Party Game Sundays: Sportsfriends

I've been waiting to play Sportsfriends for what seems like a lifetime now. I did not personally back the Kickstarter, so I wasn't able to play the beta builds on PC and all that fun stuff. I have however watched people play Johann Sebastian Joust and BaraBariball numerous times on the internet. Tuesday the 6th I finally got Sportsfriends when it was released officially on the PS3, PS4, and PC. I began playing it with Noukeo, but we quickly realized that we needed to be playing with the maximum amount of players in order to have the most fun. We grabbed my brother and called up Landers so that we could have Party Game Sunday on a Tuesday. We then played it again on actual Party Game Sunday.

So for those of you who don't know Sportsfriends is a collection of four local multiplayer games. If you don't have at least two people present you can't play any of them. The developers of each game made a conscious choice to not include any kind of AI opponents, because in reality these types of games are best when played while sitting next to other people. It is way more satisfying to trash talk someone to their face after all. The four games are Hokra, Super Pole Riders, BaraBariball, and Johann Sebastian Joust. 

Hokra

Hokra is a very minimalist game. You control a square, which is either green or purple to differentiate you from your opponents. There is a small black square, which I believe is supposed to be a ball. When you move over the "ball" you pick it up. When you're in control of the ball you want to have it inside the area that is the same color as you.

There are multiple stages to choose from, which are all weirdly named after real life cities. They have varying shapes and patterns of purple and green on them. If you're green you want to have the ball on the part of the stage that's green. As you stand there, or the ball passes through it, it begins to fill up with a darker shade of green. Once the entirety of the green space is filled up you win. 

This barely looks like a game, but it definitely is.

In order to spice up the very simplistic gameplay there are a few things you can do. Like in any sport you can pass the ball. This is helpful to get the ball away from your opponent, or get the ball to a teammate. I personally like to pass to the wall and juke around the opponent to catch the ball myself. When you don't have the ball you can dash in order to make it so one team doesn't completely dominate. 

Hokra is really cool, because I think that anyone could figure out how to play it almost immediately without being told how. It takes the most base concepts from what we perceive to be a sport and makes them even more simple. The entire game is made up of colored squares. You're a square, and you need to get the ball into your goal. The fact that it's so simple and easy to pick up is what makes it very competitive, which is awesome.

Super Pole Riders

Super Pole Riders is insane. I don't know how else to put it. It controls super weird, and everything about it is just ridiculous. For starters one of the characters you can choose to be is named Stone Cold Heather and it's a man. You can also be a man with a bear head. You can also play at such locales as Princeton, or a weird version of Mario Kart's Rainbow Road.

You are a pole vaulter, and above you is a ball on a rope. It goes across the entire stage and there is a goal on either end. What you want to do is either kick, or push the ball into the goal opposite where you start. It sounds straightforward, but it certainly isn't. I can't even really explain how you control the game. You use the right stick to move the character and the left stick to rotate the pole. Instead of the pole being solid it's more like a pool noodle, because it bends like crazy. So you can hold the pole up and push the ball towards the opposing goal, or figure out how to plant the pole and kick the ball.

The poles are way more bendy than you'd expect.

Kicking the ball sends it flying pretty far, which is what you want to do most of the time. Sometimes you can't do that though, because your opponent is holding you down with their pole. In order to get rid of your pesky opponent for a bit you can kick them. Whoever is higher while kicking will knock the other person out for a little bit. This allows for some uninterrupted hitting of the ball, which is prime time to just use your pole to push it right up into your opponent's goal. 

I know how to play Super Pole Riders, but when there are four people onscreen everything usually just devolves into total bedlam. When we were playing there was a lot of screaming and accidental kicking. The control is easy enough to get down, but when there are other people moving around you can't really predict what is going to happen. I never got angry playing Super Pole Riders and I didn't even feel bad when I lost. It's just so goofy that I found myself laughing at almost all times.

