Pong Quest Review – Mediocre Modernization

Publisher: Atari

Developer: Chequered Ink

Rating: Everyone

Reviewed on: PC

Also on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch

In the 1970s, Atari’s Pong captivated fledgling gamers across the world thanks to its ability to translate the sport of table tennis to two electronic paddles on a screen. Pong Quest evolves the formula, delivering a procedurally generated dungeon-crawler where all enemy encounters are Pong matches with power-ups. While this does effectively breathe new life into the well-worn title and prove that Pong is still fun nearly five decades later, the changes aren’t enough to warrant more than a short stroll down memory lane.

Strange happenings are afoot in a kingdom populated by sentient Pong paddles, and the king requests your help to venture into dungeons, retrieve magical orbs, and open the final area; it’s a story that’s as inconsequential and thin as you’d want from a lighthearted RPG built around Pong. Once you enter each themed dungeon, you have four randomized floors to work through, defeating NPC paddles in modernized Pong on your way to a challenging boss battle. 

Despite myriad twists to the formula, the enemy encounters are essentially simple matches of Pong: Two paddles line up on opposite sides and bounce a ball back and forth. This basic formula hammers home the timeless nature of Pong; I felt a tinge of excitement each time I entered a match and the high-energy battle music ratcheted up. 

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While Pong’s basic action of rallying back and forth is still fun, the thrill of Pong Quest’s battles comes from the unique powered-up balls you can use. Some of the special balls deliver exciting effects to attack with and defend against; I love one that abruptly curves toward one of the walls and another that adds speed-increasing oil slicks across the field of play for a few turns. However, some are too overpowered and take away from the enjoyment, with the Fire Ball as the most egregious offender. If you touch it, it rapidly eats away at your health, meaning it’s much better to just let that shot go past you, defeating the entire purpose of Pong. Other balls provide challenging scenarios to defend, but with a select few acting as winning weapons, you’re better off filling your inventory with those rather than experimenting with the more unique ones.

Efficiency is key in Pong Quest’s battles. Instead of winning by simply scoring more goals than your opponent, you must outlast them and whittle their HP down to zero. Unfortunately, your health doesn’t replenish until you reach the next floor, meaning things can get dire if you have more than a couple prolonged encounters. If you let a shot pass with no HP, you get booted from the dungeon and must start the floor over. Thankfully, one of the most abundant power-ups you can find is the Potion Ball, which replenishes your HP each time you use it. Still, when there are so many interesting abilities to experiment with, it’s annoying to have to constantly take up one of my limited inventory slots with boring-but-essential Potion Balls.

Each battle grants you experience, which eventually levels you up. Each time you reach a new level, you can select from one of three presented perks. These range from added HP and inventory slots to various markers on maps and added damage to opponents. While it always felt like the least interesting option, I leaned heavily into the extra HP option to increase my survivability in the dungeons and reduce my reliance on Potion Balls.

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In addition to battles, you can earn extra items by completing optional objectives. At the start of each floor, an NPC will ask you to go the extra mile by clearing out all the enemies, battling zero enemies, or visiting every room on the floor before leaving. A carnival barker also lets you complete puzzle-based minigames like setting up surfaces to ricochet into a goal, matching cards, or even exploring a dark room to find light switches before time expires. Sadly, none of these are particularly rewarding or fun, often granting you special balls you likely don’t have space for. However, the black hole challenges – where you wager a chunk of your inventory for bigger returns on Pong-based minigames, like knocking out an approaching centipede or collecting every coin on screen – are thrilling and the exact kind of twist to the Pong formula I was looking for. 

If you would rather forego the dungeon crawling and just play Pong, you can compete in local and online multiplayer matches. I like the option of stripping away all of the power-ups and visual flair to play classic Pong, but I wish there were more advanced options for the core multiplayer mode; it would be great to tweak the rules or set my own stable of special balls for the players.

I enjoyed my time with Pong Quest, but with unbalanced abilities, generic dungeon crawling, and repetitive battles, the experience struggled to hold my attention. Pong Quest delivers a fun and unique take on the well-known classic, but the novelty wears thin even before the brief campaign comes to a close.

Score: 7.25

Summary: Pong Quest delivers fun and novel concepts in small bursts, but is weighed down by generic dungeon crawling, unbalanced abilities, and repetitive encounters.

