Game #011: Stack-Up, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo R&D1 Published by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias:

Oh, boy. I'm in trouble here, guys. I obviously had some issues last review since I needed to review a game that ostensibly required the R.O.B. peripheral and I needed some workarounds since I didn't have one to play with. Fortunately the main game mode of Gyromite could be played on two controllers so, in theory, it could make a decently fun two player game assuming the two players could communicate worth a damn.

I'm not so lucky with Stack-Up. The only reason I knew what I was getting into was because of the Angry Video Game Nerd review. What little preview footage the Nerd deigned to put on screen showed some player interaction so I thought I could somehow get an hour of play out of this game. With the R.O.B. I think I could have and not just because it moves so slowly. I'm going to get into more detail about the game in the usual sections but know this upfront: this is not a true One Hour Review. Sorry about that.

First Impressions & Presentation:

The game continues its puzzling, hopefully only two-game trend of the game keeping its Japanese title for the US title card. I actually did find out why this is the case so go ahead and read that in the trivia section.

The title card itself is trying to make an attempt at appearing 3-D while pretty much failing. The pink and yellow text for "BLOCK" does stand out from each other. Unfortunately, not all of the letters follow the correct perspective. The C "shadow" so to speak should have a few of the yellow pixels erased to correctly show the gap in the letter. On top of that the layered grid pictures that straddle the word fall flat. Literally.

Not Pictured: 3-D. Sorry, Nintendo

The title card does give the player a jaunty introduction piece of music which represents about 50% of the music in the whole game. Game composers had a much easier job back in those days. There was no introduction to witness and in retrospect I don't know what they could have demonstrated so it was off to the main menu.

The main menu has a small array of choices. Test will send a check signal to R.O.B. which will let the player know the add-on is working and will also ensure that the player's optometrist will continue to be a rich man in the future. Direct, Memory, and Bingo are the three actual game modes.

Pictured: Not selecting Test mode. Do not do it!

My first impressions are summed up like so: where's the game? In all of the gameplay modes the player controls the same scientist from Gyromite. It turns out that he is actually a professor named Professor Hector. The player is tasked with controlling the professor to hop on different buttons associated with one of the six actions the R.O.B. is capable of. The R.O.B. has a different accessory from the gyros this time. This time the player gets to handle blocks instead of gyros. There are five blocks that come with the game of five different colors. The game screen in the Direct mode shows the blocks stacked in a default pattern on the R.O.B.'s middle position. The player is in charge of controlling R.O.B. to move the stack of blocks from one pattern to the next. See the problem yet? I'll elaborate.

Pictured: Results?

The presentation this time around is pretty bland. Most of the playing field is made of ugly grey blocks to make the button stand out. The professor does look good hopping from button to button and the buttons themselves make a pretty neat effect when they are pressed. There are only a few different poses for the professor so the smoothness of his moves breaks down in front of the lack of variety. The rest of the playing field does not fare much better as it is just a black bar with the objective in neon green with kind of piss-yellow colored text. Overall it's not a very attractive looking game and the fact that everything in the game is pretty much static doesn't help. Most of the focus was meant to be used on the R.O.B., I suppose. See the problem yet? I'll elaborate.

Experience & Conveyance:

The experience here can be pretty much summed up in one word without the R.O.B.: pointless. I'm sure that moving the stack of five blocks in specific patterns from one of the five resting areas to another is probably a challenge when working with an actual peripheral. The game wants the player to press start when the correct pattern of blocks is achieved. The thing is the blocks are just blocks. There are no sensors or anything to let the NES know which block is where leaving the whole game to the honor system.

Not Pictured: Me mashing the start button. "S

The other two game modes add wrinkles to Direct's formula. First there is Memory. Thankfully the player does not have to memorize anything. What is required is that the player must use the A and B buttons to select the different R.O.B. commands to move the blocks into their correct pattern in a single stream so it works more like programming a computer. Once the player thinks they have put in the correct program the player gets to pick how fast each step is before the next step is executed. Given the agility of the R.O.B. I assume the correct answer is always the slowest speed. Again, the player can just go ahead and claim they have correctly completed the pattern. The honor system wins the day.

