Ping pong, like love, is a battlefield
One really great thing about Game Boy World: Finding strange obscurities that intersect with things I love. Example for today: Battle Ping Pong.
Have you ever heard of Battle Ping Pong before today? I'm going to go ahead and say, "No, you haven't." This one was pretty tough to track down (not quite as hard as Hong Kong, since a search on eBay for "Game Boy" "Hong Kong" nets you a lot of Asia-region releases and bootlegs, but still tough), because evidently most people haven't heard of it — even in Japan. It was worth it, though! It's one of the very first games created by developer Quest, one of my absolute favorite game studios of yore. Quest created Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics, and their key personnel has had a hand in the likes of Final Fantasy XII and Crimson Shroud. Quest is awesome. Well, was awesome. R.I.P., Quest.
Battle Ping Pong isn't really all that awesome, though. This was clearly put together in the "walk before you can run" phase for the studio, and it's pretty interesting as a curio. But it's actually kind of crummy as a table tennis sim. It feels weird to use the words "Quest" and "crummy" together in the same mental breath, but, well, sometimes that's how it goes.
Fortunately the next Game Boy World episode covers a game that, I hope, will bring us out of the doldrums of import obscurity. Please look forward to it in a few weeks.
