TangoBunny

TangoBunny as Tomoka from Prince of Tennis: Sweat & Tears! Art by Ramiel / Pawberry

TangoBunny as Tomoka from Prince of Tennis: Sweat & Tears!

Art by Ramiel / Pawberry

Prince of Tennis – Genius Boys Academy It’s the GBA one! You know, the one for Game Boy Advance. Prince of Tennis: Genius Boys Academy! Genius Boys Academy came out relatively early in the Game Boy Advance’s lifecycle, just a year after the GBA launched, and two months after the first PlayStation Prince of Tennis game. Unlike the console game’s focus on strategy, this handheld version leans into fast-paced matches better suited to quick portable play, feeling similar to the typical tennis video games of the past. You select a character, get a few brief lines of introduction about how you’re entering the ranking matches, and then it’s a chain of battles against each of the opponents. It’s not trying to be a long story-heavy adventure or a deep tennis sim. It’s just for some tennis action with the Prince of Tennis cast! The only gameplay modes are: Ranking Match, Practice (Singles), and Practice (Doubles). At the start, you have eight selectable characters, and three more are unlockable. Each time you beat the game, a character is revealed, so clearing the game three times will fill out the whole roster. There’s a gallery option, but it only has twelve pictures to unlock. Other options include how quickly your special gauge builds up, the difficulty level (Easy/Normal/Hard), and selecting your wallpaper! The wallpaper option is really quite charming, leaning into the cute animated pixel art style of the time. It feels nostalgic towards the Japanese Java flip phones of that era, and one of the options has pink hearts!

The ranking match mode is framed as an in-school ranking challenge, overseen by Coach Sumire, to determine who will join the regular tennis players. She’ll explain that this time the rankings will be held differently, as it’ll be a series of one-set matches against the existing regular team members. Your opponents have their own fully voiced quips before and after a match. It’s throwaway taunt-style dialogue, with characters saying things like “I’ll let you off this time,” but the fact that a GBA cartridge has voiced lines at all is impressive. As usual in the Prince of Tennis series, to decide who serves first, you spin the racquet and guess if the handle will land on the rough or smooth side. Even though it’s a 50% chance, they style it like an elaborate roulette system, making it a little more exciting to find out who’ll be up first. Compared to the first PlayStation game, it’s extremely fast-paced. Rallies snap back and forth in quick succession. One of the key differences from the console game is that when you switch sides, your character does actually move to the top of the court, rather than keeping your character on the bottom of the screen and just changing the background view. The controls are basic: Button A for a standard shot, Button B for a lob shot. You can do variations of the shots by holding a shoulder button as you hit the ball. As you play, a special shot meter builds up, but the game isn’t very clear about how you’re meant to trigger the special move. It’s all dependent on character, timing, and position: If you’re in the character’s optimal spot to return a shot, your character will flash for a split-second. By holding down both of the L+R shoulder buttons and hitting the ball at this moment, your character will glow and hit a special shot that the opponent will have a tough time returning.

To learn where these shots tend to happen, I found it best to hold down the L+R shoulder buttons whenever the special meter was full. I’d still often miss the optimal position doing this because I didn’t run to the exact area before I hit the ball back, but it helped me learn roughly when these shots could be activated in the first place. Once you’ve beaten every regular opponent, the final opponent is Sakurano from the girls’ tennis team, the one single playable girl in the game. She doesn’t have any special shots at all. She’s the last character you can unlock, so it is cool that you can play as her eventually, even if she is the ‘weakest.’ When playing as her, her introduction states that she’s entering the rankings just for a chance to play against Ryoma. Once she’s beaten, Coach Sumire simply says that you’ve passed the ranking challenge and that you’ll be playing as a regular in the upcoming tournament. That’s it! There is no actual upcoming tournament, but that’s okay, because it never pretended that there would be. This game is just the Prince of Tennis ranking challenge. You get a single image of your character in the background while the credits roll. After the credits, a silhouette appears of your newly unlocked character, and the character select screen changes to have the three extra slots for the unlockable characters. And… that’s all there is! Back to the main menu, and you can start the ranking mode from the beginning again. In essence, Genius Boys Academy is a very simple real-time tennis game. It doesn’t feel especially rewarding to get 100% completion, since the twelve gallery images aren’t very exciting, but as a game, it’s good for some fast-paced action.