Pictured: It's kind of like programming Jaca except it's not and I get to make a robot do my bidding. So it's actually way better than programming Java!

The last game mode is Bingo. This is the only time in the R.O.B.-less game that the player faces some antagonism. The object is still the same: get the blocks into their correct order. This time the player is tasked with completing a row or column on a bingo board of buttons to activate the desired command. Pressing a button will switch it from not pressed to depressed and back. Standing in the professor's way are a pair of glitches. One glitch will slowly move from spot to spot and deny the professor some territory. The other will press buttons in a row and will most often execute a command the player does not want so it becomes a game of land management. It's kind of like Sim City except instead of natural disasters there are computer programs trying to ruin the player's day. So it's not really like Sim City at all and I should really stop making metaphors.

Not Pictured: The objective. Hope you memorized it in the two seconds it was shown to you!

On the conveyance side the player would be completely lost without any knowledge of the peripheral that is supposed to be used. See, that's the thing I like about the Zapper. There is only one obvious use for that device so if the game requires it the player should expect some shooting to occur. With the R.O.B. it has so far either been a stand-in for a second player in Gyromite or the puzzle itself in Stack-Up. I think the game was fully intended to only be played new. Considering what I found out for my trivia section in my last review this is probably true. These days on an emulator there is no conveyance to be had. If the player has the device and is playing it on an appropriate TV then the game functions well enough to let the player complete its objective. As far as it stands with me I can't give the game much credit.

Verdict & Score:

Stack-Up leaves me a bit confused about how to grade it. I did not play the game for a full hour. There is nothing in the game that can even challenge the player without the peripheral. I thought for a couple of minutes about how to rate this game. Do I put an asterisk on the score? Do I score it on its own scale? But I remembered my mission statement: I am filling the shoes of a person who, 30 years after the fact, has decided to download the entire NES library and wants to play some games. Based on this concept I cannot recommend Stack-Up. I suspect that with the full suite of equipment the player could get some amusement from the set up and I think I would give the game a four based on its unique merits. However, today, I must give the game a 2/10. Hopefully the bottom of my graph is not filled up with games like this…

Factoids & Trivia:

So last time I went over the historical significance of the R.O.B. This time I intend to cover some of the more technical aspects of the unit.

Much like the Zapper, the R.O.B. responds to light patterns on the player's TV. Instead of white light on a black background the game will flash different series of green light patterns to give the R.O.B. one of its six instructions. In a way it is sort of like a bar code. The maligned Test mode in each of the two games sends a diagnostic signal to the unit. R.O.B. has an LED in its head that will light to signal that the unit is working properly.

The instruction manuals that I have read consistently refer to the R.O.B. as a "he" but I have no soul because I stared into its eyes for so long so I'm choosing to call the peripheral "it". Speaking of the unit's eyes the manual warns against pointing the device at the sun and to make sure to darken the display on the player's TV so the green flashes stand out well enough to be detected.

Finally, there is one good reason why the title cards are in their original Japanese/English. The oldest NES carts actually held the original Famicom chip board in them. The Famicom board used a 60 pin connection while the NES used a 72 pin connection. The NES carts internally had an adapter which is sought after by collectors because it allows the NES to play other Famicom games. This might be part of the reason the game is so damn expensive.

On the financial side, holy cow! Be prepared to shell out some big bucks for this game. This appears to be the most rare of all of the original 17 with the lowest price I found on eBay being $30 and the average being closer to $60. On top of that the block trays and the blocks need to be acquired and that will run you another $120. Add to that the claws needed and the R.O.B. itself will cost an additional $120. Not only that the game needs to be run on a CRT TV and not a modern LCD TV so good luck finding one of those as well. So $300 for a game with not a lot of playing value? This should be for collectors only.

