015 · TENNIS
In this episode of NEStalgia, get ready for a game that's a lot like Pong but with better graphics! It's TENNIS on the NES. For more NEStalgia and the show notes, visit NEStalgiacast.com
Tennis is an NES launch game, and it opens with the same title music as Baseball, which makes sense since Intelligent Systems and Nintendo R&D 1 worked on both. We found it more competent than we expected, and also a game that seems to be playing against you. We spent a surprising amount of time on the way the players scuttle.
What it gets right
- Every point is a fight. You can be up 40 love, drift to deuce, and then somehow lose six sets. Being three sets up means nothing. We agreed that winning six to nothing, over and over, would be less rewarding than this.
- Difficulty that scales. Level one sometimes just hands you points when the computer double faults, and level two is a clear jump. By level five the ball is much faster and the bald, sunburned opponent charges the net and spikes a backwards smash. Joe, who only tried the easiest and hardest settings, doubted he scored a point on him. We called him a demon, and the Roger Federer jokes did not stop.
- Small details. Mario is the referee, and his head turn has three frames, including one for the middle, so he does not appear to snap his neck. Doubles is a nice addition too, though it is strictly a two-player mode with no computer partner.
Where it falls apart
- The Z axis. The game tries to show the ball in the air, and we kept misjudging it. A swing that looked perfectly timed would meet a ball that had bounced a hair in front of you. The game demands precise timing and does not let you see enough to deliver it.
- Aiming is a guess. We could only work out that early or late timing sends the ball a little to one side. The manual says to press A to return the ball and then lists 12 shots, and we could find about four: a normal hit, a lob, a smash and a backhand.
- No weight to the player. Soccer felt like it had traction and momentum. Here you tap to move because holding a direction sends him way off, and he stops and reverses at full speed.
- Doubles didn't help. A Valentine's Day round with a girlfriend who had no interest in video games, against two computers, was no easier.
Beyond the game
Miyamoto is listed as designer on Tennis, as he is on Baseball, so we took it as a sign he hadn't hit his run yet. We also covered oscilloscope tennis from the 1950s, which we called unplayable, and a very wholesome GameFAQs guide from April 2004 that thanks the author's sister and mom.
The bottom line
Skip it. Nobody voted it onto the Essential Games List. Sam would rather you played Wii Sports Tennis, and our view was that there are plenty of good tennis games, so nobody needs to play something this archaic. With this one done, none of the NES launch sports games made the list. We filed it in the jank folder.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Whether it's singles or doubles, you'll love the non-stop action of this amazingly real tennis game.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Joe. I'm Sean. And I'm Sam. Hey, all four of us here again. Lovely. Anyway, let's talk about tennis, boys. What do you think? Tennis boys. Oh, yeah. Well, we can talk about tennis boys. Let's stick with the game. I was ready to do a whole thing about Roger Federer. But anyway, yeah, let's talk about tennis.
The NES game, a launch game, and kind of like, you know, a proving ground for any video game system. At this point, I'm not saying any more. You won't see the PS5 launch with a tennis game. Unfortunately, tennis games are kind of rare nowadays. You don't really see like a virtue of tennis or anything like that. Yeah. But back then, of course, tennis was a proving grounds thing.
Pong obviously being a big one. But there were iterations of tennis before that. But Pong obviously like... Oscilloscope. I'm sorry. Sorry. Oscilloscope tennis was the first video game. Yeah. And that's like... And that's totally different than like what people think of video games. Like, honestly, you know, a lot of people probably didn't know that. So I would highly recommend looking that up. I know a lot of people know of like computer space and stuff like that in terms of older video games than Pong. But this is really... This is the 50s? Yeah. This is really early. And I'll link it in the show notes. Literally unplayable. Yeah.
But anyway, enough about that. But so Pong obviously ate like enough quarters to justify like so many other people to try arcade games. And that's how you see stuff like Pac-Man.
You know, I'm just going to list off Frogger or stuff like, you know, stuff. Obviously, it grew from there and then created a crash. And so that's not dangerous. And I'm not saying tennis games cause crashes because really games like E.T. cause crashes. Not that E.T. is really the worst game of all time. Have to get that off my chest. There's a lot of throwing things out there and taking them back all the way. Yeah, you know, I noticed that. But isn't that really just what tennis is? Ah, good point. You know, hitting a ball, getting it back to you. It's a concept episode. We're trying something new here, folks. But maybe we should just get into our first impressions.
