World Ping Pong Championship Review—World Class Disappointment

[Atariboy]

When I was kid, I wanted a pool table. Instead, my parents got me a ping pong table. While I was disappointed, I grew to like ping pong. So when I saw World Ping Pong Championship get released, I was cautiously optimistic. Unfortunately, rather than reminding me of the fun I had playing ping pong, it reminds me of the initial disappointment.

While Gameshastra created a handful of original titles for the Minis program at the very start (games like D-Cube and Deflector), most have simply been ports, either from their PC casual games or their more recent efforts on iOS. At first I thought this was an original PSP title, but apparently it is simply a port of World Cup Table Tennis, originally by Skyworks (who also originally did Crime Spree).

You control a ping pong paddle, apparently held by The Invisible Man. You can move the paddle around with the D-pad or analog nub, and pressing X jabs the paddle forward. To serve, you have to move the paddle to the ball and hit it; you can’t use the X button. To return the ball after it’s batted back to you, you move the paddle where you want and hit the X button to whack it back.

You don’t always need to use the X button though, as you can just move it forward yourself. It’s kind of a strange playing method, as if it were meant for a touchscreen where your finger controlled the paddle, or perhaps even for the Wii, with the waggle controls. Using the analog nub or D-pad instead is more than a little clunky. Still, because it’s physics-based (as opposed to simply timing your button presses), you can perform some impressive trick shots by putting spin on the ball.

On the other hand, you can’t really seem to slam the paddle down hard to spike the ball. Then again, maybe that’s not done in competitive ping pong, as it can be somewhat dangerous (I fell on and broke the legs of a table that way). But I think it’s just because touch controls don’t always translate well to a D-pad or analog nub. They should have added a slam button.

And basically that’s all there is to World Ping Pong Championship, other than being able to choose to play an opponent in practice mode or compete in a World Championship tournament. In either case, you are playing against invisible people, though they do come from countries, which are rated by skill. China and Russia are the tops at ping pong, while the US and UK are the worst, lagging behind Finland, Canada, Sweden and Germany.

The graphics are clean, if very sparse. There’s a table, two paddles, and a ball. The music is generic, though catchy and the sound effects are ones you’ve probably heard before.

While World Ping Pong Championship can be fun to play for a match or two, there’s just so little to it. Icon Games has made a number of fairly simple sports games—Arcade Darts, Arcade Air Hockey & Bowling, etc.—but they went the extra mile and added things like opponents with names and faces, not to mention different things to unlock and spiffier presentation. This is among the most spartan of Minis, about on par with Sony’s “Feel for Two” line.

As I look at YouTube and look at the iOS version on which this is based, there are all these extra features on iOS that would have addressed my complaints. Unlockable paddles, more countries in the tournaments, stat tracking, and so forth. That version? 99 cents. This costs £2.49/€2.99. There is no excuse to charge more money for less features.

Far, far less features in this case. This is not the first time Gameshastra has ported an iPhone game to PSP without including all the content (Top Gun lost the volleyball mini-game, Route 66 lost the mini-games to replenish hints), but this is by far the most egregious. My guess is they ported the game a couple of years ago (the copyright date on it is 2010), when World Cup Table Tenniswas more bare-bones, and they simply just published it now, rather than updating the game to its more current form.

3/10

POSTED BY JEREMYR ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 29, 2012 AT 7:41 AM