Hyper V-Ball

"Yucky volleyball"

The use of the word Hyper in this game’s title is a great irony. A better name for this game could have been Valium V-Ball, or maybe Apathetic V-Ball. The one thing that sets this volleyball game apart from others is that besides the generic men’s and women’s leagues that use recognizable countries for teams, there is a third futuristic Hyper League, where the players all wear mechanical body armour and can send the ball flying in strange “hyper” zig-zag patterns over the net. There, now that I’ve dealt with the one marginally interesting feature about Hyper V-Ball, I can spend the rest of the review telling you what’s wrong with the game.

The first thing that one notices about “Hyper” V-Ball is that the ball actually moves extremely slowly. Even when the ball speed is cranked up as high as it can go under the Options menu, the ball still acts more like a leaky helium balloon than a hard object. After each serve or bump, the ball will float up to an impossibly great height, often actually disappearing off the top of the screen, before gliding back down to earth again. Now, for some reason the games start with each team tied at seven points. Normally I would question the strangeness of this, but even to make it to fifteen points from seven takes a long time at such a slow pace. So, I instead say kudos to the developers for being unrealistic with the scoring.

The second issue I had with Hyper V-Ball was the layout of the court, which is rendered in a 2-D side perspective. This was just an incredibly dumb thing to do, because it cuts off any possibility of lateral movement. Think of most tennis videogames that use an angled top-down perspective where you can see the entire court and can therefore move in any direction on it. This is of course impossible in Hyper V-Ball because you can’t even see the floor of the court, and the players are limited to moving only forwards or backwards.

Not surprisingly, trying to maneuver the four players on the team around a flat court is awkward. They can either stand in a big clump together, or spread out into an unrealistic single line leading from the net to the back of the court. This also kills a lot of the potential strategy of the game. Whichever player is highlighted (which is indicated by flashing white) gets to hit the ball. When this happens, the next player is cycled to within a fixed rotation. So even if this player is nowhere near the ball, he had better get there quickly before it hits the ground. You can in fact select another player besides the default, but this involves pressing the Select button on the controller, which involves moving your hand out of position. The ball does take a long time to come down, but it’s still awkward to get everything done in time.

Another problem with the side-view court is that it affects ball-placement. There simply aren’t as many open areas to spike the ball to, which means that it’s harder to score and the result are lots of LONG ralleys back and forth. Of course usually the rally will come to an end as a result of a missed ball on your part as opposed to a computer error. Even though there are arrows and little visual prompts EVERYWHERE to tell you where to run and what button to press (the game literally says “press jump button now,”) sometimes the ball will just fall onto the floor after passing straight through a player’s hands, or because the player’s diving mode didn’t feel like kicking in for that particular play.

The controls are one button to do a standard attack or volley shot, and another to do a “Hyper” shot or block, depending on the situation. The spike set-up is often done automatically by a computer-controlled player, so really all you have to do is get the return, let the computer set up the spike for you, then jump up and smash the ball down. Personally I like to have more control over what I’m doing. There also wasn’t much opportunity to control the ball’s direction, and so it would often stupidly spike right to the waiting opponent’s outstretched arms.

On top of all these problems, Hyper V-Ball is utterly lacking in charm. The graphics are bland, and the players look like nondescript and dorky high-school students from the 80s. Even the supposedly hip Hyper mode falls flat since it soon becomes obvious that the same characters sprites are being recycled from the other leagues with identical stances and movements, except with some robot armour grafted on. The SNES hockey game Hit the Ice is a perfect example of how a game that has control and realism issues can still be fun because of the care and extra touches taken with the visual presentation. Not so with Hyper V-Ball.

So there you have it. Hyper V-Ball is one sports game that truly deserves its place at the bottom of the dusty bargain bin.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/23/03, Updated 05/06/03