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Tennis |
Although you may have thought this was the
VideoBrain equivalent of Activision's Tennis, it's
really just a fancy version of Pong, with tennis
players instead of paddles. Tennis
does offer what is referred to as "Rushing Variations"
where the paddle slowly moves left and right in
addition to up and down, but the player doesn't
control the left and right movement (the player moves
on his own). Due to the VideoBrain's odd
controllers the movement seems very choppy which is an
unforgivable sin in a Pong game (after all, up and
down movement is all there really is!).
Tennis does have a few nice things going for it
though. There is a row of spectators at the top
of the screen, and a little man comes out to drop the
ball in front of the player between each serve.
Tennis also features 95 game variations and
supports up to four players (assuming you can actually
find four controllers). However in the end
Tennis is really just a Pong clone, and a weak one at
that.
Interestingly although Tennis was one of the first games to be developed (code for prototype versions of Tennis and Pinball were deposited in the copyright office) it was one of the last VideoBrain cartridges to be released (manufactured from 11-7-78 to 2-14-79) and had a print run of around only 913 copies making it the rarest non-productivity cartridges for the system.