Alright, whew. That’s it. I’m finished with the peripheral games. It is time to play the last 6 launch titles for the month of March and there are some good games coming up, too! I have no idea about the next one, though,as  I’m going in blind. Next time on One Hour Reviews I will play Clu-Clu Land.

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

eBay prices taken on February 29th

Does R.O.B. work on a flat screen TV?

http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=5&threadid=139551

Stack-Up Wiki Page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-Up

R.O.B. Instruction Manual (opens as a document)

www.robotsandcomputers.com/robots/manuals/Gyromite.doc

Game #010: Gyromite, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo R&D 1, Published by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias:

First, I want to do a little self congratulations for making it to my tenth review. I'm considering the first 17 reviews of the US launch titles to be a real proof of concept for the project so I would like to thank my readers for staying with me. A lot of my time has been taken up by the Zapper block and the Sports block but I have just one more gimmick peripheral to go through before I can go back to reviewing some one-off game ideas. So before I can get to games like Excitebike and Kung-Fu I will review the two games used with the Robotic Operating Buddy or R.O.B.

I jumped on the Nintendo bandwagon relatively late in the NES' lifespan so I did not get a first generation NES box set. To the best of my pre-research knowledge the R.O.B. was released at launch with the NES and was intended to have a large role in Nintendo's library for several years. For better or worse it was only used for two games, both of which were released with the US Nintendo launch. As such I never owned a physical R.O.B. but I am curious how much one might cost today. I intend to find out and report on the significance of the peripheral in the trivia sections of the next two reviews. For right now rest assured that I am going into these two games blind except for one very important source of information.

Yes, the Angry Video Game Nerd covered the R.O.B. in his episode 100 special. This gave me a lot of insight into how to play Gyromite in particular because nothing, nothing, in the game tells the user how to play. So much had to go into setting up the R.O.B. to play Gyromite that instructions in the manual must have been necessary. Well, here I am thirty years later and if I didn't have this video for guidance I would have been sunk. This is going to affect my first impressions of the game pretty dramatically.

First Impressions & Presentation:

Booting up the game made me a little nervous because on top of having no music playing at startup I was also treated to a pretty ugly looking title card that does not even have the right name!

Pictur... Not Pictured: Gyromite?

It seems that when Nintendo brought this game over they kept the original title card intact. The game was originally called Robot Gyro because the R.O.B. was simply called Robot in Japan and the game makes use of the spinning gyros that came with the unit. I also do not get any demonstrations of the game in action so I have to go ahead and wing it.

Pushing start gets me to the game option screen and I have a few selections to make.

Not Pictured: My recommendation to never select "TEST"

Test and Direct lets the player input controls which will send a signal to the R.O.B. to make sure it is receiving its commands correctly. The signals are sent out in an epileptic inspiring series of green flashes. I suppose that the frequency of the flashes tells the unit to do something different but I have no peripheral to test it on. Considering that the flashes happen at each input if the player starts mashing buttons on this screen it could really be painful to the eyes.

The two game modes are Game A and B. Game A has both a 1 player and 2 player mode but these are just alternating player modes rather than any sort of competitive or cooperative arrangement. Game B is a single player game that I will get into later. Selecting Game A actually took me longer than I expected. Out of habit I pressed the A button to get into the Game A mode and that does not grant me entry. Instead it cycles through the 40 stages programmed into the game. The B button cycles back through the numbers in the opposite direction so I was able to finally enter stage 1 via the start button. The first experience Game A gives me is a quick pan shot of the playing field which is roughly two or three screens wide. This gives me a good look at the problems I have to solve and implies what my goal is without telling me directly. The issue is that without a manual to reference I have no immediate idea as to what my character's capabilities are and button mashing does next to nothing to teach me anything.

Pictured: Dy-no-mite! ...in Gy-ro-mite!

