 As long as sports video games have been around, there's always been one lingering criticism. Why would you play a football, or baseball, or basketball, or hockey, or whatever game, when you can actually go outside and play it yourself? Alright, allow me to explain. When you're a fan of professional sports like I am, the gaming world offers kind of an alternate universe where you are in control of what happens. For example, I'm a Minnesota sports fan, which has not been fun for the past 25 years because none of the teams I root for have even been to the finals of their respective league in that time, or have let alone won a championship. So as a kid, being able to play a season of Madden as the Vikings, or a season of Griffey Baseball as the Twins, that allowed me to change that. And not only that, in some instances, you can even make trades or create your own players, like you could in NBA Live or the NHL series. Now, having said all that, that puts games based on stuff like Volleyball in a bit of a precarious position because, I mean, the professional Volleyball Circuit isn't exactly the most popular thing out there. So the same things that make the NFL, MLB, NBA, or NHL video games popular aren't going to apply to Volleyball games. Thankfully, the people behind games like Hyper V-Ball understand that, and they know just a regular old Volleyball game just isn't going to cut it. Yeah, there's 12 international men's teams and 8 international women's teams, but most importantly, there's 8 robot teams that play in a robot league where they can evidently play God with physics. I mean, come on, this isn't just Volleyball, this is Hyper V-Ball. The action takes place strictly from a 2D perspective, and the format follows a traditional Volleyball structure for the most part, where you serve, save, set, and spike, and the game provides 4 different types of set passes and spikes depending on which direction on the D-pad you're holding, and it actually works pretty well. You can also defend and block a spike as well, which is just as simple as timing your jump correctly. The only real issue with the gameplay is that it's pretty dang slow-paced. On one hand, that works from a strategic standpoint since you can aim your spikes for a gap in the defense. On the other hand, your opponent tends to repeat the same patterns over and over and over again, so games can really drag at times. The controls are really simple. You press A to jump, and then Y at the right time to serve or spike, but you really have to be spot on with your timing because it's easy to whiff. If you're playing in the robot league, you can also press the Y button on spikes to put a little English on the ball, so to speak. In a funny touch, you can also press the L button during the game to get comments from your coach. Nothing here, she says, is all that insightful, but it's still pretty funny to see. I've also read that the R button substitutes players, but I have to plead ignorance on that one because this game shares the same problem as, say, Bill Lambert's Combat Basketball. I can't tell one player apart from another. You can hit a ball so hard into another robot, however, that it has to be removed from the game. In fact, you eventually get to the point where you can take out so many players that the other team has to forfeit, so that spices things up a bit. My favorite bit, though, is probably the robot ref, who actually talks trash when you mess up. Hyper V-Ball was developed by Video System. Geez, you think your name is generic enough? And they also made the F1 Grand Prix series for the Super Nintendo, as well as Arrow Fighters, and each of those games range from OK to pretty dang good, so they got a pretty good track record. Still, Hyper V-Ball is just OK at best. The robot league stuff is cool, but they really could have done a lot more with it, and the pace of play is just way too slow. Plus, playing against the computer can get pretty boring, because the patterns are so repetitive. It feels like you're just doing the exact same thing over and over. But still, I gotta say, if for whatever reason you're jonesing for a 16-bit volleyball game, then Hyper V-Ball, uh, well, it's not great, but it's not terrible either. And it's decent enough with a second player, so there you go. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.