Oddities: Pong Toss - Frat Party Games

Welcome to Oddities, a weekly feature in which we plunge head-first into the bargain bin of gaming history to extract a single game that you’ve either never heard of, or probably wished you hadn’t. This series follows some of the strangest, most obscure and most incredibly awful games that have ever appeared since the invention of Spacewar!. They won’t all be bad games, but we’ll make it our mission to find the really, really weird stuff. It’s Pong Toss: Frat Party Games this week, probably the most pointless game we’ve ever seen.

Quick question to kick off this week’s Oddities: What’s fun about beer pong?

a) The beer

b) The sense of achievement when you pot a cup

c) Beating your friends

d) The possibility of more beer

e) Drunken silliness because of beer

f) The beer

Here’s a clue - it’s one of the answers involving the word beer. In summary: beer pong is a bit pointless without the beer. Not just pointless, but horrifically dull. It’s throwing balls into cups.

So it should come as no surprise (this is a series about odd games after all) that there’s a videogame out there devoted entirely to beer pong. Except, without beer. There’s not even virtual beer because it’s a game designed on the Wii for little kiddies. *shudder*. 

So let me introduce (or god forbid, re-introduce) Pong Toss: Frat Party Games. A game released in 2008/2009 on the Wii’s WiiWare digital platform that lets up to four players use the Wiimote in a virtual game of ‘pong toss’, which is the censored name for beer pong by the way.

The gameplay is exactly what you’d expect: make a throwing action while using the d-pad to aim. Aim for the cup. Get the ball in it to score points. Yay. Only the mechanics are notoriously unintuitive, the presentation appalling and the lasting appeal practically nonexistent. There’s only the one game mode!

So the game was critically panned and while there aren’t many reliable sales figures, one can assume that it didn’t do too well. What makes this all worse is that the game was originally titled Beer Pong: Frat Party Games in the US and EU but was changed due to a whole load of hullabaloo focused on the game’s lax ESRB rating. The alcohol references were deemed to be too overt for a game aimed at children. A US Attorney General even got involved. 

The whole commotion arose before the game was even released, which explains why they actually cared. Considering how awful the game is it was hardly worth the effort. In fact, the game probably would’ve turned kids away from alcohol forever if the references were maintained.

We’ve covered a few weird games so far on Oddities, but this is probably the first game that’s just straight up bad. It does lead us to wonder how and why the developers decided to create something like this. Usually, money is the main focus of appalling videogames, but at what point did JV Games think that videogame beer pong would actually sell? Unless Mad Catz invents a beer squirting peripheral for PC and consoles, I don’t think it’ll ever catch on.

Hang on.

We’re just going to call Mad Catz.