I'm going to break down the control scheme and how I had to work around the lack of peripheral in the experience section. My first impressions section is going to be pretty short as gameplay wise there is little I could experience. Without doing some research I could make zero progress at the start of my play time so that is all going to be brought up later.

The graphics during gameplay actually are pretty decent. I am dealing with a plain black background but it is made up with colorful foreground objects such as the bright red and blue pistons that are an important gameplay feature, green enemies, grey stationary objects and a mostly white player avatar. Everything is quite clear graphics-wise and the black background actually helps everything that the player needs to interact with pop and that is quite helpful. On top of that the music track that loops is quite cheerful. I would describe it as industriously optimistic with its upbeat march tempo. It complements the implied science motif of the game and once I got the ball rolling on my gameplay experience it was actually a good addition to my experience. Of course I would have liked more than one theme in this game mode but I'll take what I can get. I honestly did not have that much time to get bored with the music considering what I needed to do to play the game normally.

Experience & Conveyance:

Hoo boy. This is where I needed some help. I think the best way to tackle this section is to describe just what the R.O.B. is supposed to do for the player and how that is hard to emulate. I am going to break down the R.O.B. in more detail in the trivia section but for now the unit's role is to pick up spinning tops, or gyros, and set them down on pads that are attached to levers. These levers would then push the A or B button on the second player's Nintendo controller. This function is activated by the first player pressing start to prep the TV for a command and then pressing directions or the A or B button to steer the R.O.B. to the correct location, pick up the gyro, and drop it on one of the action buttons. The movements of the unit are very slow and deliberate. The game itself is not very demanding in its time limit but there are enemies that must be avoided at all costs because the player can do very little to defend himself. It is very possible to die while waiting for the R.O.B. to execute its command. Now, for me as the chump playing this on his laptop what am I supposed to do?

Pictured: Death. My fault or the R.O.B.'s? You dec- yeah, it was totally my fault

It turns out that there is a pretty simple solution to my issue. At the end of the day the R.O.B. is just a stand in for a second player in a cooperative game. I just had to program my SNES style USB controller so that the direction pad and the start and select buttons all gave inputs to player 1 and then let the A and B button control to player 2. The Angry Video Game Nerd accomplished this by sawing apart two NES controllers and duct taping them back together to create a clumsy but functional Gyromite controller. I don't have that kind of money to burn and I'm not playing on a real TV anyway so I am satisfied with my solution. With all that out of the way let's finally dig into some real gameplay and conveyance!

Stage 1 is not a great ambassador for the rest of the game. After the quick pan shot to show the playing field I was finally given control. My first obstacle was a blue piston which blocked my progress. This lowered itself on its own as a sort of default function so I proceeded past it and made my way to a green vertical line. This turns out to be a climbing wire. What I did not know then but I quickly learned is that the climbing wire is one of only two ways to gain height in this game. My scientist avatar cannot jump at all. This makes sense seeing as how all of the controller functions are absorbed by movement and raising and lowering the blue and red pistons. While it does not make sense physically it at least provides some of the rules the player needs to complete each challenge. No jumping: check. This lack of jump button became problematic as I quickly fell into a small pit. The solution to my problem was to raise the blue piston I stood on to get me back to ground level but I was quickly defeated by the game's green bird-reptile-like enemy as it fell on top of me.

Pictured: Not Mario

My lead up to my first death did teach me a couple of things. First, I can't jump. Already covered. Second, I learned the movement behaviors of the enemies. The enemies can't jump either. They simply walk forward and will climb any rope they come across. They rarely, if ever, track the player. This allows the player to make some pretty deliberate decisions about how to proceed which is good considering how slowly the player can respond under normal circumstances. This encouraged me to use the pistons to evade the monsters, block monsters' progress, or even crush them between the piston and the floor or the ceiling. The only other method of defense are radishes which are sprinkled throughout the stages. The monsters will stop at any radish they come across and eat them for about ten to fifteen real life seconds which is more than enough time to walk past them. There is no indication the player can safely pass through one of the eating monsters but trial and error taught me that quickly enough.

