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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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...
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| 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:
NES Tennis wiki:
Info on scoring in tennis:
Prices of Tennis on ebay taken on 2/10/2016.
Comparisons of the two opening title tunes at the beginnings of these two videos:
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