Chronogamer

The idea of a videogame with a rule extending into the outside world? Kind of like "if your opponent scores, drink your beer!" or "if the puck goes off the screen, you can't drive for two days!"

 

LOL, the first augmented reality game!

 

Well, it's interesting that such a simple system had sometimes to resort to very complicated mechanics. A necessity given what the Odyssey really is. It's actually impressive they could simulate so many sports and games in this system.

I agree! They were establishing the "sports game" genre! I do find a lot of these games to be difficult to enjoy but that doesn't mean I don't respect that all of them were "the first" and that someone who'd never seen a videogame before had to create them out of thin air.

This uses a game card that allows both players to "serve" the "ball" at any time by pressing their reset button, doesn't it? The instructions are incredibly unclear, but the illustrations makes it seem like the idea is that the player that wins the face-off is meant to then move his player into the opponent's field and then press the reset button to send out a new puck, which gives the losing player time to get into position to potentially block it (especially since you're meant to play at the slowest setting). This explains all the various rules about what happens depending on where the puck ends up when shot from various positions - the player needs to quickly move across the red line and make a shot BEFORE the puck flies off screen. This also prevents the defender from pretty much being able to automatically score without fail if he manages to block an incoming shot, since the offensive player would have no real time to move into position to defend the goal.

It kinda makes sense this way (and doesan okay-ish job translating the sport of hockey to a Pong-typegame), and I think this was the intent, they just forgot to include a note explaining that "players make a SHOT ON GOAL by pressing the RESET button".

On 11/14/2018 at 8:24 PM, Odd said:

It kinda makes sense this way (and doesan okay-ish job translating the sport of hockey to a Pong-typegame), and I think this was the intent, they just forgot to include a note explaining that "players make a SHOT ON GOAL by pressing the RESET button".

Greetings! That's a good point! If I remembered the game better, I'd probably like "hey, that makes sense now!" but it's all very murky. A lot of these games seemed like rounds of flipping a coin but with more steps. It's really wonderful though to find a comment from 2018. I hope you're doing well, traveler!