''Kings of the Beach'' is a beach volleyball computer game released by

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the ...

1988 File:1988 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The oil platform Piper Alpha explodes and collapses in the North Sea, killing 165 workers; The USS Vincennes (CG-49) mistakenly shoots down Iran Air Flight 655; Australia celebrates its Bicenten ...

for the Commodore 64 and

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

. A version for the Nintendo Entertainment System was produced by

Konami , is a Japanese multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Chūō, Tokyo, it also produces and distributes trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machines, slot machines, and arcade cabinets. Konami has casino ...

(under the

Ultra Games Ultra Software Corporation was a shell corporation and publishing label created in 1988 as a subsidiary of Konami of America, in an effort to get around Nintendo of America's strict licensing rules in place at the time for the North American ma ...

label) in

1990 File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of humanity on Earth, astrophysicist ...

Gameplay

The player can play as

Sinjin Smith Christopher St. John "Sinjin" Smith (born May 7, 1957, in Santa Monica, California) is a professional beach volleyball player. He won one U.S. championship and two World championships with Randy Stoklos. He began to compete as a professional in ...

and

Randy Stoklos Randy Stoklos (born December 13, 1960) is a retired professional beach volleyball player. He is the first player to earn $1,000,000 playing competitive beach volleyball. He won one U.S. championship and Five World championships with Sinjin Smith. ...

. The game features three modes of play: practice, match play and tournament. In the latter, you progress through five beaches (

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United State ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

Waikiki Waikiki (; haw, Waikīkī; ; also known as Waikiki Beach) is a neighborhood of Honolulu on the south shore of the island of Oahu in the U.S. state of Hawaii. Waikiki is most famous for Waikiki Beach, which is one of six beaches in the district ...

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a ...

, and Australia) filled with increasingly challenging opponents as you attempt to win it all. While Smith and Stoklos are joined by Ron Von Hagen, Tim Hovland and Mike Dodd as the only 'real' volleyball players featured in the game, EA spiced up the competition with some notorious characters from other games, including Hard Hat Mack and Lester from '' Skate or Die'' and '' Ski or Die''. The gameplay controls for the console version are fairly simplistic, with the

directional pad A D-pad (short for directional pad or digital pad; officially referred to by Nintendo as a +Control Pad) is a flat, usually thumb-operated, often digital, four-way directional control with one button on each point, found on nearly all modern vi ...

and two buttons doing all the work. In the PC version, players control three actions, bump, set, block/spike. Diving for the ball occurs automatically. The only 'advanced' moves in the game are the ability to dink or perform a one-handed Kong block (Stoklos's trademark). Another endearing feature of the game is the ability to 'argue' calls with the referee, which occasionally allows players to get a point overturned. However, if players argue too much, the referee may penalize them with a red card and deduct a point.

References

{{reflist

External links

* GameFAQs provides a fairly complet
overview of the game
1988 video games Beach volleyball video games Commodore 64 games DOS games Electronic Arts games Nintendo Entertainment System games North America-exclusive video games Sports video games set in the United States Video games scored by Rob Hubbard Video games developed in the United States Tiger Electronics handheld games Video games set in San Diego Video games set in Chicago Video games set in Hawaii Video games set in Australia Video games set in Brazil