BaraBariball

For some reason I first heard about BaraBariball during a stream of a fighting game tournament. It's the kind of game that looks simple on the surface, but it has a high skill ceiling. In that way it's well suited for high level play, but I'm certainly not ever going to be playing it at a high level. I'm generally pretty terrible at it.

You pick one of three characters. There's a the heavy Popo, the all around Sari, and the speedy Joshi. BaraBariball is a sport that takes place both in and around water. Like Hokra, your character is either colored green or purple to show what team you're on (You can switch to blue and yellow as well). Each stage has an elevated central landmass, that has water on the bottom. Each half of the water is colored like the two teams, which are your goals. You want the ball to fall below the screen when it's in your goal. 

This is how you score.

It's actually incredibly hard to score in Barabariball if your opponent knows what they're doing. Rotating around your character at all times are a few colored orbs. Each orb you have denotes a single jump, so in a standard game you can jump five times. Once you run out of jumps you have to get back on the ground in order to regain them. This allows for people to fall in the water, retrieve the ball, and get out with jumps to spare. This is why you need to hit your opponents as much as possible. If you hit your opponents when they have no jumps left they will break, which makes it so they can't do anything for a few seconds. 

When you score it nets you two points. If anyone on your team dies by falling through the water you lose a point though, so you have to manage your jumps carefully. If you want to make it either easier or harder you can adjust the number of jumps you have. The high skill ceiling is where I fall off on this game though. I have fun enough messing around with my friends, but there is so much more to the game. You can charge attacks, cancel moves, unleash special attacks, and a whole bunch of other ridiculous things. The BariBariBlog, which can be found here lists a tons of advanced techniques that I didn't even know existed.

Johann Sebastian Joust

When it comes down to it Johann Sebastian Joust is barely a video game, but it is by far my favorite game in this collection. I tend to think that the PlayStation Move is no good and I wanted nothing to do with it. This game alone made me purchase two move controllers and I couldn't be more pleased with my decision.

If you were watching the screen during Joust you wouldn't really be seeing anything. The only things displayed on the screen are colored musicians and the occasional word. The real actions happens off the TV, which is what makes it so fun. Each player holds either a Dualshock or a Move controller. The Dualshocks work well enough, but you really want to be using a Move controller to get the best result. 

The goal of Johann Sebastian Joust is to get your opponents to move their controllers quickly. The ball at the top of the Move controller will be lit up as long as you're alive. If you start to move too fast then the light will blink and rumble a bit. If you keep going after that, then you'll be eliminated from that round. You'll want to keep your controller as still as possible while doing whatever it takes to make everyone else move quickly.

This is all you'll see on-screen. The real action happens outside the TV!

Joust could end up being a game where everyone stands still and keeps their hands to themselves, but in my experience that's not really the case. Classical music is playing the whole time and the tempo dictates how quickly you can move. When it's slow the sensitivity of the Move controllers will be much more sensitive, but when the music speeds up it facilitates charging your opponents.

I'm not going to lie, Joust can get quite violent. When we played there was a whole lot of hitting and some of us even got hurt, but it's one of the most fun video game experiences I've ever had. Rounds go quickly, and it takes seconds to start another. Just playing vanilla Joust is fun, but you can add all kinds of rules to shake things up. You can add in random freezes to the music, so that no one can move for a bit, there is also the option to give players a few seconds of invulnerability while holding down a button on the controller. 

It's a really cool game that uses the PlayStation Move controllers in a way that's super innovative. 

Amazing!

Sportsfriends is an amazing package for just $15. If you buy it on the PS3 you also get it for the PS4. These four games are all very fun and super replayable. I can see myself coming back to this package quite frequently. Joust seems like something that would be particularly awesome at parties, however with alcohol involved it might get a bit more dangerous. That might make it even better though, who knows.

I'm glad that local only games are making a comeback, because it means that we can continue to have Party Game Sundays for a long time to come!