The only other thing I could do with each stage was collect the bundles of dynamite. Since the fuses of the dynamite were lit and I had a time limit it was easy enough to assume that I was meant to collect/defuse all of them. Collecting all of the dynamite rewards the player with a "win" jingle and they are taken to the next stage without much ceremony. After I learned all of that I knew everything I needed. There are no new wrinkles introduced later in the stages, no new mechanics or anything. It is just 40 stages of raising and lowering pistons, evading enemies, and no jumping. As a challenge I decided to jump right to the last few levels to test out my skills and most of these final stages only required one or two tries to complete a piece.

Pictured: Sleepwalking to Game B victory

Satisfied with conquering Game A well within my hour allotment I moved to Game B and it is actually a bit of a different experience. Game B involves protecting the scientist avatar as he literally sleepwalks his way through different obstacle courses. The player needs to raise and lower pistons so that the scientist makes it from the left side of the stage to the right intact. While this is an interesting twist to the Gyromite formula it is actually pretty dull. The game designers knew that the R.O.B. had a long lead time to inputting commands. This means there is a pretty long wait at the beginning of most of the stages as the scientist lurches his way toward the first obstacle. There is no way that I found to speed up this process. On top of this the player is eventually tasked with selecting the correct path out of two or three choices. The first couple of times this happens there is a an arrow sign that tells the player which path is correct with enough lead time to steer the avatar over in that direction. Eventually the player just needs to flip a coin and guess which path is appropriate. The player only finds out that the wrong choice was selected the moment it is too late to do anything about it. The avatar is then promptly dumped in a pit to be eaten by a monster. Good Nintendo fun!

Verdict & Score:

Gyromite is an interesting beast. It was a game with a very specific function in mind and that function was to sell more NES consoles. To that end Gyromite probably shows the best use of the R.O.B. but also displays its limitations. These days I don't get to play Gyromite nor its sister game with a real peripheral and playing the game on one controller does take away some of the game's novelty and sense of timing. Still, once I got around the initial struggle of setting it up I found a fairly interesting puzzle game with a set of rules that are followed throughout. Game A gave me quite a bit of enjoyable puzzle solving game time and I will take that any day. With all that put together I will award Gyromite a 5/10. I think there are some great ideas but I think more could have been done with the concept had it not been limited to what a player could reasonably accomplished with the R.O.B.

Factoids & Trivia:

The R.O.B. is an interesting toy. In fact, that's what Nintendo was betting on with the release of the R.O.B., or just Robot in Japan. See, just a couple of years prior to the NES release an event known as The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 occurred. To summarize the Crash, dozens of toy makers wanted in on the video game craze and the market, especially in the United States, became too saturated. A few colossal marketing and production errors later and many game console makers and software providers went bust and retailers were stuck with product they couldn't move. After that, home consoles were a poison pill and retailers did not want to sell much of any product that even looked like a video game.

The Family Computer was taking off in Japan and Nintendo needed to get into the American market so they came up with a ploy to get the NES into homes. They sold the R.O.B. as the primary product with the NES as the add-on. The cute robot toy was simply a way for the kids at home to enjoy a video game. Apparently this was good enough for as many retailers as Nintendo needed and the R.O.B. came boxed with the console and Gyromite while Duck Hunt and the Zapper was the other big Nintendo bundle. While the Zapper came out ahead as having more appeal in the long run, helped by the fact that more than two games in the NES library support the Zapper, the R.O.B. ended up being just what Nintendo needed to penetrate the US market like a Trojan Horse with big, googly eyes.