Coverage of Prince of Tennis: Genius Boys Academy!
(Konami, 2002, GBA)

Thanks for the information!

I was waiting on reviews just to see how they'd handle the Heaven stages, because that was always the most mind-blowing aspect to me as a kid.

It's not the base game that made the original special, it's all the additional detail they put into things you'd rarely see.

Nah man, no way, it's probably just a smear on the camera or your reflection or something

(Pages 11/12 of the 12-page coverage)

(Pages 7/8/9/10 of the 12-page coverage)

(Pages 3/4/5/6 of the 12-page coverage)

Coverage of Prince of Tennis: Sweat & Tears for the PlayStation!

It's a Tokimeki Memorial-adjacent game disguised as an anime tennis game.

Unlike most Prince of Tennis media, this one lets you play as a female character pairing up with the Prince of Tennis regulars, so there's fanservice abound!

That Blockheads Pub has been cropped in a way that provokes the imagination.

I've been hearing about the crazed puzzle in Resident Evil Requiem (the GGC AAG AUA ACG UGU CAU one) and it reminded me of a similar puzzle in Leaf's DR2 Night Janki that I wrote about in TangoPunk EGG 5!

The Tsukihime trial version is making headlines today, so of course, I have to post what I once wrote about it as a newcomer in TangoPunk!

Awkward characters experimenting with different kinks, their thoughts/expressions in the moment, and expressing how they feel at the end of it (whether it turned out well or just embarrassingly).

You’re very good at relatable moments!

Art by Luxar92 for TangoBunny. TangoBunny is swinging a tennis racquet in the box art style of Family Tennis and Pro Tennis: World Court

Absolutely incredible TangoBunny artwork from @luxar92.bsky.social in the box art style of Family Tennis and Pro Tennis: World Court by Namco!

These few seconds of blurry camcorder footage is the only image I could find of the game online. And I had to hunt for it.

It's taken from www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFyc...

The legend of bhirsch13 lives on.

GAMERS 2

Mario Tennis isn't one of the Virtual Boy games on the app yet, and now I'm wondering if Nintendo was actually thinking "better not release Mario Tennis, people will play it instead of Mario Tennis Fever on Switch 2"

I just realised that Nanao is the modern day All Your Base in terms of viral video game dialogue.

What's your pupil distance score, everyone?

Mine's minus ten!

Fear.
Implied violence.

The Virtual Boy.

tangobunny art by haiku oezu!

i went through confirmation-bias-searching on bsky where I associate everyone being like "oof ow my sore boobs nvm it just means i am a nice girl :)"

that's baby steps and the real goal is to have BIG TIT ENERGY and FAT NIPS THAT CAN DEFLECT ALL COMERS

smack 'em like a street fighter 1 cabinet

It's happening! I'm crashing out!

bluesky culture is the worst!!! "uwu i'm cute and bland :) heres what i think about celebrity today" shut up and act like you've got some BIG FIRM SOLID STATE NIPPLES

"lmao get fucked"
I JUST DID BABE, ITS VALENTINE'S

TangoBunny plush holding a rose received on Valentine’s Day.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

I love the low-res appeal of these kinds of games, but I always wonder... it'd be so interesting to see these kinds of games getting decompilation/recompilation PC builds with limitations removed.

I hope that happens some day!

New upload! A collection of 7 behind-the-scenes videos recorded in 1999 covering eroge studios from the CD "Bishoujo Wonderland 2" included with "Bishoujo Wonderland Magazine Vol.1 (1999/6)": archive.org/details/maki...

Note that most of these videos contain NSFW 18+ content.

world at large. be the good kind of crazy

the kind that rubs themselves off every night and writes yaoi fanfics and can't stop thinking about vintage game shows

not the bad kind of crazy which can't stop talking about celebrities being satan cannibals from space

please I beg you

Cool Boarders TangoBunny Sketch reward artwork by Ramiel/Pawberry

Cool Boarders TangoBunny!

Art by Ramiel/Pawberry

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An interview with Cool Boarders, translated from the Cool Boarders Strategy Guide!

Now that Cool Boarders is available via Hamster's Arcade Archives spinoff, Console Archives, here's what I wrote about it in TangoPunk Year of the Bunny Issue 7!

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Now that the original Bomberman is available in the Super Bomberman Collection by Konami, here's what I wrote about it back in Issue 10 of TangoPunk!