



When on defense, your only real job is to guess when to jump to block an opponent's spike. However, if we put too much juice on the shot, would send the ball out of bounds.

Spikes were handled more or less automatically, but we could add extra power to the shot by holding down the appropriate button. Pressing the X button would set the ball to that player. 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. If you press too early or too late, the ball would go flying toward the back court and out of bounds. 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. When the ball is served to you, you can set the bump by pressing any button. In one nice touch, the game showed a variety of player-specific serves, such as jump, overhand, and underhand serves. In fact, once we got the timing down, it was pretty easy to get aces on our opponents. The closer you hit the button when the meter is full, the better your serve. To serve, you press the X button in time with a vertical meter shown next to the serving player. The game's controls make heavy use of the different face buttons on the PlayStation 2 controller. For a Japanese sports game-which can get a bit wacky-Venus Evolution, despite its title (we'll be honest, we have no idea what "Venus Evolution" refers to), is as straightforward and true to the sport of indoor volleyball as you could hope. After all, the country has hosted the Men's and Women's World Cup games-held every four years-since 1977. It's not surprising that a World Cup volleyball game would be released here in Japan. 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. 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. All rights reserved.TOKYO-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. Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and Safety Information / Your California Privacy Rights are applicable to you. ^ Back to Top ^ © 2021 ESPN Internet Ventures. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