Joe? Yeah, well, first thing I noticed, the exact same music as baseball on the opening title screen. Ooh. And yeah, that is true. And that can easily be explained by the fact that both Intelligent Systems and Nintendo R&D 1 worked on both those games. Okay. Yeah. And other than that, I mean, I felt like it was tennis. I guess my first impressions are always just random observations, but the players scuttle. They're very bug-like when they scuttle across the court. So that creeped me out a little bit. But this is why we do first impressions.
Yeah, it was tennis. So that was my initial reaction. Sean? I was not expecting you to be freaked out, like creeped out by tennis. But like, did you notice that they, like, even after the play, I don't know, I don't play tennis, but after the play, like, your opponent scuttles up to the net. Oh, yeah. That is true. That is my first impression. I felt like the computer was, like, taunting me, because it usually did that after I made a mistake. That's true. You just go, what? Yeah. Walk up to the net and just be like, what? He didn't walk. He scuttled.
I'm sorry. But yeah, I mean, other than, like, sort of anthropomorphizing the computer player, no, this is, again, this is tennis. Like, I dig old sports games. I thought this was more frustrating, even though it feels a little bit more intuitive than a lot of these other games that we've played.
I thought it was frustrating because it feels rigged. But that may just be me, because I'm not very good at games. But that's my first impression of tennis. Yeah. My first impression, it's kind of in the same as what you guys said, I feel like. I mean, actually, not as what Joe said. That was not my first impression. I didn't get scuttled. I thought you were actually alarmed if you were making the same analogy. I'm more just like, OK, yeah, this is a basic video game representation of tennis. And like, I can play it. And maybe I'll get better at this because I seem kind of bad at it right now. And maybe I won't. And we'll see what happens. Yeah, I think we all kind of. Oh, sorry. I forgot that you had to go. Yeah, Mike exists. Yeah.
Our host. Thank you so much for welcoming me back to the show. You're welcome anytime. Thank you. So for me, I like tennis a lot as a sport and I like tennis games. And my initial impression was kind of that this was so different than what I imagine like game tennis games this time would be capable of, especially when we look at like what baseball is capable of and stuff like that. So this is actually a pretty competent game, in my opinion. But to the difficulty level. Yeah, the difficulty is there. And I actually like felt at every time like, oh, this is really like there's something on the line here because I could be on a 40 love streak. And then all of a sudden it's like, you know, we're a deuce. And then next thing I know, I've lost six sets.
Yeah. So. So, yeah, first impressions for me were definitely like to Sam's point, how do we get better at this? And my short answer is you really don't. Yeah. Let's just talk. This is sound silly, but I'm just going to go through the objective real fast for those of home that don't know.
Tennis basically is, you know, one person serves the ball and then they hit it back and forth in a volley. And then if it goes out of bounds or if the other person fails to return it, the person gets 15 points and 15, 30 and then 40. So I'm sorry. I don't know the thing behind that. And then love means zero. Don't know the thing behind that either. Sorry. I'm really prove myself as a tennis person here. But you do that. And then after you get past the 40, you take the set and then you have to take six sets to get the game. And then you have to take two out of the three games. If that sounds long, you'd be surprised to know that in real men's tennis, you need to take three games to win. So it can go up to as many as six or seven games if necessary.
You know, if we did this for like baseball and football, like if I pulled out the rule book for football. Yeah, it's interesting that the game kind of boils down to that. And obviously there's other things like faults and, you know, terminology that we could talk about. But I think that tennis is actually a pretty simple game. And that's kind of what makes it so accessible to video games. The idea of hitting a ball back and forth. Yep. At least in theory.
So let's talk about singles mode first. And that's just kind of the standard tennis game that most people are familiar with. It's very much like Pong only now there's a couple of different enhancements, like different types of shots.
Yeah. I don't know if I ever could pull off any other shot than just like overhand. Are you saying on purpose though? Or like, did you ever notice? Yeah. Cause I mean, it happens. They did. Like if I was closer to the net, it would go for like a, I don't know what the word is. Just like a slam or. Yeah. An overhead smash. I think the manual says smash. Yeah. Did you look at the manual? I did look at the manual. Were you as confused as I was that it says like press a to return the ball. And then here are 12 different shots.
