We’ve previously covered one compilation, in the charity fundraiser Soft Aid. Game Set & Match is another chance to bring together a bunch of old games and is purely for profit, taking as its unifying theme the sports game. If there’s one thing that Super Chart Island’s journey so far from 1984 to the end of 1987 has taught us, it’s that the game-playing British public loved sports games. Almost any sports games. So taking a whole bunch of different minor sports games and bundling them into one was a savvy move from longtime savvy movers Ocean. Most of the games come from British former rival turned subsidiary Imagine, and most of those from a deal to remake the games of Japanese developer Konami.
One of the Konami originals is Hyper Sports, which alongside Daley Thompson’s Super Test means that this is the first time (but not the only time) that Super Chart Island will review a release containing game(s) already previously covered on Super Chart Island. Which is weird. Even more so because the biggest reason for their presence on Game Set & Match appears to be to bump up the numbers on its box. 10 games and over 20 events, it trumpets, on the basis of all of the different events contained in those two games. Although you would have to do better than me at Hyper Sports to even get to all of them.
They remain similar but distinct takes on the multi-sports challenge. Daley Thompson’s Super Test (Ocean, 1985) is the more generous to the player and places the higher value on variety. Hyper Sports (Imagine, 1985) shows its arcade origins through both difficulty and visual flair. They’re not my favourites but they do enjoyable things with small challenges, the better for not attempting the task of tackling a sport as a whole.
Taking the one game at the time in brief approach to reviewing the rest of the contents:
Pool (CDS, 1983)
An early, functional but very simplified version of pool. Only three balls of each colour?
World Series Baseball (Imagine, 1985)
An early, functional but very simplified version of baseball. Decent music for a Spectrum game.
Konami’s Tennis (Imagine, 1986)
An early, functional but very simplified version of tennis, where it’s easy enough to return the ball but working out how to actually score a point is a very different matter, with a slight feel of playing against a pre-injury Andy Murray.
Konami’s Ping Pong (Imagine, 1986)
An early, barely functional version of table tennis. Its most distinguishing feature is the demonic laughter of the crowd in response to each rally.
Basketball (Gamestar, 1987)
An early, garish and confusing version of basketball. A two-on-two match where all the four players wear different colours from each other.
Jonah Barrington’s Squash (New Generation, 1985)
An early version of squash, where to be honest I don’t understand the sport well enough to make any judgements about functionality or otherwise. A bit like Konami’s Tennis except with half of my shots being ruled out for reasons I don’t understand, plus the audio has synthesised speech which you can just about make out reading out the score, as long as you already know what the score is.
Super Soccer (Imagine, 1986)
An early, not even functional version of football in which you have accelerate/brake/turn left/turn right controls for your players for some reason. On the other hand it includes a degree of customisation of how it looks which allows you to play on a magenta pitch, which is not to be sniffed at.
Barry McGuigan’s World Championship Boxing (Gamestar, 1985)
This game stands out a mile in these surrounds, due to such factors as better-than-minimal graphics and a career mode, even if the punches its boxers throw feel a bit weedy and weightless. When you define your character at the beginning you are asked to choose between them being Black or White, which is an age ahead of its time.
Overall these are some of the games which have aged least well, or rather aged the least to my liking under the approach I’m taking to playing them, which is a very different statement. For a start, the barrier of complexity, and that of the difficulty of making AI advanced enough to play realistically badly, would be significantly lessened if I was playing them with someone else two player. That would be a more natural fit for what they’re representing, and there can be something fantastic and joyful in trying to work out how to play a game alongside someone else while competing with them. More relevantly, childhood experience would suggest that while such a process of competitive co-operation works best with the best games, it works better with bad games than mediocre ones.
