ball): 153
Game 3 (1 Player, Straight Ball): 101
Championship Soccer
There are apparently 54 different game modes here, with variations based on the speed of the players, how hard the computer is to beat, and the size of the goals; penalties and out-of-bounds only exist in two-player modes. I am not going to be able to play most of the modes, so I decided to play on Mode 38, which is Medium Speed, Easy Difficulty, and a Medium Sized Goal.
Feeling the controls here took a while to get used to since you are primarily controlling three dots with legs which represent the players who all move in the same triangle formation and this only changes when your goalie is in view and then you can move the goalie horizontally. Passing the ball however felt a bit frantic even by the end of the game, and part of that was because I kept forgetting that I could kick the ball further by holding down the Button as most of the time I just fluttered kicking (rapidly tapping the Button) while trying to dribble the ball.
Even though I lost the game, I like that I never felt that I was so outmatched that the score was un-soccerly high, say 2 - 18. The realistic score is also likely because I played against an easy opponent, and it was a surprisingly tense game while never feeling frustrated. I think I might play a game against a hard opponent just to see how that game turns out although if I am getting destroyed I might just quit, especially if it feels like the game is cheating. I have never been a big fan of soccer games, honestly because I have never given them much of a chance, but with the 10 minutes I gave Championship Soccer, I did have fun.
Verdict: Yes
Game 1: 2 - 3
Miniature Golf
Miniature golf itself is already kind of a puzzle game and Miniature Golf presented here is even more so because of the starting ball placement and the putting mechanic. When I first started, I glanced over the user manual because I felt like I knew the basic mechanics of golf, but after striking the ball more than five times and the ball barely moving, I quit, reread the manual, and started a new game. The manual says that the distance of your club away from the ball determines the distance the ball will travel. What conventional wisdom keeps from you though is that you can move your club all of the way across to the left side of the screen if your ball is hugging the right side with hardly any room to put between the right wall and the ball, so you "swing" your club across the screen to bank the ball off of the nearby wall so that your ball will end up on the left side of the screen. Maybe. If you are lucky.
I do not know why I was surprised by the "physics engine," but whatever calculations the game uses to determine the length the ball travels I found confusing. At times the ball would blaze across the screen only to stop on a dime. Obviously, there was no indication of incline, decline, or any other features aside from the walls and moving obstacles, but it was not always obvious as to what would be a cause for the ball to slow down or come to an abrupt halt.
The level design felt off too, in that there was a lot going on in terms of nooks and areas where it seemed like I would have to actively try to hit my ball in order to get there. There were a couple of instances when the moving obstacle would knock my ball around, but only in a level or two was it an initial problem that I worked around after adding a bunch of strokes to my counter.
As for the total number of strokes, I am not sure. I thought the game would keep track by hole, but it only kept total track until the end of the game and it said that I had a stroke count of 5. This could mean that I actually had 104 strokes, which would not surprise me as around hole 7 or 8, I already had 70+ strokes.
Verdict: No.
Game 1: I do not know if I maxed out the counter at 99 strokes and it just looped back because my final score was 7. So maybe it was really 108? I do not think that it was that I shot 7 over par. Who knows.
Realsports Boxing
To surprise pretty much no one, I have mixed feelings about Realsports Boxing. On the one hand, I like that you can pick one of four boxers to play as and one of the remaining three to be your opponent. This leaves a lot of combinations as to how you play; okay, specifically 12 different matchups depending on who you play as. The instruction manual even gives tips on how you approach each of your opponents and presumably, how the computer will approach fighting against you as each character has strengths and weaknesses depending on the types of punches used.
In practice, I could not tell the difference and each match ended up turning into a button (because there is only one) mashing punch-fest. In Game 2, I did try to see how many punches I could get in before my character became exhausted, and at 17 punches, I decided to pull back and see if I could regain some stamina because my yellow meter had maxed out. This really just felt like a video game version (sort of) of Rock'em Sock'em Robots, except here you could move all around the boxing ring, something that I feel is not present in enough boxing games. Verdict: No.
Game 1: (Jabbin' Jack vs Iron Fists) KO in 5th Round.
Game 2: (Macho Man vs Lefty O'Leary) KO in 3rd Round.
So that is it for the random sports games, the sports genre, and all 51 of the games in Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1. I feel like Realsports Boxing came very close to getting a Yes vote from me and if I were to have guessed what I voted before I reread my article, my memory told me that I had a good time, but I think I was looking for more than a button masher with an odd stamina mechanic. Only one out of four for today ended up a yes, but for how varied these games were within the sports genre and how they were each presented, I am not really surprised with the end result. I am a little surprised though that Realsports Soccer was not included in this collection, but maybe 12 sports games was just one game too many.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
