#90: David Crane's Amazing Tennis

Amazing, eh?

I assumed David Crane was a tennis player who I'd just never heard of but it turns out he was one of the Atari game programmers who got fed up with how bad Atari treated their programmers and quit to form Activision. He was involved in games like Pitfall and Ghostbusters! Apparently he was a big enough deal that he got to put his name on a game, like Sid Meier with his Pirates and his Civilizations.

Gender, race, size? Nope, the only player
customization option is handedness.

He only has the one game named after him, and I can imagine why. Amazing Tennis is only amazing in terms of how bad it is. The characters are pretty sluggish and I had a hard time moving into position to even make contact with most of the balls. Maybe it's realistic to be able to hit the ball where the other person can't reach it but if I can't have a rally in a tennis game it isn't much fun. Especially since I couldn't find any way to precisely aim the ball myself so I had no hope of hitting the ball where he couldn't reach it. I actually managed to score a total of one point total across an entire set.

Kanyanta > Ziggyny

I'm sure part of it was just not knowing the controls very well, but I found the game to be sluggish, frustrating, and not fun.

Rating: D-

#62: Super Battletank: War in the Gulf

Who is Garry Kitchen?

Does the video game industry create games glorifying current wars because they think that's what people want to play or because they're in some way propaganda? I don't know, but there were plenty of Kuwait/Iraq war games when I was a kid. I hadn't heard of this one before today, but from the name I expect to be driving a tank in the gulf.

FIRE!

Yep. I am in a tank. I am driving around, finding other tanks, and blowing them up. As far as SNES era tank games go, though, this is actually pretty good. I have four different weapons with ammo levels. It makes use of all 8 buttons on the controller! (Accelerate, decelerate, open map, shoot weapon, turn left, turn right, select weapon, and pause.) There are all sorts of gauges and doohickeys that make it feel like I might actually be driving in a tank.

SCUD!

The game has an overarching plotline that I assume mirrored the actual campaign in the gulf war in some way. Maybe? I don't actually know. But sending in a tank to take out a SCUD launcher sounds like the sort of thing that would have actually happened.

The game controls well, and matches the theme well, but it really isn't my cup of tea. Maybe I would have played it a bit as a kid, but I'm pretty confident it wouldn't have been a two-renter. I died on the second mission this time (I tried to figure out what an icon meant on the map by driving near it, and I think it was a mine field) and decided I didn't really want to start over. This game is what it is, and what it is isn't for me.

Rating: C-