Tennis NES
Tennis — the NES game, not the actual sport — hails from an age when the most rudimentary of virtual simulations could be entertaining and notable simply by existing, perhaps causing a passing family member to comment on how it looks just like the real thing. Although a genuine novelty in the 80s, this dull-as-toast recreation of tennis has gone stale, hardly able to stave off boredom long enough for a good rally.
As no-frills as its name, Tennis immediately drops you into a menu screen framed by the signature black background of Nintendo's early titles. Your two options consist of singles or — for a bit of multiplayer cooperation — doubles, both of which take place on a flat court with an overhead perspective. Speaking of perspective, that can take a bit of getting used to: the little blip of a ball expands and shrinks as it sails back and forth over the net, doing its best to trick your eyes into seeing depth and distance.
Tennis was one of the launch titles for the NES way back in 1985, and it succeeded in winning new gamers to the system in much the same way as Wii Sports. That begs the question, of course, why bother with this if you already have Wii Sports Tennis, which you got as a freebie with your Wii? Well for a start you control the movement of your player in this game!
For a game developed over 20 years ago, NES Sports Tennis is pretty impressive, and it stood out from its contemporaries at the time with its attention to detail. The rules of tennis are modelled nicely here and a fair amount of strategy can be used in the game. You can also have singles matches against a friend and doubles matches against the CPU.
Jimmy Connors was the man! Tennis today has some phenomenal athletes who take to the tennis court and deliver amazing feats, but none of them have the character of Connors. He was a madman on the court. A celebrity athlete with tennis-whites and explosive charismatic energy.
For the mid-90s, Jimmy Connors was an easy choice for a celebrity sports game. Tennis seems like a gentleman's sport, but it's had it's fair share of colorful characters like McEnroe and Connors - which was actually good for the sport.
I love tennis and have always had an affinity for video games that tried to replicate it. Football, Baseball and Soccer have long histories in gaming, but Tennis always captured my interest. I had high hopes for tennis video games when the PlayStation and Saturn arrived, but the clunky polygons really turned me off - both visually and regarding playability. But leave it to the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System to pull off a version I really liked. So much for advanced polygon processors.
Tennis for the NES was one of the many launch titles in 1985 and it was on of the many “classics” in the sports genre. Obviously the game hasn't aged very well and it shows because there are tons of better tennis game out there, but to think if it as a game from the 80's, tennis is actually not that bad.
GRAPHICS: 6
Very bright and campy, tennis is obviously no Super Mario Bros. The court is green and orange and the stands are all blue with little pixel heads sticking out of them, resembling the crowd.
The sprits for the tennis players are all the same; some stereotypical tennis player in a pair of shorts and a tennis shirt. Depending on the computers difficulty, they wear different colors, buts that's about it. One interesting note is that the umpire looks like Mario, possibly the very first Mario cameo in any video game, excluding Donkey Kong Jr.
Positioning your player is a tricky business, and unlike in the real world isn't at all intuitive. Once you manage to get lined up, you can either bat the ball back with a standard shot or lob it high into the air, but control over trajectory is limited at best. Serving is no easier to grasp, but like most of the gameplay mechanics, acceptable after a fair amount of fiddling.
When the ball is bandied back and forth without a stumble, a subdued sense of fun begins to creep onto the court; at higher speeds, it can almost turn to excitement. If this were the only tennis game available on our home planet — which, at the time of release, it might as well have been — it would have something going for it, but that's not at all the current situation. There are countless alternatives of higher quality for simulation and arcade tastes alike, not to mention plenty of quality action games on the NES that blow it out of the water. In fact, you could purchase the original Animal Crossing and find this very game playable inside, along with about fifteen fellow NES titles to keep it company.
The controls are pretty simple, you simply press A to do a strong shot, B to do a lob shot and use the D-pad to move. Very often you'll either hit the ball into the net or hit it out, which you don't have much control over. Even when you do manage to hit a strong shot, the ball goes slowly which provides your opponent ample time to react and run after the ball. In addition to this often when you try to hit the ball you'll either miss it entirely, even though it's an inch in front of you, or you'll hit the ball about a few feet in front of you, which seems to happen randomly. To rub it in the CPU rarely makes such mistakes; it’s fair to say that the controls can be a little unforgiving at times.
Mario makes an appearance in Tennis as the umpire calling the shots and faults. His next appearance as ref would be in the excellent Punch-Out!!, which we desperately hope will arrive on the Virtual Console very soon.
Tennis looks and sounds like it plays: safe, boring, and generally okay. The bare necessities of sound design keep the events grounded, interspersed with occasional musical jingles. Players are animated with commendable accuracy considering the technical restraints, and the courts are kept sparse so as to avoid confusing clutter. The only genuine dose of character in this department is a cameo by Mario posing as referee, long before he took tennis racket in hand himself.
Once you've determined whether you want background music, you and another player can either jump into a match or go into practice mode. There are 4 difficulty levels to adjust play as you improve. The difficulty setting also effects the cash prized for tournament play. I like the practice option as it gives you the ability (alone or 2-player) to get a feel for the mechanics & action or just have some fun hitting balls.
You can enter your name(s), up to 8 characters, to identify you and your opponent in a 2-player match. You serve with the A button and can control the path via the D-Pad. Once the ball is in play, the A button is for normal strokes ad the B button is your power shot. The longer you hold the button, the harder your shot. Similarly, the D-Pad allows you to direct or add "spin" to your strokes.
I'm not sure if this is a reality-check option, but you have the ability to bow out of a match. Press START & SELECT together and B-button to confirm and you will be disqualified. Quirk or added reality? You decide :)
For tournament play, you can choose between 1, 2 or 3 set-to-win variations. This gives you the ability to play a quick 1-set match or go for standard 2-set play or the Grand Slam 3 out of 5 set options. At the end of each tournament, a password will be displayed. Write it down and use it to resume the match later on.