How you do it. Like exactly. I guess it's just, it's a situation dependent when you do it. Right. And as far as I know, there's really only like four shots. There's like your normal hit, your lob, your smash, and probably like a backhand. Yeah. You know, the one thing that I, the main reason why I said that I thought that this game was rigged against me was because I don't know about how you guys feel about this.
Maybe you had a different experience, but I felt like I had no control over where this ball went. Like it, it just always went back to the guy. I feel like it was in the timing of it. Like if you're early, it'll go a little bit off to the side and you're late, it'll go to the other side. But even, even that is like, I'm not, I'm not sure if that's exactly right. That's how I kind of felt.
Yeah. The intuitive way to, to, to, uh, give the player input on where to hit the ball would be if you press right, the right button when you're returning. Yeah. And one thing that we're kind of dropping out here is that this game has a Z axis, if you will, in the sense that like, it really tries to show the air. But a lot of times that makes you just misjudge a lot of things.
Yeah. But it's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy how much it boils down to like where you hit that ball on the Z axis, because to your point of like saying that you didn't feel like you had much control over the ball. I actually felt like even the smallest, the smallest difference in my timing of hitting that ball was going to register in like hitting the net or going out or. Yeah. But I'm saying like, so to me, that was what was crazier. It wasn't like so much like, I don't know where this ball is going to go. It's like, you have to be really precise. Not that there's anything wrong with that because in real tennis, you have to be.
Yeah. Precision is key, but it's, it's a little frustrating in an early video game where you can't exactly tell how close that ball is to you on the Z axis, at least to hit the ball. Think that you're timing it perfectly and then watch it like do the smallest bounce in front of you. I also, I also felt like it had to do with where on your racket you hit it. Like if you, if you take a couple, couple extra steps away from the ball, you hit, it hits the edge of the racket. And then if you take a couple, you know, one step closer, it hits the middle of the racket.
Uh, but I didn't really have any way of like testing that theory to see you like, because it's, it's how it's happening so fast. And I'm not particularly good at this game. So I feel like, uh, I feel like the biggest handicap for me anyway, it was just that your guy moves so fast that you can't ever get into the spot where you need to be that. I mean, I know that that's essential because once you get to the more harder difficulty levels, you have to move fast to get to where the ball is. Right. Right. Um, but even I went easy first and I went medium and then I went the hardest.
I just, I feel like it was so I had to, I couldn't hold down a direction because I would just go way off, uh, like off to the left or something. So you felt slippery? Oh yeah. Not like slippery cause your guy stops on a dime. But you have to like kind of tap it really quickly to make a move instead of, instead of just hold down a direction. Cause I just could not get him where I wanted it to be. Yeah. To, uh, to Sam's point. Um, one of the reasons why I thought that soccer was such a good version of that sport in an eight bit game was because, uh, when you moved your player, it felt like there was traction. It felt like there was some sort of resistance.
There was like, there was like kinetic energy to it. Uh, you, the only real time that you could control in which direction you were going was when you were with contact, made contact with the ball. So you would think that it wouldn't be that hard to sort of simulate the fact that you can't just run at full speed in one direction, trying to chase this ball. And then immediately go at the exact same speed in the other direction. You'd think that there would be some momentum that feeling of like, Oh, I have to slow down and then keep going. Like you have weight. Yeah. There's no weight to this. Yeah. So I mean like, I'll just add here cause this is, I feel like this is important.
You know, we were praising Shigeru Miyamoto in last week's episode, uh, for super Mario brothers. Like we were all over him, but he designed this game too. And he also designed baseball another game that we weren't too hot on.
So it's kind of interesting to see at the early level of his career. I mean, we don't know. I mean, they list him as designer. We don't know how involved he was. I'm not saying he programmed anything. He didn't program anything, but you know, they put him in as designer for these games. And it's very interesting to see like, you know, these small little nuances that he doesn't quite have perfect yet. You know, he's not on this. He's not on this incredible run yet. You know, he's, he's not at super Mario brothers three level yet. I think he's just doing too many sports games recently.
Yeah. And I think like, you know, again, these are games that are, you know, he wanted to, he designed a lot of the NES games. Like, uh, I think, you know, I'll put an article up on the, on the website eventually of like the Shigeru Miyamoto launch games and talk about them a little more in depth in relation to him.
