Game:

Beach Volley (1989)

Duration: 49:27

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14

Volley...ball!

A G-MODE recreation / reissue of old mobile phone games, this introduces "G-Mode Archives 04: Beach Volley Girl Shizuku". They've released quite a few reissues for the PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch and it's good to see them getting ported from old defunct hardware for posterity. Of course, most of them have not aged well and this is more for novelty than anything else, but it's a commendable project and I hope many more old mobile phone games can be salvaged such as the BREW service titles, J2ME releases and older Android / iOS titles. There are a few games I really WANT to play such as Climax's 2006 iteration of "Lady Stalker" ("Waltz of the Labyrinth", which has practically been forgotten) and many Western Java games on mobile, to name a few, but this is a good starting point. There have been projects for years now slowly integrating old mobile titles for use in emulators.

That said, while this is a great recreation of 2007's "Mobile & Game Studio" title, it's a rather simple but functional start to a pretty nice series overall, with three other games (and a demo) that are related to each other. One title that will most likely NOT be covered is "Beach Volleyball Girl Shizuku Training Camp Edition" which was a free flash demo distributed for the "Pico Pico Mixi" (aka "pikomiku") between August to September of 2008. Said title essentially takes place somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd game as the two mains are doing intensive training. When you look back at games like these, it's truly impressive how far mobile phone gaming has come in such a short time (but at least these titles weren't predatory like many of the phone games we have today).

G-Mode has done what they need to on their part with a few basic configuration elements, the ability to scale up to 1080p and the ability to turn graphics filters on or off (though the in-game filter here is pretty good without making things blurry or too pixilated). The same jerky, low framerate is also here (for better or worse) and the game has gamepad support which doesn't seem to suffer any issues in terms of lag or latency. Even with the game's low framerate, it's easy to control for the most part, but you can't control things with maximum efficiency like most games in the 30/60FPS range. The story has a smidgen of depth for a series about volleyball and actually builds upon itself with each subsequent release. In this game, the plot centers around two 15-year-old high school freshman, “Shizuku Asagiri” and “Haruna Minase”, aspiring players who decided they wanted to seriously pursue volleyball since middle school. Although they had a horrible debut in their local match back then and were essentially mocked, they didn't give up and train hard to participate in this year's national volleyball tournament, the "Cinderalla Cup", after successfully beating a masked duo (who serve to inspire them as rivals).

The game is 2-vs-2 paired volleyball and is easy to operate. Unlike real volleyball, the game is broken into sets where the player must reach a set amount of points first based on the rules (15 points for a single set or 10 for a two-of-three set, making it a little slower than the sequels). Another thing that differs from real volleyball is that you have special volleyball powers and can take the outfits and skills from your defeated opponents to use in matches. By default, Shizuku has the "Fire Attack" (which is probably the cheapest, most versatile skill in the series against the CPU besides the "Phoenix Attack", so I never changed it other than to experiment). The reason I say Shizuku and no one else is because you can ONLY play as Shizuku... yeah. While the game has a Story, Versus and Collection mode (Collection for swimsuits, but it's pretty barebones), you can only select what opponent you want to face for practice, and you can't switch between your partner, which is why Shizuku learns skills in the first place (to minimize the need to use other characters).

The actual gameplay is mostly what you'd expect: Blocking, Jumping, Serving and Spiking all make an appearance. As this was originally a phone title, the game automates a lot of the movements and positioning for you, but you will still want to go manual in small doses (especially when a special attack comes your way). Since we've been talking about specials, a small bar is on the HUD that goes yellow-orange-red. Orange allows for power spiking and red allows you to do a special attack by jumping and pressing down on the pad... this move is fairly temperamental in this game but much more responsive in the sequels. The graphics and sound are fairly good compared to other G-Mode titles. It's an okay start for the series, but the sequels are better. This is a video of some things in action.