credit wsj.com
If you're in college, have a large table and some cups, and want to get drunk, beer pong is the best way to do it. It's played one-on-one or in teams of two, and setup is easy. I've always thought beer pong could make a great addition to a collection of Wii drinking games. JV Games, however, thinks it's ready to be the main act.

You won't find quarters or flip cup here; Pong Toss is strictly a beer pong affair. And unless you're already inebriated, it will be tough to justify the money you spent to download it on WiiWare.

The first problem with Pong Toss is its control. To play, you hold the Wii Remote up, arc your pong ball's trajectory by levering the top of the Remote, and jerk the top of the Remote forward to mimic the act of tossing the ball.

On paper, this all sounds fine, but using the same basic gesture to aim and throw makes it very difficult to accurately lock down where the ball is going to go, and aim at the cup you want to hit. I often screwed up my shot by performing the throwing motion too slowly. The relative power and quality of your shot doesn't appear to be impacted much by how quick you jerk the Remote to throw either, and there is no reward for good follow-through. This leaves me to wonder why the developer chose to use so much motion-based control.

I also continually forgot to turn off the Practice Mode, which lets you make unlimited practice shots before any real shot. It was frustrating when I made a great shot only to find out that it didn't count. Replicating such a feat is difficult.


The bounce physics remind me of early attempts at 3D. They seem to follow some set of rules, but not any here on earth.

The graphics show a similar blast from the past. They're muddy by 1995 standards, and I don't think we had many standards back then. Why make the game full-3D? A drawn look would have worked just as well, especially if on a tight development budget. It's not the late nineties anymore; consumers don't demand that every game be in 3D. I don't think JV Games got that memo.

I guess a little research would have shown that JV Games isn't known for award winning games, and Pong Toss isn't going to change anything. The characters are stereotypical (not even in a perversely fun way), the textures are smudgy, and the animations are repetitive. Even the splash of "liquid" when you make a shot is low-res—if you've seen it splash once, you've seen it splash a 1000 times. This is the animation you have to see close to 18 times every game, not counting practice shots. If there was any animation to invest in when making a beer pong game this would have been it.


The interface is basic and bland; there isn't much more to say. It doesn't meet modern UI standards for priced games, and looks worse than many free flash games. There are two modes of play, and neither of them contain any campaign or story. A campaign mode isn't necessary, but something is. As it stands, there is no incentive to play Pong Toss: Frat Party Games more than the ten minutes it takes to complete your first round.

When I first heard of Pong Toss it was still called Beer Pong. JV Games changed the title shortly after release because parents and the media got on its case. This was not a smart financial decision for JV Games, but gamers everywhere should be grateful. Pong Toss: Frat Party Games is still a game of beer pong, but it is so bad that calling it Beer Pong would be doing a disservice to the drinking game.

Beer pong is designed to reward winners and losers with plentiful sums of ale for their achievements and failures—it's brilliant. I'm convinced it could make for a great Wii game, but Pong Toss missed the cup and the table.