Concept: Take a procedurally generated dungeon-crawler and replace all enemy encounters with Pong matches fueled by power-ups

Graphics: Simple graphics harken back to the visual aesthetic of the original title, but the anthropomorphic Pong paddles are kind of creepy

Sound: High-energy battle themes help propel the action while you’re in a match, but the dungeon-exploration tunes are hit or miss

Playability: Whether you’re bouncing through a dungeon or competing in a match, Pong Quest keeps its controls as simple as can be, even if the power-ups feel unbalanced

Entertainment: While unique twists on the Pong formula make battles enjoyable at first, the repetition quickly wears on the experience

Replay: Moderately low

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Super Mega Baseball 3 Review – Its Own Brand Of Baseball

Publisher: Metalhead Software

Developer: Metalhead Software

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, Switch, PC

The Super Mega Baseball franchise doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a long-running series created by a company with deep pockets. That said, Super Mega Baseball 3 not only delivers solid gameplay that sticks close to the fundamentals and nuances of the sport, it also adds a dash of style that’s all its own. People think of tradition when they think of baseball, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do things a little differently to still give fans a good representation of the sport.

The age-old battle between pitcher and batter is very much alive in Super Mega Baseball 3. Pitching is particularly important to master; it consists of matching your pitching reticle (on the left analog) to a second moving reticle in the batter’s box. Even on medium difficulty (more on this later), nailing your pitches to paint the corners and avoid serving up juicy meat for batters can be difficult – especially when your pitcher has decreased stats because their stamina is low or because they’re tense due to their performance.

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Sometimes you barely hang on to pitch another inning. Other times, you walk a batter and give up a few runs, which leads you to dip into your bullpen unexpectedly before sending it into a full-on death spiral only four or five innings into the game. I like that I started to have success not only by getting better at the physical act of matching the pitching reticles but because I started to pay more attention to my pitcher’s own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if I had a good amount of stamina and velocity but not a good command of junk pitches, I had a better time if I threw power fastballs more often than trying to get the batter to swing at my not-so-accurate curveballs – even if that meant throwing less variety of pitches overall. It was simply the risk I had to take given my pitcher. Also factor in individual positive and negative traits, and Super Mega Baseball 3 can give you all you can handle, or not if you prefer, thanks to customizable sliders for fielding, batting, pitching, and player speed.

Upgrading your squad in the new franchise mode can be a lot of fun, and while the mode restricts some of the ways you construct your roster, at least developer Metalhead is giving you its own take on a mode that sports gamers are more than familiar with. Player development opportunities (PDOs) are a big part of the mode. They sound like performance-enhancing drugs – and sometimes that might be true – but they’re actually skill boosts you can buy to permanently affect specific players’ attributes. The twists are which ones can be purchased, how long they are available for, the extent of their effects are random, and they can come with negative traits. Furthermore, the money you generate to buy PDOs is tied to your payroll. The less you spend on veteran players with high salaries, the more you can spend on PDOs to develop new talent. It’s a nice tradeoff that keeps teams in check while still letting you build your roster in different ways.

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The downside of the franchise structure is that dropping and adding players to your roster is one-to-one, so to add a new third baseman, for example, you can’t drop the salaries of two lesser players to afford the single new acquisition. Also, pitchers must replace pitchers, and fielders must replace fielders – another restriction that stops you from being creative with your roster. Despite these stipulations, in a broader sense, I respect that the game isn’t trying to be a hardcore baseball simulator; things like offering your pitcher named Reef Sandwalker a teeth-whitening PDO for more velocity puts a unique spin on the mode.

Super Mega Baseball 3 could use some tweaks to its gameplay, such as the automatic triggering of small defensive animations to prevent your player from getting turned around on a routine fly ball or missing an easy tag, for example. But on the whole, it provides solid gameplay in a fun, stylish wrapper. Add in the series’ own touches, such as extensive customization options, cross-platform online play, and the abundance of co-op (online or off) opportunities, and you’ve got a game that makes an already-familiar sport stand out.

Score: 8

Summary: The game delivers the baseball fundamentals with its own sense of style.

Concept: Add a franchise mode and more adherence to real-life rules (such as the dropped third strike) to an already-solid baseball experience.

Graphics: The colorful, matte art style still shows off some detail such as the dirt at the plate and the background crowds.

Sound: Stadium announcers read off some funny advertisements if you turn down all the other audio sources, which is fine to do as you’re not missing a lot during games.

