121. Simple 2000 Vol. 24: The Bowling Hyper (Tamsoft, Playstation 2, 2003)

The Bowling Hyper is another game in the Simple 2000 series of budget Playstation 2 titles, this one is a bowling simulator. The controls are familiar to anyone who has played a bowling / golf video game: you position your bowler, select the angle and power of your shot, then a meter comes up that requires a timed button press that determines the spin on your ball. The more power you selected, the faster this meter moves, and at any high power, it is nearly impossible to make the ball go perfectly straight.

My strategy in real bowling is to first throw a heavy ball harder to blast away any pins that I can, then throw a smaller ball slower for better aiming to clean up any leftovers (I very rarely strike), so I was glad to see my style represented as gameplay mechanics, though I had a harder time doing well in the bowling hyper than I usually do in real bowling. The game consists of 3 modes:

1. Standard: A ten frame game of bowling played with up to 4 players. You can't skip the CPUs bowling animations and they were all better than me so I gave up on this one pretty quick.
2. Quest: A little more interesting; this single player mode gives you a limited number of balls to hit increasingly tricky predetermined pin setups.
3. Excite: By far the most thoughtful & fun mode. I always want sports simulation games to get a little more video game with it, and this is that mode. Instead of a straight bowling alley, you are presented with a colorful space station that has a curved lane, so you have to purposefully spin your ball to hit the pins. The second excite lane had a conveyor belt in the middle that pulls all balls to the right, so you have do adjust to the left to balance it out.

I honestly was not skilled or persistent enough at the game to get any further, but I'm glad they injected some video game weirdness into what would have been an otherwise drab bowling facsimile.

3/5, a few cool ideas in an otherwise middling bowling simulator (in other words, par for the course in a Simple Series game)