But overall, like he had input on almost every NES game that was coming out at that point because it was important. You know, it's, he was important in the Japanese world because each month a new Famicom game was coming out. So it was kind of like important of like, you know, it's not like the NES launch here where it's like, throw 17 games at them and this will keep them, you know, full for a little bit, you know? So, uh, so I agree with everything that you're talking about here in terms of like player control and stuff like that. I just can't get over how even on like, and sure on difficulty one, it's not so tough, but like, it's always feels like a duel with the computer here. And that says something about the AI.
Maybe it's a little like too fine tuned, but it's also like a little nice to see like a tennis game that just doesn't hand it over to you. Sure. I just felt like, you know, it's, it's important when at any point, if it's like 1530 or you're up 40 love, like at any point, the whole game can change. And while I think that's frustrating and I was screaming at the TV, I don't think that like, there's anything wrong with that. You know, it's, it's supposed to be challenging.
I mean, tennis is not a game where you're just supposed to like win set after set after set. How rewarding would it be to win six, nothing, six, nothing game over? It feels like, it feels like the kind of thing that if you did have this game for, you know, a month to just deal with this game and without being distracted by other games, you can get a lot better at it. Oh, for sure. Yeah.
And kind of progress. So we should, we should talk about the difficulty levels a little bit. Oh, for sure. Joe, you want to kind of like walk us through some difficulty? So, so, I mean, I'll be honest, I played the first of the easiest and the hardest mode. Didn't really play anything in between. And there is certainly a drastic difference, as you would expect. That's kind of crazy. There's a polar, you know, there's the hardest mode has features a sunburned guy who he is. I could not even imagine beating him. Yeah, I was going to say he seems more like a demon. They really programmed him.
But yeah, he is. I don't even think I scored a point on him. Whereas with the easy difficulty, I felt like it was pretty even, actually. So I guess I can see, granted, I didn't play the, you know, two through four difficulties. But I can see that, like, maybe it is one of those games where, like, the more you play it, maybe it is, it does help you work your way up, gain your skill, work your way up to the sunburned man. Yeah, the difficulty definitely scales up here nicely.
Like, even if you're beating level one consistently, level two is a jump. And I think that's appreciated. Like, it's not, like, here's the thing about the level one and why it's a little easier than most. I felt like level one was sometimes just giving it to me. Oh, yeah. In the sense that, like, it would just, like, yeah, it'll fall. And that's weird, too. You never see that in tennis games nowadays where, like, the computer will double fault and you'll just get points that way. Yeah. Like, that was nice. I don't want to match that way. Yeah, or, yeah, yeah. You want the whole thing that way. It's like, it's all down to this. And then, oh, double fault. Okay, game's over. Great. Sean, any thoughts on difficulty?
Oh, yeah. I played one, two, and five. And one I was really struggling with. I, I, I, the first, um, the first set was, it went, it went down to six to six. And we played a tiebreaker. And I lost a tiebreaker. Um, and then I, I played in, I played the second, the second set and lost that one. So I never was really that great even against the easiest difficulty, which is why I had my thoughts about, like, is the input actually affecting where the ball goes?
Or am I just hitting it back to him? And then, two, I did notice that, like, that tiny little jump, um, where it seemed a lot more competent and it wasn't double faulting all the time. But, like, yeah, five is just, the computer is not even trying to pretend that it's trying to be a challenge to you. Which is showing, like, I, I know what, what you're inputting and I know how to respond to it because I'm the computer.
Yeah, I, I've had a similar experience. I actually went from one to five and then went back to three for a little bit. Um, but one, I was. Because five is so discouraging. Five is ridiculous. Five is, my experience with five was I would serve the ball. Also, one thing that happens that we didn't mention is that the ball gets way faster as you get into a harder difficulty. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, the ball speeds up a lot. So I was going from one, we were just kind of having a nice little volley, to five where, you know, we got Roger Federer. Or whoever over there.
Sunburns, bald Roger Federer. Federer's been around long enough. Why not? Satanist Roger Federer. For the right to me, he was not, um, he was not playing professional tennis in 1983. But, yeah. That would be incredible. He just won a Grand Slam. So that would be it. Uh, yeah, you're playing against that guy. If you can, if you can even return the, I found, like, even if you can return the ball, he's just going to get right up to the net and just spike it to the side. Which I didn't know you could do.
