Beach Spikers: Virtua Beach Volleyball

"A fun and addictive beach volleyball game"

BEACH SPIKERS

Firstly, I like to say this is a beach volley ball game (2 vs. 2) so I don' get anyone confused. Well, another sports game from Sega. Sega are known for making great sport games and seeing that this is made from the makers of Virtua Tennis, it looks and sounds like a good game. Plus that you have women in bikinis. But does it have enough gameplay to make you want to buy it?

Gameplay: 8.5/10: This game has 4 modes: Arcade, World Tour, VS mode and Training. The first one, Arcade is when you play in 8-team tournament and try to win and get points at the same time. If you win the tournament, you play the best players and see if you can win the championship. At the end your score is counted and you are put up on the ladder. There is 2 styles of Arcade. Arcade and Original. You can also choose how hard you want the game to be. Then there is the core part of the game, World Tour mode. You can edit your team and pick 1 of 25 countries and then start your rise to NO.1. Your aim after every season (8 events) to finish NO.1. It might be hard first season but second season you will be able to finish it. You will be playing 15 other countries for the NO.1 position. Also, after every match you will get skill points to put on your partner. Once you have your partner on max. skill, it can quite easy to beat most teams besides Brazil, USA and Australia. But still it's fairly easy. To try and stop this being easy they have added the teamwork bar. Whenever there is a changeover, you will have the choice to praise your partner, encourage your partner, yell how bad your partner was or just do nothing. But, again the bar will go up to 100% quite easily if you know what to say. That's about the only problem with gameplay with only 8 events per season and fairly easy to get your partner perfect, it makes it a bit easy after a while. Maybe, thy could of aopted a system to lose points but it doesn't matter. Then, there is VS. Mode. This can be very fun to play believe me. There is 4 mini-games you can play: Beach Spikers, which is a normal beach volleyball game, Beach Flags, where you run to get the flags in sort of a knockout competition, Beach Countdown, where you are playing beach volleyball with a bomb with a counter and Beach PK where you have a person one sid etry to stop the smash going into the square. All, of these very fun and you could spend hours playing these. Then, there's training mode and it can teach stuff and some of it can be very tricky.

Sound: 4.5/10: The music isn't that good like in all Sega games but I don't worry about it too much. The sounds Ok but with a annoying guy who says ''Fantastic'' or ''Great'' when you dig the ball and about to smash it. Not the best but it's OK.

Graphics: 9/10: The graphics are fine. The women in bikinis look fine. Everything looks fine. Besides the women in bikinis there isn't much to say about the graphics.

How long does it last: 8.5/10: It can last a fairly long time. Even though it can be easy to do World Tour mode. Then, there is arcade mode and training mode. It's also fairly addictive so it can last you for a while.

Pros
* Fun and addictive
* Excellent multiplayer
* Women in bikinis.
Cons
* Not big enough world tour mode
* Annoying guy saying ''Fantastic''


Overall: (8.9/10) 9/10: This is another solid sport game from Sega and it disappoints me that Sega won't be bringing any more of there sport games to Game cube. Also, to people who thinks that this game is only about the girls, it isn't. It's a very fun game.

Buy or Rent:
Most likely Buy, for sport fans and many other people but you might want to rent it if you beat games very easily.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/27/03, Updated 04/27/03