Tennis is a game that can’t go wrong in describing exactly what it is – it was Nintendo’s first foray into the world of Tennis and as mentioned was launched as a black box title in 1986 in Europe. If you don’t know what Tennis is or how to play it, then chances are you may stop reading this so click at the top to see other reviews on the site. When you pop the cartridge into your console, you’re treated to the same jaunty music on the introduction screen that befell other sports games that was released on the black box labels. You then get to choose between playing a Singles game or Doubles game, the level of difficulty and then you go straight to the game – no character no selection, no entering your name, no choosing what type of surface you want to play on – straight to the action. You really can’t fault games that don’t mess around with options and selections – two presses of the start button and away you go.
Getting into gameplay it immediately felt like it had aged like crazy which is sad considering the graphics still looked ok. The false 3d the game relied on was hard to get used to and i never fully got the hang of it. On top of the the controls almost seemed oversimplified to the point it actually got harder. You could turn your character with left and right but you could only use 1 type of hit. I don’t know much about tennis but I’d imagine one button should’ve been a Forehand swing and the other a Backhand swing. However unlike other sports games i wasn’t terrible at this one (other than getting tonnes of faults.
So you’re dressed in duck egg blue and black shorts whilst your opponent is in a green that matches the court and can camouflage well whilst (supposedly) Mario is sitting on his high chair umpiring proceedings. Back with the launch titles, Mario sure did have a lot of jobs – a demolitions expert, a tennis umpire, a platforming superstar. When did he get time to get on with his job of going under peoples’ sinks and repairing leaky pipes or reaching around a U-bend unclogging the toilet? Well nevertheless he sits there keeping score and shouting “Out” every now and then. The rest of the graphics are simple yet bold – the standard green grass of the court and the contrasting brown around the edge of the court. Ok, there is no definition in the crowd but even now 27 years later the detail in the crowd has not improved that much!
The controls are simple – the d-pad moves your character around somehow at the speed of light with twinkletoes on his feet where us mere mortals have feet. The A button does a typical forehand/backhand shot whilst the B button does a lob. The one flaw in the control system is that you cannot aim the ball properly when making your shot – if you try pushing the d pad in the direction and pressing the A or B button to make your shot, your character flies away from the ball swinging wildly and missing the ball, conceding a point. In that respect, when you hit the ball, all you can do is just hit the ball and hope it stays on court. The music, well aside from the jaunty piece at the start of the game, there is a distinct lack of this in the game. However, it always feels wrong to have music in sports games so there is no great loss in this, and certainly you wouldn’t need your Minidisc player full of college rock whilst pretending your Boris Becker.
MUSIC/SOUND: 5
The only song I've ever heard in this game is the classic 8-bit sports song in many of the sport games on the NES such as Baseball or Volleyball. It doesn't sound bad, but it does give this weird vibe to the game, followed by you saying, “What did I just listen to?”
The sound effects are classic chip tune. They're just a bunch of blips and beeps. Also, depending on the type of shot that you have made, the pitch can go very low or very high. Not that interesting, but as for a NES game, its ok, and besides, comparing it to games made in this era is just ridiculous.
GAMEPLAY: 5
Well, tennis is just tennis. You serve the green fuzzy orb and your opponent hits it back, and it keeps going until you or he wins.
The controls are pretty good. There are only two shot buttons; the A and B button obviously. The D-pad moves your player and start pauses. The only problem that I have with the controls is that when you hit the ball the wrong way you want it to go, it either hits the net or goes out. This is more of a timing problem that I have so it's not a major game killer problem, but it is usually a pain sometimes.
So all in all, black box Tennis marked a change in sports games – it was a vast improvement to the Atari 2600 tennis games but still had a lot of flaws that could have been ironed out in development, but instead other Tennis games (such as Jimmy Connors Tennis) improved upon these flaws. The controls are simplistic yet you don’t feel like you have control of the shots you are doing – only if you could lob the ball or do a normal forehand shot. In sports games, control is key – whether it’s Football or Tennis, anything that needs precision in order to score a point or a goal. Graphics wise, it does the job well for a launch title, and any game that has a two player option is a bonus in my opinion. There wasn’t a huge number of titles that were either two players or even two players on the screen at the same time, so for you and your friend to play either co-operatively or against each other is certainly a bonus. It is an average game that won’t captivate or illuminate, but won’t disappoint – it will do exactly what it says. Copies of the game are common place, in your local game shop or on your favourite websites that may or not have auction elements to it. For sports enthusiasts, it certainly is worth checking out, to see how far tennis games have come since then until now with the likes of Top Spin and celebrity endorsements. I’m off to get out of these tennis whites and hang up my racket ready for a game that has more fire power, more oomph, more…. adventure, on islands, so maybe I should keep these shorts on then.
Tennis is playable, but considering that stands as one of its primary advantages, it's a backhanded compliment. Its faults lie in oversimplicity and dodgy controls, the latter of which is a crucial point to any competitive game, serving as a poor example to a future of superior successors. Those with a true love of the sport should look elsewhere, and even those hoping for nostalgia to put a positive spin on things should think twice. Despite a decent foundation, Tennis is no smash hit.
While Tennis is far from being a terrible game (unlike NES Sports Baseball) it is hard to really recommend it wholeheartedly. It’s a bit too clunky in its implementation when compared to the excellent Super Tennis on the SNES or Mario Golf on the N64. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait long for both of those games to make it over to the Virtual Console; until that time we would advise you stick to playing Wii Sports Tennis for the time being.
