The Ultimate Pong
Creator: Fernando Dominguez Sarmiento / nuF FREE Fun
Surprisingly, 'The Ultimate Pong' is infact one of those tennis games. It plays vertically (one player is on the top of the screen, the other on the bottom), and each of the two players gets to choose from a selection of bats before play commences. Each bat can perform three 'tricks', rather like the special moves in the Street Fighter games. If you know the key combination, you can get your bat to shoot out fireballs, generate shields, grow longer and more.
The creator obviously has a 3d graphics program of some sort, and has used this for much of the game's graphics. PNG, as the game is often called, also has speech done by some gruff type and a rather pointless .avi clip to take up space.
"20 years after Pong Tango defeated every combatant on the very first
Pong Master Championship, he decides to begin a new one, called :[Png],
where he doesn't fight, but his son, Origin, does. Now it's up to you
for whom would win this new Pong Master Championship :[Png]"
That's the storyline, taken from a help file which does not display when you click either of the help options on the game's menu bar. Similarly, the 'password' and 'players' options also did nothing on my computer. Running the game in 256 colours produced some dreadful problems with the graphics, including buttons that did not show up and visibility problems with bits of a picture. You can see this in the screen shot - bits of selection sign remain, there's some purple stuff and the game is not supposed to contain a bat called 'Origes'. The game was also jerkier than when run in a high colour mode, and it's a pity that this point was not covered in the documentation.
PNG allows you to move your bat in eight directions, which means it's possible to set up tricky shots your opponent will find hard to hit. I felt that the arena was a bit too cramped, however, making it too easy to hit the other guy with your weapon. It's possible to kill him in the few moments before the first ball appears and you are free to move. The weapon power meters did not apply to the correct players, and there were various other problems with the weapons and smoke trails.
A match lasts only a very few seconds, and then you have to go through the menus and loading wait again. The cheats provided some fun and the game had some good ideas, but I thought the overall execution was fairly average.
Addendum: nuF FREE Fun have revised The Ultimate Pong and have released version 1.2. If you search softwarezone (see link below), you'll see both versions. This review and rating refer to version 1.0, but you should get version 1.2.
Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 8/10
Presentation: 6/10
Playability: 6/10
My rating: 7/10
Find the game on softwarezone.com. (nearly 4 megs, and you must type it into their search feature as I can't put the link to the specific page)
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