Turbolog – World Court Tennis
Welcome to the Turbolog, an ongoing series intended to educate Robot Panic readers about the Turbografx-16 and Turbo Duo library. In each entry, I’ll be giving brief information about a game in the Turbo library as well as the game’s rarity and my personal rating, both on a scale of 1-5. We’ll be working backwards alphabetically by title. If you’d like to read all the entries in the Turbolog, simply click the “Turbolog” tag below each article.
The “World” sports series continues with World Court Tennis. Billing itself as the “world’s first tennis role-playing game”, WCT is probably the most unique take on Tennis gamers had seen way back in 1989 when it was released. A simple round of tennis could be played in single player or in multiplayer using the TurboTap, but the real meat of the game was in “Quest Mode”. Here, the player needed to go through the equivalent of a Tennis-based Dragon Quest game in order to defeat the evil Tennis King and restore the purity of tennis to the land. Completely cheesy, right? Wrong! It’s absolutely AWESOME!
The game follows all the standard RPG cliches. You wander around town getting hints from NPCs, you buy items and equipment – tennis equipment, of course – from shopkeepers, and when you leave the town you deal with random battles, the difference being that rather than bludgeon enemies with axes and swords, you challenge them to a friendly game of tennis. The best part is that you can choose to decline the challenge and simply move along with your game. It’s all quite charming and corny, and surprisingly enjoyable.
The actual tennis game plays fairly well for a game of its era. Controls are exactly what you’d expect, and if you’ve played a Mario Tennis game, especially on the Game Boy Advance, you’ll feel right at home.
Rarity/Cost (1-5): * As with most of the Turbo sports titles, World Court Tennis is incredibly easy to track down and remarkably affordable. You should be able to pay no more than $10 for a nearly complete copy.
Rating (1-5): **** Well, it’s 8/16-bit tennis, so there’s that. But the RPG segment of the game makes this one a winner. If you’re a fan of Dragon Quest style RPGs and like to throw down with some old-school tennis, World Court Tennis should be right up your alley.
