Volleyball! (Odyssey²)

While many sports can be represented somewhat effectively in the top down two-dimensional style practically required by the kind of rudimentary video game you’d get around 1980, sports that involve a net like tennis or volleyball always had to ask the question of how to include that in the gameplay. Some just eliminated the net entirely or made it irrelevant despite its presence, but for Volleyball! on the Odyssey², a very strange approach was taken instead.

Volleyball! is a two player game where either two human players, two AI teams, or a human and a rather idiotic AI can play volleyball with a team of six. The volleyball is unsurprisingly a large square considering the graphical limitations of the time, but the all-important net is represented in a rather odd manner. Between the two sides of the field a large white bar nearly bisects the middle of the rectangular play area, but at the very top a section remains open. If the ball makes contact with this net stand-in, it doesn’t actually count against you, the ball instead bouncing back off of it and remaining in play. However, to try and get a point you will need to hit the ball up and through the only available opening.

Some problems naturally emerge from this approach to making the net. Each player controls their entire team of six players at once, moving them around the field in lockstep. If the ball reaches the bottom of your side of the field, that will count as an end to the current volley, but only the serving team each round can score with this method. This is apparently an older style of volleyball scoring and the current main format at the time of this game’s release, but its elimination in the real sport was because of many of the same problems that crop up here. Many rounds of play will likely lead to no points being scored because it throws the priorities of both teams out of whack. The serving team doesn’t have to fear being scored on and can play sloppily if they so wish while the defending team has no incentive for being aggressive since they, at best, will earn a chance to serve next time. The only area the ball can pass through being near the top of the screen also means its rather hard to do any sort of intentional strategies or tricky maneuvers. Holding down the controller button will turn your next contact with the ball into a spike, but the spike just speeds it up wildly and having a good angle for a spike that actually mirrors the real life action is unlikely so the spike is rarely worth the risk. Instead, you’re more likely to bounce a ball against the solid net at speed when attempting a spike and end up with a ricocheting pixel moving around your side of the play field.

Getting the ball up and over a net you can barely approach properly is already more difficult than it should be, but your influence over the ball is rarely what leads to a point being scored, unless of course you’re on defense. The most difficult part of Volleyball! isn’t scoring a point, it’s getting the ball out of your side of the cramped rectangle. Moving all your players around is disorienting enough, but any time a player is moving and makes contact with the ball, they’ll knock the ball in the direction they’re moving.  This means if you’re trying to position them better you might send the ball off in the wrong direction, but even if you hit it the right way with one player it might be passed to another who immediately knocks it counter to the intended path. Points are most often earned when a ball is pushed to the bottom by accident when a player is just trying to get the ball around their side of the field, and since trying to hit it up and over the net can instead lead to its bouncing off the “ceiling” and back towards you, attempting anything fancy is likely to lead to a scramble to avoid scoring on yourself. The best option is usually to toss the ball completely horizontal over the top of the net if possible and hope your opponent isn’t doing the same. While the space near the top is two players tall and thus you can only position one player in this spot due to their evenly spaced formation, you can just keep holding to the right to ensure any ball that contacts that player is immediately fed back to the other side of the court.

The AI will never really pick up on the boring practically of a horizontal net clear, and it barely seems to have a handle on the game it was programmed to understand. It spikes at almost random points that don’t benefit it and tosses the ball around its side of the field with little game plan, so at least as you struggle with the handling of your team you won’t need to worry about the opponent being much better at the game than you. This does mean that you’re not going to find much legitimate challenge in Volleyball! though, and perhaps the biggest joke is how long the game is meant to go.

Volleyball! is meant to be a contest of the first to 10 points, but due to the serving rules and general reliance on player mistakes over skillful maneuvers, games can drag on for a long time for something so simple and shallow. Two humans playing are likely to have no reason to break away from boring but safe tactics, and attempts to do so can lead to compromising their own position or just having an attempt to play in an interesting manner immediately countered by boring practicality. There isn’t even anything preventing you from “dribbling” it between the net and back wall or passing it back and forth between two horizontally aligned players. Unless you really want to tell yourself that you can get 10 points over an AI that barely understands how the game is played though, you’ll likely be turning off the console before you ever come close to actually finishing a round of Volleyball!.

THE VERDICT: Volleyball! for the Odyssey² pretty much fails in every way it can. The reliance on a scoring system where only the serving side can score ensures the game is abnormally slow and both sides of the field are thus incentivized to play in ways that further sabotage the game’s flow. Moving your whole team at once is confusing and leads to balls constantly moving in unanticipated ways, but trying to make use of your team members is a poor strategy when guarding the top of the oddly designed net works so efficiently. Attempting a spike is pointlessly risky since it most often damages you, and the computer opponent doesn’t seem to realize that its attempt to mix up how it plays consistently lead to it scoring on itself. Confusing despite its simplicity and lacking any sort of draw, Volleyball! not only utterly botched adapting volleyball into a video game but completely failed at making a video game that is worth anyone’s time or attention.

And so, I give Volleyball! for Odyssey²…

An ATROCIOUS rating. If I had to say something positive about Volleyball! and wasn’t allowed to commend its flashy and colorful box art, I guess I’d have to say the little dance a team does when they score is cute since the players flash various colors of the rainbow as they do so. Everything else I would have to say about this game’s design is just a list of how almost every choice not only prevents this from being an enjoyable experience but also fails to capture volleyball due to how the design forces you to play. Your extra players are a liability and pretty much there to scramble and defend if the ball gets past the defender who has an easy time body-blocking the entryway. Players can barely even play the game because any diagonal throw to try and clear the net can come back to bite you instead and your own spikes are even more prone to causing you problems. While the time of release does make the point system make sense, it also just means everything drags on as the priorities are too heavily skewed and thus unambitious play is rewarded and exists without a means of punishment. Volleyball! is both too easy to figure out and yet confusing when you try to break out of the most effective but least interesting method of play, and since you can only play against a computer controlled opponent who doesn’t realize it keeps handing over points or a human player where the only points are earned by mistakes, there’s no way to play Volleyball! in a way that really rewards the player for actually getting involved in the gameplay.

Volleyball! barely even feels like volleyball in this strange attempt to adapt the sport that turns the net into a wall with a small opening, the court into a tall room, and the players into six clones who float around the air identically to each other and can only move a square ball around by bumping into it as they move. The only point of authenticity is a rule style that is as dated as the game’s presentation, the gameplay that lacks any sort of engaging element stretched out by the conditions placed on actually scoring a point. While old sports games are often overlooked because they cannot capture the experience of playing the sport they’re adapting, Volleyball! feels like it is worthy of particular note since its every attempt to integrate something from the real sport leads to it feeling less like volleyball.