We return to sports for this collection of Sports themed games from Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 released by Code Mystics on the Nintendo DS in 2010. These games I grouped together because they are all played on courts. Yeah, I know that is a potentially strange sub-category of the Sports genre and possibly less cohesive than Part I of Sports where we featured football and baseball games. All three games here differ in the actual sports, how they are played, the rules, as well as the overall quality of the games themselves.
Basketball
I guess I should not be surprised by the limitations of the Atari 2600, but I was in fact surprised when I started Basketball and found that it was only a one-on-one game on a court that looked like a court at a local underfunded park. The controls are pretty simple and at the same time, a little confusing. You move with the joystick, and jump/shoot with "the button." When you shoot, you hold the button down and your player raises/lowers the ball which determines how far you shoot the ball. Thankfully that is the extent of the aiming as the game automatically aims the ball at the basket and if you are at least close enough to the hoop, the ball will more than likely go in. There are also only two-point shots.
Playing the game as a single player, I only played against the computer AI and I noticed that if you are either winning or the game is tied, the computer is a lot more aggressive, sticking closer to you, harder to shake off, more likely to steal the ball, and more successful in their own shots. If you are trailing, I have noticed that the computer will run in the opposite direction or at least give you room to make any kind of shot you want from anywhere on the court. This change in AI reaction definitely made the game more interesting and tense, especially in Game 2 as I kept trying to get in a final shot before the end of the game.
In the third game, I changed the difficulty settings to both be A, which according to the manual makes the players faster. I immediately noticed that the computer would stick to my player to the point that it was almost impossible to take a shot without them jumping in front and blocking me.
However, I was able to make three shots, figuring out that while they played amazing defense, they seemed more defensive when it came to offense. Eventually, we ended up in a stalemate, facing each other while constantly stealing the ball from each other and not moving. So I just stood there to see what would happen, and I was only a little surprised when the game ended. I do not know if I broke the game, or just hit that sweet spot, like in Pong, where the game would not allow itself to move into/out of a position that it deemed to be disadvantageous.
Verdict: No.
Game 1 (Difficulty B): 44 - 40
Game 2 (Difficulty B): 42 - 42
Game 3 (Difficulty A): 0 - 6
RealSports Tennis
Wow. Just wow. Color me impressed. For a tennis game, the team at Atari got this one spot on. Not because the game mechanic felt accurate, or because the court itself was accurate in any way apart from there being a court at all, but because the game just felt fun.
The serving mechanic was simple in that you just had to have your player over the bouncing ball and when you pressed the button, you hit the ball over the net with no need to worry if your serve was going to be in or out. It was just in because there were no service boxes, no alleys, just a boxed court, and a net. Hitting the ball had the same simplicity, although I think that the direction you were pressing on the joystick when you hit the ball had some effect on the direction you hit the ball, as well as how much your character moved forward while hitting the ball being the indicator for how hard you hit the ball. This is all just speculation as I do not recall reading about it while breezing through the instruction manual.
For being a RealSports title, this was a pretty barebone take. There was no way (that I could tell) to hit a lob or to hit a top or backspin. It was just to get your player to where the ball lands and the game will automatically hit the ball back across the net. Even knowing that I did not need to press the button, I still found myself pressing it when I went up to hit the ball, it just felt good to do so. And while I did destroy the computer player, they put up a good enough game to have points, and the games actually were tense. Even the 6/0 set does not accurately show how many points the computer scored either through my own error or their skill. They do a great job returning volleys reminiscent of a Wimbledon match and about as realistic as an Atari tennis game is going to be.
I did not finish my first match, taking about 5 minutes per game, but it is likely that I would have won in straight sets. And while I played on "Slow," the game did not feel slow, but just the right tempo. I will definitely play the "Fast" mode too and play around with the A-B difficulty settings to find the perfect match.
Verdict: Yes.
Game 1: (4: Slow / Difficulty A): 6/1 - 6/0 - 0/0
RealSports Volleyball
Hmmmmm.
RealSports Volleyball is really just beach volleyball albeit with an interesting day/night mechanic. You play two volleyballers (ballers?) with the major difference in how you play the game being if you have setups turned on or off. In my first game, I had setups turned on because that seemed like a good idea (I guess?), but this was definitely the more difficult of the two modes. With setups, you could either hit the ball back over the net or set it up for your other player, although I could never determine how the game decided if it was going to be a setup or not. This added a level of complexity because I did not always know if I was going to have to go running after the ball on my side of the net after a setup or hold back and wait for the return. With setups turned off, the ball would always go back over the net so as long as you tracked the ball with one character, you were almost always guaranteed a shot that landed in; sometimes the ball would land out of bounds, but this seemed more random than because of something I did wrong.
Something else that added some psychological complexity was that the net did not seem to have any height to it as at times it seemed more like the players were kicking the ball a few inches off of the ground back and forth rather than batting it up and over the net. This resulted in several quick-fire volley exchanges.
The day/night mechanic I thought pretty interesting but never experienced it because my games never ran into the night. During the day, the court/sand is yellow and the sky is a shade of purple/blue, but at night (also shown when the game is over), the ball would no longer leave a shadow, making it harder to track. This feels like it is supposed to be an in-game difficulty timer of sorts, encouraging people to play fast otherwise the environment will play against the human player (at least in a single-player game).
On one hand, I had fun once I felt I had a better grip on the game and getting used to controlling two separate characters who essentially covered the same general non-overlapping area, but on the other hand, it was pretty hard to always determine who could cover the ball even when tracking the shadow of the ball.
Verdict: Yes
Game 1: (1-Player with Set Ups) 3 - 15
Game 2: (1-Player without Set Ups) 15 - 11
So those were the court sports, sports games. Oddly enough, I had higher expectations for the one game of these three that I ended up not liking while really enjoying RealSports Tennis, which I went in not expecting much. I do play tennis, or at least played recreationally from the age of 9-10, then I played competitively in high school, and back to recreationally again off and on. So I thought I was going to be pretty harsh on a game that I actively enjoy playing the real-world equivalent. RealSports Volleyball was another surprise highlight from these games, pleasantly surprised by the day/light mechanic even in its most rudimentary sense.
I feel that 66% of these three games (as well as the four games that preceded them in Part 1) are a great example of making a fun sports game. The game has to at least look like the sport that it is trying to replicate, but the controls, especially on a console that has one joystick and one button, need not be overly complicated (swinging a bat or selecting a play) and above all else, should be accessible and fun.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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