But why was the R.O.B. retired so quickly while the Zapper had staying power? Well for one, it's a lot easier to make a game where the player is required to shoot things than it is to create a game to make use of a very highly specialized toy. The R.O.B. is a pretty clumsy contraption. The device itself has a hexagon base where different extensions can be attached. In the case of Gyromite the R.O.B. is fitted with two gyro stands on the right side of the base, the blue and red button pads (to correspond with the blue and red pistons in the game) in the front and front-left, and the gyro spinner on the back left. The R.O.B. can move its clawed arms to any of those five positions and also has three height settings so the gyros can be passed over each other. Green flashes on the TV instruct the R.O.B. to move left, right, up, down, or open and close its arms. The head of the R.O.B. never moves so it can maintain eye contact with the TV. And your soul...

Problems arise when the gyros run out of steam and fall off of the button pads while the player is attempting to keep certain pistons closed. The accessory itself moves very deliberately to each of its positions which makes it hard to make and execute quick decisions. Trying to solve a relatively fast paced puzzle such as a Gyromite stage boggles my mind. The toy is also quite loud as servos grind away to get the R.O.B. to move at all. It makes me wonder if this was enjoyable in a family room situation due to the noise. Still, if Nintendo was just trying to make video games approachable again they succeeded. The rest, certainly, is history.

For a video of the R.O.B. in motion, please check out the YouTube link below. If you want to buy a R.O.B. with all of its attachments, feel free to shell out about $100 on eBay. If you want to buy Gyromite you will only be out $5 to $40 depending on whether or not you want it boxed. If you want to read more about R.O.B. continue reading my next review as I attempt to get an hour's worth of entertainment out of the only other R.O.B. game that Nintendo released: Stack Up.

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

R.O.B. in gyro action!

An Eighties as hell commercial for the NES

R.O.B. Wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.O.B.

R.O.B. TVTropes page:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/RoboticOperatingBuddy

Prices taken from eBay on February 22nd, 2016.

Game #009: Tennis, Released: October 18th, 1985

 

Developed by: Intelligent Systems Published by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias:

Tennis! Ah, I don't want to beat a dead horse about the game being named after the sport. It's generic, sure, but if you are reading all of my reviews in order my stance on this naming trend is pretty clear. I can't put words in the mouths of the developers but I can guess that one of the early goals of the NES was to show how much better it was than the competition by giving the public the exact same types of games it already had but putting it on their own machine which had superior hardware. This direct comparison does allow the NES to stand head and shoulders above its predecessors without needing to innovate much but I think this risked making Nintendo seem pretty generic. I'm just glad that this trend does not go on for much longer. Perhaps I should not review so many similar games in a row like this moving forward.

Speaking of which, welcome to the final installment of my Sports Pentalogy! Today's subject is Tennis; a tennis game. Where the player plays tennis. Yeah. I have played NES tennis titles before but I don't think I ever played this game. I remember playing one NES title that allowed the player to change some options for each tennis match such as the surface of the court. I played it for a spell at my grandmother's house but for the life of me I can't remember which game it was. There is a large chance I will find it during this project.

My personal experience with tennis is pretty brief. I attended a summer camp program for eight weeks one year and their activity of choice was tennis. Sure, there were plenty of other things to do but for whatever reason there were tennis courts everywhere. Now I was still in that phase where I apparently did not know how body mechanics worked nor did I have the patience to practice anything. The best I could do was swing at a ball that was lobbed at me and somehow always come up exactly three inches short. I swung my racket at the correct angle but the ball was always a little too far away. I was probably just a stupid kid.

I have also watched a couple of tennis events on TV and I know the basic rules of the sport. I have played Mario Tennis on the N64 a bunch so I also have a fair amount of practice at playing virtual tennis. Once again, I only have two buttons to work with so I'm sure I can figure it out.

Sportsball fans had better be ready because I am about to play some sports!

First Impressions & Presentation:

I turned on my game and saw "Tennis" appear on my screen with a weird typeface that has skinny vertical pieces and thick horizontal pieces. This make the title look like it was written with some really awkward looking stencil. The music that plays while viewing the title screen is lifted directly from Baseball. Or I should say that the Baseball title stole from Tennis because Tennis has an earlier copyright date. The two pieces when heard side-by-side are slightly different in its timbre but the melody and even the small percussion noise at the end are the same. I'll see if I can dig up a comparison online.

