Skip to main content

NES Tennis: Yet another sports title

Tennis is the last sports launch title I'll be playing (sorry, 10-Yard Fight, no one likes you), and it's not awful. As with Soccer, I had such low expectations that I was not disappointed.

Bits of Tennis are found in the game NES Remix, so I knew what to expect. I mean, it's tennis, so you're bouncing a ball back and forth across a net. The action is fast paced and challenging, which is why it's still somewhat enjoyable.

Tennis mostly does what you'd expect: you control a player, who runs around hitting a ball back and forth over a net against a computer-controlled player. If you're quick enough, you can volley (hit the ball back without letting it bounce), but I found this usually resulted in the computer scoring against me. Eventually, either you or the computer will miss, and it's on to the next serve. I struggled to figure out how to get the ball to go where I wanted, so the whole experience felt random.

You can choose the difficulty level but not the length. You have to play a full match of tennis, which is long! A match is the best of three sets. To win a set, you must win six games and be at least two games ahead of your opponent. A game would typically last a couple minutes, so the whole match lasted about half an hour. I stopped playing after my first match (which I lost), because I had no desire to play again. That match was fun enough, but what would be the point of playing again? I'd rather play Super Mario Bros.

One big downside of Tennis is that the two-player mode is cooperative (doubles). They had to do it this way because the opponent's side of the court is in the background and therefore appears much smaller. I'm not sure why they didn't do it left and right like in Soccer. The frontal perspective is kind of nice, but probably not worth losing competitive two-player.

I wouldn't recommend NES Tennis, but it's all right. I liked it better than Baseball.

Grade: D

Linked Reviews
"Tennis is playable, but considering that stands as one of its primary advantages, it's a backhanded compliment."
— Stephen Kelly, Nintendo Life, 4/10

"Tennis isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn't mean it's good, either."
— Pat Contri, Ultimate Nintendo: Guide to the NES Library, 2/5

"NES Tennis holds up well—there is, after all, only so much you can do with a real-world sport whose basic format is simple enough that it could be distilled down to serve as the topic of the world’s first video game."
— Jeremy Parish, NES Works

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Street Fighter II: 30th anniversary

Thirty years ago Street Fighter II made the transition from arcade to living room on the Super NES. Although quickly eclipsed by its two successors, for one year it was the hotness. It would be hard to overstate how popular Street Fighter II was in the early 90's. Its predecessor was downright bad, but Street Fighter II invented the PVP fighting genre as we know it. Its roster of eight characters was a huge step-up from Street Fighter's two (Ken and Ryu, who returned for the sequel). The next iteration of the arcade game, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, which hit arcades just as the SNES port arrived, let you play as the bosses as well, increasing the roster to twelve. A false rumor said a secret code would let you play them at home. While that wasn't true, there was a code (↓, R, ↑, L, Y, B) to let both players choose the same character for a mirror match. A prime strength of the game is how interesting each character is: the American airman Guile (think Top Gun); the

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: 30th anniversary

Hard to believe it's been thirty years since The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past came out on the Super Nintendo, yet here we are! A Link to the Past is in contention for the title of Best Nintendo Game Ever . It perfectly reinvented, reimagined, and revolutionized everything great about the original Legend of Zelda . First off, the story is expanded, with five pages devoted to it in the manual, including background mythology not included in-game about the three gods that made the Triforce. The opening cinematic tells of a war centuries earlier, which resulted in seven wise men sealing the Triforce away in the "Golden World." When the game begins, the boy Link awakens on a dark and stormy night, hearing the voice of Princess Zelda in his head, asking him to rescue her from the dungeon of Hyrule Castle, where she's been imprisoned by the evil wizard Agahnim. Link finds his uncle, wounded, who gives him his sword. Link's first task is to rescue Zelda, then lead h

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: 20th anniversary

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is special to me because it was one of the first games I played on the Wii U. I hadn't owned a video-game console since the Super Nintendo until my wife bought me a Wii U for my 30th birthday. Since I missed the Game Cube and Wii eras, playing The Wind Waker was a revelation to me. It was as good as I remembered A Link to the Past being. I've read that, when it debuted, some people hated the cel-shaded art style of The Wind Waker. In retrospect that's hard to fathom, because the game is such a visual delight. The cartoony style and feel of the game is probably its strongest feature, at least for me. Sailing the seas and exploring the game's many islands is a joyous process of discovery. There are all sorts of quirky citizens to meet and interact with, including an auction house, bird people (the Rito), pirates, a traveling merchant (Beedle), temples, and the long-lost, sunken kingdom of Hyrule. The mid-game twist delighted me: Link l