Video Olympics, otherwise known as 50 Shades of Pong. Pretty bold of Atari to market 50 slightly different versions of pong as the Olympics but these were the old carny days of gaming as opposed to now, the new carny days of gaming. I’m sure because you have been made jaded by shitty marketing practices in modern gaming you immediately went “there is no way there are actually 50 games on there” and ding ding same as it ever was same as it ever was!

A more accurate description would be saying its 8 pong games with different color schemes and layouts that each can be played by different amounts of players and with marginally different rule sets usually revolving around whether or not you catch or just hit the ball. The differences between the 8 actual different pong interpretations are self explanatory. In Hockey the goals are a bit forward from the side of the screen, in Quadrapong you can have four players, Foozpong has you moving whole rows of blockers, etcetera etcetera etcetera. The most notable thing to me here is that there is actually a single player against a computer opponent mode and I don’t really remember there being a lot of pong clones out there that actually had single player. Even with any differences though its all pong though and is exactly as fun as you think pong is.

The first time a Philadelphia Flyer was on the cover of a video game though so, bonus points from West Philadelphia. I actually met Bernie Parent once when I worked at a retail sporting goods store in South Jersey, he showed my manager his Stanley Cup ring and she thought he must have been one of the Flyer's dads because it said "Parent" on it. Thats what I tell people was the reason I quit that job as opposed to the real reason of having a terminal case of 'being too hungover to go to work more than two days in a row.'

Reviewed on Nov 26, 2020


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