PixlBit

A typical tennis game that gives you just enough. . . but in color!

This little portable tennis game was developed by Yumekobo and published by SNK for the Neo Geo Pocket Color in 1999. It's one of the games in the Pocket Sports series. Yumekobo was one of SNK's development teams which worked on several big Pocket games, such as the Biomotor Unitron series, the Puzzle Link series, and spin-off games such as SNK Gals' Fighters. 

PTC is a very simple sports game. There are three modes: Exhibition, Tournament, and Record. There are eight characters, some of which have regular names (like Alice and David) and some of which have Japanese names (like Hiyama and Tanaka). In addition to these eight, two secret characters can be unlocked. When choosing a character, a triangle inside a circle shows you their stats; speed is at the top of the circle, power on the left, and defense on the right. So it depends if you want a fast character or a powerful one.

When playing Exhibition, you not only choose your character, but your opponent as well. Then you choose which court to play on and how many sets to play. It's a real bummer that you can't choose to play 2-on-2, as the game would be much more interesting. After an exhibition is over, you can choose to play against another opponent, picking the one you want to challenge. Yeah, not much to it.

Tournament lets you climb the ranks to face-off against the champion. If you lose, obviously, you're out of the tournament. This is perhaps a little more interesting, as you don't know who you'll face next, but is still overall rather dull. Record lets you look at your records with specific characters and to choose to erase your data.

The gameplay is simple: B is your regular hit and A is a lob hit (high into the air). By pushing in a specific direction, you can hit the ball where you want, which is great. Characters cannot charge their swings (such as in Mario Tennis, which I was used to doing), so you have to press the button just as the ball gets to your character. Pushing slightly forward on the directional pad will make your character dive, which can be a little annoying. Sometimes the ball will seem to go right through your character or his racket, but this happens in every tennis game.

The character animations are good, but they express no joy or sorrow when getting or losing a point. The character portraits are all very anime-like, each one looking distinct, and each one having different stats. The color is there, but doesn't really pop out like I was hoping it would. The music is okay, but can get annoying as the loop is very short.

Overall, PTC is a decently fun tennis game, but awfully bare-bones. With no unique features, power-ups, or creative modes, it's a good distraction game if you have nothing else to do, or if you really want to play a tennis game. Otherwise it's best to stick with Mario Tennis. The game is also two player, but you need a friend with the game cart and a cable to hook between the systems, so multiplayer here is cumbersome.

Final Verdict--3 Stars: It's Okay

PTC is not a bad game, just a boring one. Matches are not very exciting, and the game is very bare-bones, but it's certainly not bad. Controls are intuitive and the characters are good, but when good things are wrapped up in a boring package, you get something quite bland. Perhaps Yumekobo could've added special fighting moves to each of the characters; this is on an SNK system, after all. Looking back, it's apparent that they just wanted to get out a quick tennis game on the NGPC, and that's exactly what they did. Oh, and it's in color!

Join me every Saturday as we take a look back at all kinds of retro games, good and bad.