I don't think you can. It makes a different noise, too. So I really don't think you can. It makes a different noise. No, it is a thing. It's a backwards smash. And it's, uh, yeah, it's like, it looks pretty crazy. And it always hits to the right. It kind of, it's, it's. And you can do that? You can do that. I'm not saying that.
Yeah. Again, like, the precision of the Z-axis here really, for me personally, while it's a cool thing to have such a detailed thing in a, in an ice game like this, it's a bit of a breaker for me because it's so frustrating and so unreliable. I do think it'd be something, like I said before, I think it's something that if you just had this game and just played it nonstop, you could get good at it. If you're just kind of trying to pick it up for a little bit and then play it, it's not good. You won't have a good time, I think.
Right. So one thing I want to mention before we move any further is that Roger Federer did not win a Grand Slam. He won a major. I just needed to correct that because. Yeah, I was going to correct you, Mike. Yeah. Thank you. I said that when I was talking to Sam, if you weren't listening. Anyway, let's move away from that. And before we move on to doubles, one thing real fast. Mario's the referee. Yeah. I don't know if that's what they call them. Referees, lifeguards.
I should never talk about like how I know things before we go into games because. I'm talking about like I'm a big tennis guy and it's like, what are they call those guys? Lifeguards? What are they? Lifeguards? He's like, Paul. No, you keep that in. Yeah, no, I'm keeping that in. I'm sorry. I'm sounding like I'm taking myself out of character.
But I think that's just interesting that they're continuing to put Mario in these games where he's not even like necessarily proven yet, like as a mascot, but he's kind of become the mascot at this point. He's in golf, even though he's really not in golf. He's in. Yeah, I know.
There's a whole story behind that, though. For me, he's in golf. For me, he's in golf, too. But apparently like in a Wii game that only came out in Japan. No, in a Wii game that came out only in Japan. He like the official NES golf character like shows up in this game and he has a different name starts with an L or something. I can't remember. Whatever. I'll link that in the show notes. But I just need to bring that up because I think that's so weird that he just keeps showing up in all these NES games.
Working different jobs. Like he was having like a quarter life crisis before before Mario. Everybody talks about all this is before Mario Tennis also. So he's like, you know what? This looks pretty fun. I want to play it myself. Do you think this takes place after after like Mario Tennis? Like this is like kind of after the fact of him being like a historic champion. He retired and now he's just a lifeguard. Mario Tennis is a prequel to Tennis.
Mario Lifeguard would be a pretty cool game. Like a mini game in Mario Party 10. Yeah, but what happens like if you don't win? You play the level again. No, then like the Koopa drowns or something? Or what? Yeah, well, Waluigi will drown.
All right, let's move on to doubles. Oh, wait, wait. Sorry. No, I do have something I noticed about Mario, the referee. Just thought it was very interesting that they programmed three frames of head turning into it. Not just they could have easily just done back and forth, but they actually programmed a frame where he looks in between. So every time it's like almost like a little animation of him looking back and forth. And I was like, who is even looking at that while you're playing tennis? But they paid attention to detail. I love that. Three frames.
So you see him looking into the center. Maybe I'm the only person in the world that cares about that. It would be really immersive immersion breaking if he didn't. No, because it's just back and forth. Am I to believe that he just turns his neck like it snaps it? That's where you would be like, yeah, I don't know if I believe this is real tennis. Well, I mean, a game with a Z axis like that is pretty better have a good head turn. If I walked in and someone playing that game with a three frame head turn, I would think they're watching real tennis.
Very good, Joe. Very good. Let's move on to doubles. Doubles is the same thing as singles, except for now there's two people on each side of the court. You get a wider court. Yeah, the court gets up. Well, the court technically does get a little wider now because the boundaries are extended. That's what I meant. Okay, great. Yeah. I'm glad that you meant that. Good. We're getting a little loose here now because I get the feeling that not everybody here played doubles. I mean, even if we did, like what really is the difference? Well, I'll tell you, I got the chance to play with my girlfriend. Do you have something to say? I'm keeping this in. Do you have something to say? Do you want to say? I don't know. Do you have something to say, Sam?