Playability: Despite the game’s arcade look, the pitching and hitting are nuanced, and can be challenging as you scale up the custom difficulty sliders.

Entertainment: I enjoy this game for what it does on both the casual and hardcore fronts, which is not an easy line to walk.

Replay: Moderately High

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Deliver Us The Moon Review – Love And Loss In Space

Publisher: Wired Productions

Developer: KeokeN Interactive

Rating: Teen

Reviewed on: PlayStation 4

Also on: Xbox One, Switch, PC

When we look to the moon, we see nothing but a glowing rock that lights up the night sky. But what if it were humanity’s last hope for survival? This is the basic premise in Deliver Us the Moon, a nicely penned story of isolation and loss that puts you in the role of an astronaut who travels to the moon to save the planet. While leaning heavily on walking simulator conventions like story progression coming from talking holograms and written documents, developer KeokeN Interactive doesn’t shy away putting you in exciting, do-or-die scenarios when things don’t go as planned.

Deliver Us the Moon’s writing is the driving force, but this sci-fi journey is also strong in its pacing and variety, which help build momentum, create tension, and make it seem like every second matters even though you mostly play at your own pace.

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The game tells the grim tale of Earth running out of natural resources, forcing humanity to the stars to find other solutions. As luck would have it, we don’t have to travel far, as the moon is rich in a powerful isotope called Helium-3 that could solve the energy crisis. The nations of the world unite and develop a revolutionary way of transmitting Helium-3 to Earth. Just when it seems we have a new beginning, the moon falls silent and the transmission ends. We have just enough energy to send a one-man rocket to the moon to figure out what went wrong, and hopefully bring the Helium-3 feed online again.

Your first steps aren’t made on the moon, and instead unfold on Earth’s surface, which looks eerily alien given the yellow sky and dust-filled air. Your mission is to power up the rocket and launch. This is an awesome moment since you manually need to bring the rocket’s systems online from within the cockpit. You are tasked to quickly throw the switches in the right order, a moment KeokeN cleverly achieves by highlighting your next interaction in a pink hue – making you look like a well versed astronaut. You then get to experience the rocket launch from a first-person perspective, which beautifully illustrates the transition from Earth’s atmosphere to space.

When you reach the lunar establishment, which is in ruin and not occupied by any life, exploration unfolds from both third- and first-person angles, often determined by the type of actions you must complete. Third-person view is used primarily for on-foot sections, which can be as tame as exploring living quarters for clues or as thrilling as darting dangerously past spinning blades in low gravity. These moments are backed by well-designed controls and sometimes stunning set pieces, like a tall tower crumbling with you on it. There isn’t any combat, but if you don’t move quick enough in certain areas, you’re going to fail and have to retry.

The first-person camera is used sparingly, but is effective for intense, intimate moments, zero-gravity flight, and controlling a floating droid tied to some of the game’s best puzzles. I was a little annoyed that almost every door you need to access requires a puzzle or keycode, and some of your actions feel repetitive and lose their electricity after doing the same thing two or three times. For instance, taking a lunar rover onto the surface is enthralling the first time, but feels like a chore the next time out.

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Most of your effort is spent exploring and following the narrative threads of the people that once occupied this station. You see many of them as featureless holograms and get to know a few of them somewhat intimately. What you learn is that the heart can sometimes cloud one’s perspective. You see just how big of a problem that can be, but also how touching it can be. At the end of the journey, I found myself thinking about what I would do if I were in these characters’ shoes in these moments.

Deliver Us the Moon is an excellently made game that succeeds in story and atmosphere. The lunar settlement is a fascinating place to explore, and even though it’s just filled with holographic ghosts, you get a sense of how it was once thriving and what exactly went wrong. The experience starts out strong and ends strong; some of the middle ground is a bit repetitive, but the narrative is engaging throughout and makes the journey worth taking.

Score: 8

Summary: You are humanity's last hope in this thrilling exploration of an abandoned moon base.

Concept: Learn what went wrong on the moon in this narrative-driven thriller

Graphics: Whether viewed from first or third person, the moon base tells its own story through its architecture. The holographic humans also convey emotion and are a big part of why the narrative works

Sound: Even though you are alone, audio logs are used frequently bring life to oxygen-free areas

Playability: Puzzle steps are sometimes repeated, but the journey has a nice flow, and the actions are all handled well

Entertainment: The narrative captures your attention in the opening seconds and keeps you engrossed until the credits roll

Replay: Moderate

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