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Hyper Sports (SG-1000, 1985)

Three Cups of Coffee Sports.

HyperSports
Mind your heart.

PLAYERS: 1-2 alternating

PUBLISHER: Sega

DEVELOPER: Konami (ported by Sega)

GENRE: Sports

RELEASE DATE: 1985 (JP)

Hyper Sports might be a part of Konami’s semi-hallowed Track & Field series, but thanks to the game’s unforgiving mechanics, I couldn’t tell.

There are four events – diving, long horse, trampoline, and horizontal bar – and I completed exactly none of them, due to the game’s rigorous qualification standards. Diving is the first event, and it’s also where my progress stopped. You jump three times on the diving board with the hopes of getting greater air with each successive jump. Then, as you’re falling, somersault as much as you can by pressing Button II repeatedly before straightening out for the landing with Button I. To move on to the next round, I had to get a qualification score of 7.60. As Alucard as my witness, I could not get more than a 7.40 from the five anal-retentive judges. Pray tell, judges, what was it about my quadruple somersault and perfect no-splash landing that made it deserve a 6? My athlete’s promising Hyper Sports career came to an end before it could begin, thanks to his inability to impress five judges who’ve never dipped their toes into a pool.

Hyper Sports (Japan)000
The diver and I are of one accord.

Hyper Sports is an arcade port, but this isn’t surprising since 95 percent of the SG-1000 library stems from Sega arcade games. What is surprising are the differences between arcade and port. None of the arcade events, save for the long horse, made the transition to the SG-1000. Diving, trampoline, and horizontal bar are brand new events made for the port. Why this is remains a mystery. Sega, not Konami, are responsible for the SG-1000 port – but could the latter really be considered a port when all Sega used was Konami’s template, not the actual arcade events? Does it really friggin’ matter? Probably not. I’m just trying to make sense of a game where you can’t progress, regardless of how well you do. I’m sure we’ve all been there.

F

10 replies on “Hyper Sports (SG-1000, 1985)”

I managed to beat the game, if you’re interested in hearing my take on what comes after the diving section. If not, well I’ll just say that I can sympathise with your difficulties in passing the first part.

Well, I don’t suppose I need to go into the diving – you’ve already experienced that for yourself. Long horse is exactly the same thing, except vertical. Also, you have to time it so that you land on your feet, otherwise you will simply not get enough points, guaranteed.

The trampoline segment is by far the worst. You press button 1 to get more height when you land on the trampoline, and you mash button 2 to do turns. You have to land on your feet on the trampoline. If you mess up once, you will not get enough points, which means you have to get it right about six times in a row, or you will fail. BUT you can’t mash the button slowly to make sure that you land on your feet, because then you won’t do enough turns to get all the points you need. Because of this, the trampoline part is incredibly difficult. By comparison, the horizontal bar part is easy because you only have to land on your feet once after mashing the button (The horizontal bar is pretty much the exact same thing as long horse, as well).

After horizontal bar, the game repeats, but there’s a difference – 7.60 isn’t the qualifying score any more, now it’s 8.00 you need. There are some other changes as well. The diving board now starts higher up, probably so you can manage more somersaults to reach that 8.00 score. My morbid curiosity overcame me, so I went through the whole game again. Upon repeat, the game demanded 8.40 as the new score. I’d imagine another repeat would push it up to 8.80, but I couldn’t be bothered after that.

So overall, Hyper Sports is the same four things, with each one requiring you to be incredibly precise and incredibly good at timing and mashing buttons. Giving this game an F is really quite sporting of you.

I recorded a video documenting my efforts, if you wanted to see that. I don’t know if it would add anything, but you might be interested in seeing what the rest of the game looks like.

As far as I can tell, this is not a port of the Hyper Sports/Hyper Olympic/Track & Field arcade game, but taken from Konami’s series of Hyper Sports games for the MSX computer. If I recall, that version is just as frustrating.

Okay, you should be able to play it now. It seems YouTube automatically disables embedding of videos if they’re unlisted.

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