Game:

Beach Spikers (2001)

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http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/sports/beachspikers/review.html

Beach Spikers is enjoyable enough to warrant the attention of any player looking for some fun, fast-paced arcade-style action.

While Sega has received much praise for its serious sports games in recent years, it has also released, to significantly less fanfare, some highly enjoyable arcade-style sports games. Now, with the help of Virtua Fighter developer AM2, Sega has released Beach Spikers for the GameCube, an all-female beach volleyball game. The game's focus on lovely ladies in bikinis may seem a bit like pandering, but Beach Spikers consistently avoids any overt lewdness you might expect and rises above it by delivering an all-around excellent game with impressive visuals and tight, intuitive gameplay.

Players already familiar with Hitmaker's dependably excellent Virtua Tennis series should have little trouble adjusting to the simpler controls of Beach Spikers, which uses the control stick and the A and B buttons for all in-game controls. Generally speaking, the A button is used for regular shots, the B button for weaker shots, and a combination of the two to produce a special high-powered shot. The analog stick is used for general player movement and can also be used to determine which direction your shot will go while you're powering up for a shot. Overall, the controls are tight and responsive. They're simple enough for a novice to pick up and play without much fuss, but they include enough depth to make it satisfying for more advanced players.

Beach Spikers consists of three main gameplay modes--arcade, world tour, and versus. The arcade mode lets you select from any one of the 16 international teams and participate in an 8-team tournament. Since it's virtually impossible to play volleyball with only one player on the court, Beach Spikers makes solo play possible in the arcade mode by automatically switching controls from one character to another, usually choosing the character that is in the most optimal position to take action on the ball. On the whole, this works well.

The world tour mode could almost be described as a volleyball RPG. You start off creating a two-woman team using Beach Spikers' impressive catalog of hairstyles, faces, sunglasses, and outfits, and then proceed to compete in a series of tournaments. The big twist is that your second character is computer-controlled and starts off playing the game about as effectively as a really stupid rock. You'll lose the first few matches, but as you do you'll gain experience points that can be applied to your partner's different skills, such as serving, returning, blocking, and so on. You'll also be asked to praise, encourage, or reprimand your partner during the game based on her performance, and your teamwork rating will rise or fall based on how your partner reacts to the input. While it's all kind of bizarre, it's also oddly pleasurable to watch your partner develop her skills, going from being a no-talent scrub to matching, and maybe even surpassing, your own skill level.

In the versus mode, you're given a choice of playing a regular match or one of three different minigames. Beach Flags has you mashing on the A button Track and Field-style in order to sprint down the beach and grab the flag before your opponents. In Beach Countdown, the volleyball is replaced with a bomb with a burning fuse. Players must volley the bomb back and forth until the bomb's fuse runs out or one of the teams drops the bomb. Finally, Beach P.K. is a basic spike-and-return competition. With support for up to four players, a regular multiplayer match can prove to be an enjoyable endeavor indeed, but the minigames that you can choose from simply aren't much fun.

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