When it comes to women playing volleyball in video games, most fans only know about Team Ninja’s bodacious beach babes of the Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball series. Still, it’s entirely possible to make a female volleyball game without the revealing swimwear and gravity-betraying jiggle physics, as the developers at Spike are proving with the upcoming FIVB Volleyball World Cup: Venus Evolution. We had a chance to check out the game on the floor of the 2007 Tokyo Game Show to see what it was like playing a volleyball video game that didn’t immediately induce a staggering sense of shame whenever a woman walked by us.
It’s not surprising that a World Cup volleyball game would be released here in Japan. After all, the country has hosted the Men’s and Women’s World Cup games-held every four years-since 1977. For a Japanese sports game-which can get a bit wacky-Venus Evolution, despite its title, is as straightforward and true to the sport of indoor volleyball as you could hope.
The game’s controls make heavy use of the different face buttons on the PlayStation 2 controller. To serve, you press the X button in time with a vertical meter shown next to the serving player. The closer you hit the button when the meter is full, the better your serve. In fact, once we got the timing down, it was pretty easy to get aces on our opponents. In one nice touch, the game showed a variety of player-specific serves, such as jump, overhand, and underhand serves.
When the ball is served to you, you can set the bump by pressing any button. However, the timing is delicate, and we found you had to more or less press the button just before the ball reached the passing player to keep the ball in play. If you press too early or too late, the ball would go flying toward the back court and out of bounds. Once the ball is passed to the setter, we typically had a couple of choices for whom to set the ball to, all indicated by button icons over their heads. Pressing the X button would set the ball to that player. Spikes were handled more or less automatically, but we could add extra power to the shot by holding down the appropriate button. However, if we put too much juice on the shot, would send the ball out of bounds.
When on defense, your only real job is to guess when to jump to block an opponent’s spike. As when on offense, the front-line defensive players also have button icons above their heads; you could send just one player up high by pressing her appropriate button or send the entire line up by pressing the triangle button. Once again, timing is tricky when trying to block an opponent’s shot, but it certainly wasn’t impossible. Once you got the timing down on all of the different shots, it was easy to get into the flow of the game, sending balls back and forth over the net in well-timed trios of bumps, sets, or spikes. The CPU automatically chose the player closest to the ball for you to control when running down a shot, and we had more than a few dramatic diving saves keeping a volley alive during our match.
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