12 Comments

I’ve never played this. I will be tonight though on my OpenEmu!

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I hope you enjoy!

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"Your face is out." I'm totally taking that out on the court with me next match.

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Only if you report back and let me know how your opponent handled you saying that!

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Could you call this the first Mario tennis?

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I think one could get away with this statement. Mario calls the shots in this one, though, unlike his later entries

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It’s great that you can make a through line of video game history via tennis. From Tennis for Two, to Pong, to NES Tennis, on and on… This article literally appeared on my feed as someone around me was talking about playing tennis on Switch, lol

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Woooaaah, that's a little spooky, haha.

Yeah, tennis in video game form has stood the test of time. It's really cool to see!

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Only played this one a little, but yeah, not a bad game.

As sports go, I think tennis is well-suited for a videogame adaptation. You play as just one character, instead of awkwardly trying to control a team. You can see the entire court all the time, while most sports have to cut out part of the court/field. There are natural options for 1v1, 2v2, or a co-op 2-player vs. CPU. And the action is fast. There's just a repetitiveness to deal with, unless you insert fantasy elements (as in Nintendo's more modern tennis games), but repetitiveness is common to a lot of these early NES games.

Even if it's only a (table) tennis game in the loosest possible sense, perhaps it's not a coincidence that Pong was among the first successful video games.

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Never thought about that before, but yeah, the sport of tennis just works incredibly well in a video game.

I know everyone highlights Bowling on Wii Sports as the MVP, but I always played Tennis the most with friends. It's EXACTLY like Tennis on the NES, just with Miis, motion controls, and sadly, Mario is no longer the referee (a political decision, most likely).

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I really didn't play Wii Sports tennis all that much, but I can definitely see how it would be good.

I've probably thought too much about what makes a sport inherently good for video games, as opposed to relying on people's already-existing love of the sport. Partly because some friends and I used to debate this.

But a big one is that most sports have too many people on the field that add nothing to a video game. Both NBA Jam and NFL Blitz recognized this and cut down on the number of players. Same with the Mario Strikers games for soccer, which is a sport that REALLY needs fixing. Yet some people play FIFA voluntarily!

Baseball has too many people on the field, but fortunately only two of them are doing anything most of the time. Trying to manage multiple simultaneous runners is always the most awkward part of a baseball game and tends to generate the majority of the swearing.

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Yeah, I've always been overwhelmed in basketball and football games, for the very reason you describe: just too many dang people I'm trying to keep track of.

I do love arcade sports games that fix this issue, though. Mario Strikers in particular is super good.

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