Not Pictured: Nintendo ripping off their own music. I'm sure it saved them a lot of money

Demonstrations were included in this title and they did not fill me with confidence. The demonstrations showed tennis doubles matches and every single demo failed to get a volley going. The bottom player would serve, the top player would return, and then the bottom players got confused. I don't think I would have learned much about playing tennis from these demos so I ended up relying on my real life knowledge to muddle my way through the game.

Pressing start for my solo match of tennis led me to the only other option menu for the game: the difficulty menu. I had stages 1 through 5 to pick from so I assumed that level 1 was for chumps. I proceeded to be a chump. I did not get to select any other game options such as how many sets I could play or the court type. 100% of the games take place in the same stadium with a grass court.

Pictured: All of the options. Also, umpire Mario. Hi, Mario!

I also did not get much music in the game. There were simple jingles that played in between games and sets. The sound effects mostly resembled an 8-bit game of Pong which makes sense considering where Pong gets its inspiration. The players move back and forth across the court with little shuffle animations and they have a lot of poses when they hit the ball. The players remain the same size no matter where they are on the court but the ball does have a neat perspective graphic to show the distance of the ball relative to the human controlled player. The ball also always has a shadow which makes it very easy to keep track of where it is at any given time. I think it's also pretty cute that umpire Mario looks back and forth as the ball is volleyed. The presentation is perfectly suitable for a basic game of tennis and the music prevents anything from getting too exciting.

The biggest praise I have for the presentation is that it does not get in the way of the experience one bit. With that obvious transition out of the way I want to get into my play hour.

Experience & Conveyance:

Playing tennis in real life is quite hard. There is a lot of technique with getting a good serve. Professional players need to throw the ball over their heads and hit a fast serve with their rackets to try and blaze the ball by their opponent. The serving player does have some restrictions on their initial hit. The serve cannot touch the net nor can it land outside the lines of the inside square of the court. The total area is actually only a small portion of the whole tennis court so it is difficult to land a fast serve in this area consistently. In my experience playing the video game I think I missed that serving zone maybe once. The player is given a pretty generous amount of time to hit the ball on the overhead portion serve and the ball is delivered consistently to the appropriate part of the court. If there was a way to finesse the ball to a different part of the serving area I did not need to learn how. The computer player was so good at failing to return the serve that my initial technique was just about perfect.

Pictured: Acing it

If the computer player managed to actually hit the ball back to me I started to have some options. I figured out pretty much immediately that the A button performed a regular hit. I could also try to pick out which side of the court my next volley would return to based on how early or late I hit the ball. Plus it does matter which direction my avatar faced so there were differences between my forehand and backhand swings. I could also hit the B button to lob the ball high in the air but that did not serve much of a purpose. My goal was to hit the ball to the side of the court where my opponent was not. The early computer player apparently did not remember the first rule of zombie survival: cardio so I would smirk to myself when the computer lamely shuffled up to where it should be only to get there a couple of seconds late.

The object of tennis is to score points, win games, and eventually win sets of games. A tennis player needs to win 6 games to win a set. For NES tennis the only option for game length is to win two sets out of three. This can be a fairly lengthy process because each individual game can, in theory, extend forever if no one player can gain a two point advantage. I managed to get stuck on a couple of games where the advantage went back and forth for at least eight different volleys. This mechanic can create tension but in a huge commitment like a full match of tennis a single game is a small piece of the overall picture. Nevertheless I watched the score counter slowly work its way up to a 6-2 game victory for me in the first set and a 6-1 game win for the second set. Victory!

When I say this game can be a commitment I mean it. It took me a good 20 minutes to secure that first match win and while that included some time of me fumbling around with my relatively agile player I did not make too many stupid mistakes. Tennis just takes a long time to play. With a pause button being the only way to take a break I found that a tennis match at the lowest difficulty became a bit of a bore. This was especially true when quite a great deal of my time was spent finishing off what was a foregone conclusion.

