The Odyssey² Today: Catch the Ball / Noughts and Crosses (Odyssey²)

Quite a few Odyssey² game carts would include two or even three games on them in an effort to better round out the Odyssey²’s lineup. In most cases it was part of an attempt to fill all the niches an early video game console could hit, bundling together games that were too simple to sell well on their own. Putting things like hockey and soccer on the same cart makes sense, but an odder pair came in the form of Catch the Ball / Noughts and Crosses, where a weak pachinko variation and a game of Tic-Tac-Toe were paired together despite neither being strong enough to support the other.

 

The Catch the Ball half of the game is the more interesting visually, as it has a coat of paint to make it about a clown scrambling to catch balls in his hat as they fall in from above. The ball’s path is obstructed by a set of platforms that mimic the shape of a pachinko playfield as best as the Odyssey² could manage, but the physics of the ball moving between them is inconsistent and essentially impossible to predict. The horizontal bars are all spaced the same no matter what mode you play and the ball always enters the same way from the top, but its path afterward just seems to be based on the game’s random whims. It may bounce, it may just roll along, but for the most part you don’t really have to worry about its path as it moves slowly and you can move the clown around to match it. If the ball ends with a straight vertical drop, there’s pretty much no reason you should miss it as you can walk over and nab it with little issue, and even if the ball misses the clown’s hat, the clown can catch it with his body and still get the point. The only real challenging ball drops are the diagonal ones where it shoots with such speed that you will need to be fairly close to where the ball exits from the obstructions to have a hope of catching it. Even if you can only catch the vertical drops though, you can still get a hearty score without ever really enjoying the task set out for you.

There are a few variations to Catch the Ball to try and make it seem more like a game worth playing, but none fix the core problem of being an incredibly boring waiting game with next to no real challenge. You can play with a time limit on or off, with the timer set to 3 minutes for regular play and ending when the clock ticks down, your high score saved afterwards. Of course, your high score doesn’t have much wiggle room to be improved on; you either get more vertical drops or you get lucky with diagonal ones, making any reason to play it again after you learn this issue nearly non-existent. There is a two-player mode, and the rest of Catch the Ball’s variations exist here. You can play with the timer off or on here and can choose how the players will alternate turns, but even the threat of losing to another human being isn’t enough to inject life into some intensely bland gameplay that is far too simple for even the youngest audiences to enjoy. It is such a skilless game with such a cut and dry “you succeed or you don’t” approach to getting points that this game definitely had no hope of appealing to people on its own merits, so pairing it with a Tic-Tac-Toe game as if that would make it more enticing was a very poor decision.

Surprisingly, I might have better things to say about Noughts and Crosses even though it really is just Tic-Tac-Toe on the Magnavox Odyssey². There is no computer player to play against, so it’s you against another person in a game of noughts and crosses. Shortly into it thought you might realize something strange that sort of sets it apart from being a straight adaptation of the pen and paper counterpart. In regular Tic-Tac-Toe, you alternate turns, a player placing their assigned symbol of an X or an O on a 3 by 3 grid until someone has managed to line up three of their symbols horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. In Noughts and Crosses though, once you place your third symbol, you cannot place a fourth, meaning unless someone has already won, things get a bit more interesting. To continue playing, players now remove one of their symbols from the board and place it elsewhere. I won’t pretend this opens up an all new array of strategizing in a fairly straightforward game, but it does manage to make the otherwise simple game of Noughts and Crosses a bit more intriguing. Many people figure out the way to almost guarantee a win in regular Tic-Tac-Toe by the fourth turn, but Noughts and Crosses makes that more difficult to pull off since you must move your symbols rather than add to them. It is a bit silly to whip out a console to play this neat little variation on Xs and Os, but it does at least give me an idea to make the pen and paper version a bit more interesting the next time a bored six year old challenges me to a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

 

Of course, a passable variation of Tic-Tac-Toe doesn’t do the game cart any favors. There is no real visual flair to the game or anything unique enough to justify it being a video game, and there are many games that will include some minor mini-game that is structurally sound but can’t really buoy the flawed total experience. Catch the Ball, surprisingly, ends up being the millstone around this game’s neck. Including Noughts and Crosses as a bonus treat on an adaptation of a board game like Backgammon might have been nice, but Catch the Ball is so bereft of any exciting or enticing features that it can’t really be paired with any other game without dragging them down into the muck.

THE VERDICT: A somewhat forgiving stance is necessary when looking at old video games. The graphics should only be held against them if they hurt play, music might not even be present in the earliest titles, and the things you can do in simple titles will inevitably be fairly straightforward and rudimentary. Even with this consideration, Catch the Ball is still unable to meet even the lowest standards set for video games. The gameplay is waiting on a ball to take a fairly random path before it arbitrarily picks whether the ball will be a guaranteed catch or not worth the effort pursuing, making your score a mostly meaningless metric of success. Surprisingly, Noughts and Crosses is the better title, providing an adequate version of Tic-Tac-Toe with a bit of a twist. It is still far too basic to help make up for the sins of its companion on the cartridge though, making this game into one of the worst games on the Odyssey².

 

And so, I give Catch the Ball / Noughts and Crosses for the Magnavox Odyssey²…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Catch the Ball is an utterly abysmal representation of the kind of poor game design developers thought they could get away with in the early days. The visuals do not properly indicate how the action will occur and the objects in play don’t even have consistent effects or physics. Success is essentially a coin flip as long as you’re paying a modicum of attention, and adding multiplayer to that equation only makes it more apparent that how the ball drops will determine the winner with none of the excitement or flair you could find in other random chance games. Noughts and Crosses is tacked on as an afterthought and is at least functional and might teach you an interesting variation of Tic-Tac-Toe, but it’s no more fun than regular Tic-Tac-Toe and that game is mostly a time-waster anyway.

 

Despite bundling these two games together on one cart to make it more appealing, the quality of Catch the Ball ensured that whatever it was attached to would be dragged down into the dregs of the Odyssey² library. While Noughts and Crosses didn’t really deserve better, it could have at least supplemented a good game rather than being tied to an utterly lost cause.