Beach Volley is a beach volley game with cool visuals and sound but fails to catch much of interest due to its extreme difficulty. The game was initially released for the Amiga computers and later ported to the Atari ST and the 8bit Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY This is a 2 Vs 2 volleyball game so, as in any sports game, the main purpose is to win every match. You and your teammate travel around some of the greatest cities of the world in an exciting volleyball elimination contest, where only one team can be the winner. The game's first match takes place in London. All basic movements are included and the main rules are easy: one of the teams has to score seven points and win. Each team is allowed three touches of the ball before it's smacked over the net (the basic rule for a volleyball game). The ball is passed around the court until someone attempts a slam shot, where the players wait by the net for a pass and leap up into the opponent's half. When jumping for a slam, the jump must be perfectly timed otherwise your player will swing to shoot, miss and fall down to the sand. You must win as many games as you can in order to visit more beautiful places like Africa, Sydney, Miami, etc. The game itself is so hard that, after a while, it almost seems pointless to play it. The AI of your opponents is set to high standards and that's why an opponent waits for the ball in the right spot at the right time, most of the time! When slamming the ball hard, the opponent is almost always there to block it. Beach Volley is a great game for its time though due to its nice graphics and sound presentation.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga OCS version has some great visuals, although only 16 colors are used on-screen! The characters look funny and move smoothly around the pitch. The backdrops are great and well drawn and each different location comes with its own visual details of the landscape's most well-known landmark. Between every level / location loading screen there is always a related humorous animated sketch involving your team as you travel around the world and reach to the next location. The sound on the Amiga version has a variety of nice and sampled sound effects along with a few tunes that suit the purpose of the game superbly (speech is also included).
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC,, Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga OCS versions of the game.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs