Super Ping Pong

Ping pong? Super Ping Pong! Like we were waiting for something original back in the nineties. The Sega Mega Drive has a lineup of games that have faded into obscurity, leaving only those truly worth remembering — and Super Ping Pong probably isn't among them, despite its best efforts.

You play classic table tennis here against the computer or another player. The ball flies back and forth, you move your paddle up and down, and when you get it right, your opponent chokes in desperation. It's honest arcade fare without grand ambitions — the goal is to win a set or series of matches. Nothing more, nothing less.

The problem is that the Mega Drive had legendary games, but ping pong here lacks that heart. The controls are functional, but the whisper of air around the paddle won't make your jaw drop with joy. The ball behaves predictably, the AI is placid to the point of boredom on higher difficulties or wildly aggressive on lower ones. There's no sense of dynamism, no punch like you remember from the better arcade games of this era. Graphics? Clean, but characterless. Sound? Quiet. You play it without enthusiasm.

Super Ping Pong is the kind of game you can play when everything else bores you — not because it's exceptional, but because it exists and works. It came out at a time when ping pong as a computer genre had already seen its best days. On the Mega Drive, it's not a game you'd go searching for.

These days, firing it up in an emulator is only worth it for academic reasons — you want to see what it looked like on the eight-bit era, when creators were already chasing content over innovation. It's not bad, it's just not a reason to sit glued to the screen all evening.