Who's for fantasy tennis?
, in which you don't play Mario at all. He's the umpire, a bristling presence in a high chair, eyes glued to the ball. Unless there's a spin-off I've missed, Mario himself wouldn't take up a racquet till Mario's Tennis on the, ergh, Virtual Boy. At the time, I had no idea who he was.
It's a simple game - move around with WASD, swing with space - but you can exert reasonably delicate control over the angle and speed of the ball based on your direction and momentum when you strike. It allows for some familiar tennis gambits - he writes, having not played actual, flesh-and-blood tennis for decades. You can rush the net to panic the other player, always at the risk of them calmly lobbing the ball past you.
Tennis is widely perceived as a"casual gamer" subgenre, associated with licensed titles and throwaway motion controls, but it's actually one of the industry's primordial archetypes, as ancient as the text adventure. One of the very first home format games, Atari's 1972 hit Pong, is. It's a little bizarre to boot Pong up and realise that the original core thrill has carried through to modern tennis sims unchanged.
In the full version of Thwack, yours for a piffling $2, there are difficulty modes, five additional opponents, local multiplayer and cool hats, written in order of ascending importance. Each opponent has a themed tennis court - the Snowman's court is covered in snow, of course, while the Ghost's wraps around spookily, so that when you fire a ball out sideways, it reappears opposite. Mario would probably rule that a foul, but screw him, the smug little git.
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