Pictured: Me being in like Flynn... or Mario

Very little of the game taught me how to play as I played it. I suspect a lot of the learning the player could do would be to watch the low difficulty computer opponent make mistakes. The computer muddles up basic enough stuff enough that the player should figure out the rules for a correct serve, which lines serve as the side boundaries of the court, and the fact that getting hit in the face actually scores a point for the opponent. Fun fact. Umpire Mario does make it very clear what the ruling of each shot is and if a fault occurs. The scoreboard also accurately represents tennis' goofy scoring progression so the player should never feel confused as to whether they are succeeding or failing.

Once I beat the lowest difficulty I was automatically promoted to the second easiest computer opponent. I began mowing through the second difficulty and was pacing to win that match 6-2, 6-1 as well but I was running out of time. I decided to reset the game and plow right into the toughest difficulty. The game runs much, much faster at the highest difficulty. The ball moves super quickly and the computer player never has trouble keeping up with the player's return volleys. I imagine that I should have taken smaller steps before entering the big leagues but this is one of the risks I face by giving games only one hour of my time. Besides, I think I was holding my own...

Pictured: The beginning of a massacre. Not Pictured: Copious tears

Verdict & Score:

Tennis is probably the least offensive of the sports games I reviewed. 10-Yard Fight had its moments but ended up getting crushed by easily exploitable gameplay. Baseball was a confusing mess. Golf was all right but was hampered by its low conveyance. Soccer wasn't terrible but its team controls left a lot to be desired. Tennis' greatest strength is that the player has control of a single avatar one hundred percent of the time. There are no issues with the controls since the player does not need to control multiple people at once. It is always clear which buttons are going to do what at all times and that makes this game the most enjoyable out of the five games of the Sports Pentalogy.

Overall I award Tennis with a 5/10. While the NES controls work well for a basic game of tennis and the game is executed without any real flaws, the game itself does not have enough charm or personality to stand out and the lack of gameplay options makes the game a bit of a hollow experience.

Factoids & Trivia:

There really is not much to say about the NES Tennis game. Like with most of the early NES titles Tennis was released in Japan on the Famicom well in advance of the US launch. The game was released in Japan on January 14th, 1984. I suspect that the reason the game has a trademark of 1983 is because the cartridges were put together late that year and then began distribution in early 1984. The game itself has been ported to several systems such as the arcade, the PC-88, and has been issued to the Wii U virtual console as recently as 2013. If you wanted your own copy of Tennis you could get a physical cartridge for as little as $4.50 but the boxed version will run you as much as $50.

One thing that always perplexed me about Tennis was the bonkers scoring progression. Essentially a player needs to score four points to win a game of tennis but nobody can win if both players have four points. At that time one player must have a two point advantage over the other to win. What I and many others find funny is that the scoring progression between zero to four proceeds like this: love, 15, 30, 40, and game. Based on my two minutes of research it seems that a lot of the scoring and naming conventions of tennis find their way back to Medieval France but the actual origins predate even that time period and there is no good documentation with regards to the tennis scores. One theory for zero being called “love” is because a zero is shaped like an egg or "l'œuf". Take that for what you will.

I am more than happy to wrap up this sports block. It was not a bad experience but I feel like I need a palette cleanser. I wish I was finished lumping games together but I have two rather unique entries in the NES library to cover. There is one peripheral that came with the NES at launch but really did not find many uses. That's right, I want to cover the Robotic Operating Buddy or R.O.B. in its only two titles: Gyromite and Stack-Up. Coming up next is Gyromite!

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

NES Tennis wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_%281984_video_game%29

Info on scoring in tennis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_scoring_system

Prices of Tennis on ebay taken on 2/10/2016.

Comparisons of the two opening title tunes at the beginnings of these two videos: