Spotlight on Skyworks Day Two: World Cup Ping Pong
by Eric March on April 21, 2009 at 4:53 pm
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(4 votes, average: 3.25 out of 5)
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App Name: | World Cup Ping Pong |
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| Developer: | Skyworks |
Version: | 1.0 | |
| Publisher: | Skyworks |
Size: | 3.8 MB |
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| Category: | Sports Games |
Price: | $1.99 | |
Moving on to the next game on the week-long list of Skyworks games, we come to one of their most recent releases, World Cup Ping Pong.
Everyone knows ping pong. It’s tennis for leprechauns. Now, it’s tennis for fingers, and Skyworks have managed to do a surprisingly good little game of table tennis. Where the gameplay is concerned, it’s all touch controlled as you’d expect; tap and drag around to move your paddle as you’d expect; swipe upwards to hit the ball. Standard ping pong (and for that matter, tennis) rules apply: The ball must clear the net; it must bounce once on the opponent’s side before it can be returned; a return that is missed by the opponent and did not bounce on the opponent’s end is a point against the one who returned it; and don’t throw hissy fits when the ref calls foul. (Okay, there is no ref. I just wanted to make a vague John McEnroe reference.)
Now, thanks to the fact that ping pong balls are so light, one of the things about ping pong that you can’t do in tennis is give the ball a wicked slice to try and catch your opponent off guard with a sharp curveball, and much to my surprise, you can do that with World Cup Ping Pong. (I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s an oft-overlooked feature of many table tennis games.) Give it a quick slice in the opposite direction you want it to curve, and the ball will travel in a nice arc over to the opponent’s side and possibly score you a point. Of course, that means your opponent can do the same, so you’ll need to bring your A game if you’re going up against the tough competitors.
As its name suggests though, this is world cup stuff, so you get to pick your preferred nation and compete against others for the cup in tournament mode. Here you get a pared down version of a full competition, which takes you through the last three elimination rounds of the competition — quarter, semi, and then the finals. I’ll tell you straight, Finland whooped my ass, so I never did get the cup — but it’s there for those who are better at it than I am.
Besides the tournament mode, you’ve also got a practise mode where you can play against any country without the pressures of competition — well, other than the competition of a single match, anyway. This is a good place to get a feel for the computer players; each nation has its strengths and weaknesses, so if you want to win the cup this is a good place to find and exploit those. If you get tired of computer AI though, you can play head-to-head on the same device against a friend instead. It’s a little cramped playing that way — I’d love to see WiFi multiplayer instead; maybe after OS 3.0 comes out — it’s there if you want to give it a shot.
Finally, there’s a pretty cool single player arcade mode — with the added bonus of targets to hit for points. The targets vary in size and colour and are worth different points — red, the largest, green the middling target, and yellow, the smallest and worth the most. Here’s where you can brush up on your return skills and earn some points while you’re at it.
There’s a global leaderboard as well, so you can compete for score against the rest of the world — but it requires registration, which is free. I’m not really big on signing up for anything unless it’s important or useful, and submitting high scores for a game doesn’t really fall into either of those categories. (In all probability you’ll just get periodic E-Mails from Skyworks, which technically I already do when they release new stuff.)
Graphically, World Cup Ping Pong is quite well done, with slick, smooth visuals and a nice presentation. The paddle positions itself above wherever your finger goes so you can see it, and it’s semi-transparent so it never blocks the action. The sounds are good and give a convincing ping pong feel to the game, with appropriate cheers and jeers from the spectators.
I was pretty impressed with the game overall. It hits all the marks and doesn’t really leave me with anything worth complaining about, so kudos to ‘em. It’s pretty hard to argue with a $2 price tag too — this game delivers at least that much entertainment value to those looking for a good game of table tennis — and those who are would be remiss if they passed this one up.
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Posted in Developer Spotlight, Games: Sports, Paid Apps
