Dodge! Duck! Dip! Dive! What's That Las - OW!

It's Super Dodgeball time! It's all the fun of dodgeball, without the pain and embarassment that comes when you get stuck on the team of losers that have no clue what they're doing so that by the end it's you against five other people. Man, that really sucked. Where was I?

Oh yeah, Super Dodgeball for the Nintendo.

The concept is simple. You control a six-man American dodgeball team, playing in a tournament to prove that when it comes to hurting others with rubber balls, Americans have no equal. So your team travels the world, pummeling the representatives of countries such as England, China, India, Kenya, Iceland, Japan, and of course, those dirty Commies in the USSR.

Gameplay is simple. The field is a large rectangle, with a line down the middle. You have three players on the inside of one half of the rectangle, with one member of the other team stationed along the edge of each the three sides. The same is true of the other half of the field, only your guys are outside, and the other team is inside.

Before each round starts you get to select which three of your players will be inside, and which will man the edges. It can make a difference, since your players have special attacks, they vary from guy to guy, and some attacks will be more effective in a level than others, depending on your competition's ability to dodge. Sam just throws a super-fast glowing line drive. Other players have attacks that hit the opponent and carry them way up in the air, only to let them crash back to earth, or one where the ball goes past the other team, then comes back and hits one of them from behind. And all it takes to use these attacks is to catch the ball, and build up a good head of steam before you throw. Simple. Effective. Fun.

A fun aspect of the game - besides hitting people with dodgeballs that move like they've bben shot out of a cannon - is that the levels often have a certain uniqueness to them. I don't just mean in terms of the backgrounds, which are set up to emphasize the sorts of things associated with each locale, such as playing Kenya in a jungle, or China in front of a huge wall scroll of Mao. For example, the Indian team is very resistant to damage, and a lot of their strategy involves simply keeping the ball away from your guys, and chipping away at your players' health with the fellows on the outside (who are typically used to get the ball back to your inside guys, but can also launch weak tosses against the other team). It's a slow, drawn-out contest, and if you let your attention wander, it can cost you. In Iceland, the surface is, naturally, ice, so it can be easy to skid forward farther than you intend when you attack, and if you go over the line before you throw, you lose the ball. In Kenya, it's hard to get any speed up at all, I guess because your shoes don't grip on dirt, so super attacks are likely not happening, which slows the game down, and forces you to up your concentration. They're little touches, but they can really mean a lot to a game that is as basic as Super Dodgeball.

The final level is interesting, though I don't understand what's happening at all. I guess the Soviets had some sort of evil doppelganger creating machine. Damn Reds. There's also multiplayer and a scrimmage mode, where you pick one of the six guys on your team to control, and then all of them run around trying to knock out the others. That mode is limited since you can't move too freely in many directions. It gets better once you manage to knock some of the players out and the field opens up a little bit.

So there you have it. Super Dodgeball, for the NES. Good times.