Why would you subject your girlfriend to this torture? Well, you know, that's actually, that's a great point. It's not that bad. It's a great point and it was on Valentine's Day, so it really was torture. Oh, man. It was like, you know, she was like, oh, what do you want to do? And I just, you know, surprised her with all this candy. And then I was like, how about NES tennis? Because I'm playing it for nostalgia and I need like an opinion on doubles. So my experience real fast is that doubles is not any easier. And in fact, it's a little harder when you have someone who has no interest in video games on your side and two computers on the other end that just have like a roll of the die.
This seems like a very specific example of how doubles could go. That's tailored to you and Laura. All right. I'm sorry for this biased input. It's not that I'm not recommending doubles. I actually think it's a nice addition. However. I would recommend it with another person that wants to play the game. But it's also upsetting that instead of you versus another player, you can only play with them. I did play. I did give doubles a try by myself. So there was just not another guy playing. A guy who loves a challenge. There was just one player on the court that didn't move and I just had to cover my whole side. How'd that go? It actually, I mean, it wasn't any easier, but it actually wasn't that much harder.
Because the guy moves so fast anyway. Yeah, he moves pretty fast. And I only did this on easy mode, I'm sure. I'm sure it would. I mean, of course I would have gotten killed on a harder mode. I got killed in singles on a harder mode. Yeah, it wasn't easier. It wasn't harder. It really kind of felt the same. So I'm sure it has to do with once you have a second player, maybe a friend, I don't know.
Playing in there, it's all about teamwork and stuff. Yeah, it definitely sounds a lot harder. I don't see any reason that anybody should go play doubles alone. But it was... That's just you, Joe. You do you. I didn't know it was a two-player mode. I thought I was going to be playing with a computer partner.
Well, that's true too, actually. Yeah, I mean, if you read the manual, you would know. But it is true. It does kind of seem a bummer that you can't play doubles by yourself. Right. That they couldn't have programmed another computer to play with you. That might have actually helped you a little bit because finally I have a computer on my side. Mm-hmm. So I'm just going to go on a complete tangent here for a second and just my only stray thought. I have to always read the game FAQ things for these kind of old games just because it's... First off, it's amazing that they exist, that someone lovingly put the time into these games. But they're also like... They're pretty old. Game FAQ has been out for a while.
Mm-hmm. And most of these are made in 2003, 2004 for these old NES games. Got TXT. Right. No one decided to make another walkthrough. And so I read this guy's walkthrough. And he's so nice. He puts in the color of the hair of each character, their shirt, different ways to do stuff. And this is important for someone like me who wants to really try to do the whole game. So when I come onto the show, I can talk about it. So I read all the way down to the bottom of his game FAQ. And I thought this was so cute. At the end, he just writes, In conclusion, I would like to thank my sister Kate, she helped with the heading, Nintendo for creating the NES and tennis, Linkin Park for providing some capital letters good music,
and my mom for reading the first draft. Aw. Like, what a wholesome thing at the end of Game FAQ. I'm not going to fight about Linkin Park here on the podcast. That is very wholesome. Yeah. I believe you just committed copier infringement? You just read his work on air. Well, I think he's okay with that. I don't know. I don't know you didn't pass it off as your own. I didn't pass it off as my own. No, I was saying you didn't pass it off. Yeah, it is. You can go to the Game FAQ. Hold on, hold on, hold on. We'll do this live. Can we get him on the phone?
It's Hoopawaka. It's the user who created this guide back in April 16, 2004. And the heading, you know, no offense to your sister, Hoopawaka, but it's just compared to other ASC2 art, it's just not really the best. Oh, damn. Oh, wow. All right. No, but I mean, his mom read the first draft, so that's nice. That's really nice. Yeah. She didn't spell check. They leave this guy's family alone. This is going to give us some weird complaints. So let's move into the Essential Games list.
All right. It's time for the Essential Games list. Not many on that list. Is tennis getting added? Let's find out. Because, of course, as you know how this works, you get your PS4, Tennis Switch, PC. I should probably mention Xbox One at some point. I'm sure there's that lone Xbox One X guy who's like... I thought we were doing it on purpose. Yeah, he's like, I'm going to get a game. I'm going to get a game. It's like, we should do an Xbox One X Essential Games list and be done in 30 minutes.
