Volleyball

Volleyball is the NES game that answers a simple question: what happens if you make a team sport with six players into a game where you directly control each of them in turn? The answer is a match that flows from pass to set to spike with no menus and no pauses.

You control one player at a time and the game switches you to whoever is nearest the ball, so a rally is a sequence of short controlled moments rather than a single continuous action. Both men's and women's teams are selectable with different speed and power, and the two-player mode puts both sides of a rally under separate control - which turns every exchange into a genuine contest over the second ball. It was a Famicom Disk System release in Japan before coming to cartridge in the West.

• ▸Automatic player switching - you control whoever is nearest the ball
• ▸Separate men's and women's teams with different attributes
• ▸Two-player mode with both sides of the net independently controlled
• ▸Rally structure built from pass, set and spike with no stoppages