30 minutes is nice, but it's basically a podcast where we reject all the games. Or say that they're also available on PC. This is a savage episode. This is... I'm just going all in.
Basically, to get the point across, we vote on the games here and we say whether they're essential for today. Not, were they essential back then? This isn't like, these were the best NES games of their time. These are the best NES games still worth playing today. So if you're playing Virtua Tennis 4, I think which is on the original Xbox. So you're already into retro games. So why not go all the way back to... Sorry, original Xbox ain't that retro. But why not go all the way back to the NES and play NES Tennis and see if that's any good? Well, why not just go back to Pong? Find out what that's like.
So Sam, is this on your essential games list? Well, let me tell you, this is not on my essential games list. Is that breaking news? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Breaking news. I would put Wii Sports Tennis. Like, way above it. I think that was like a much better representation of kind of like party tennis. Even though it's not like as difficult. Which I feel like this has an interesting curve to it. Again, we kind of have been saying this with sports games before. Where if you like tennis games or if you like tennis, this might be something to check out. Because it is interesting all the things they were able to do. Just with, you know, a directional pad and a button for swing. You know? The controls are kind of frustrating.
I think the movement speed is a little bit annoying. So it's not on the list. And I'm just going to say something here. We've been saying that about some sports games. I'm not going to say that here with tennis. And it's not that I hate this game by any means. I just don't think that if you're a fan of tennis games, it's worth going back to this. I think that there's plenty of tennis going on.
And that's kind of an interesting statement, too. Because as I mentioned earlier, there's not that many tennis games. But there's enough good tennis games out there that you don't have to play something as archaic as these older tennis games. Pong is its own thing. You know? Like, Pong is different. That's just, that's like really abstract gaming at its finest, you know?
This, on the other hand, that Z-axis, I can't get over it. The computers are just a little too challenging. And the only thing that I'm really going to praise this game for is that it is a constant fight with the computer. That you never really have a sure hand in anything. If you're up three sets, that doesn't mean anything in this game. Mia, you've heard my spiel about sports games over and over. Sam said it. Mike said a version of it. There's no reason to play this game unless you have it in front of you. So, it's not on the essential games list. It is a very competent game. That's about it. Yeah, I think that it would take a lot for me to put this on my essential games list. It would take a lot more than what this game offers.
But I think, like, the biggest thing that kind of jumps out at me is that it doesn't simulate aiming in tennis as well enough. And that's kind of like a big thing that stops it from feeling as intuitive as it should. Otherwise, the controls work pretty well, but definitely not essential. Yeah, I think one thing you carried out there, Joe, is that, like, it's a little difficult because it's unintuitive. It's not difficult just for the sake of difficulty.
It's actually, like, you know, the aiming and, like, the generosity of, like, your timing in other tennis games is there for a good reason. Mm-hmm. So, that's how I feel about tennis. Again, you know, our essential games list should be small and fine-tuned. And I just don't think, you know, we've now finished all the sports games and none of them, the NES launched sports games. There's plenty more sports games to come.
And none of them made the essential games list. It doesn't mean that a sports game won't ever make our essential games list, but certainly these earlier versions have a lot to work on if they want to enter our essential games list. Any other thoughts? Yeah, I would just say that I think this game goes in the jank folder.
Nice. Yeah. The jank folder back. Yeah. I think that we could make at least a segment of another Twitch stream out of this game because it is so, oh, no, we can't play against each other. Right. Can't play against each other, but we can watch. The sunburned people. Yeah. The other three of us could just, like, pray for the person who's playing, you know, like call Roger Federer and ask him, you know, as a tennis god, can you help us out here? And he'd be like, oh, wait, the one for the NES? Oh, no. Oh, no, yeah. You don't want me. You're not up against a sunburned guy, are you?
He has nightmares about that guy. All right. That's us. Yeah, that's all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia. Join us next time for Wild Gunman, and be sure to play it yourself if you can. For more Nostalgia, please subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen, and be sure to check out NostalgiaCast.com. That's N-E-S-T-A-L-G-I-A-Cast.com. There you'll find links to the show and show notes as well as our other platforms such as Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Thank you so much for your support of Nostalgia. We thank you for spending time with us. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on at Esposito Film on Twitter, and I'll talk to you soon. I'll talk to you soon.
