Compete on the tennis court with your favorite cartoon characters.
Apple
If you have fun with Disney Melee Mania to Apple Arcade — a CNET Editors’ Choice Picks for 2021 — get ready for Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis. The new game is headed exclusively to the mobile game service catalog of more than 230 games January 21.
In Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis, you’ll compete in tennis matches with your favorite Nickelodeon characters like Spongebob, Rocko, Garfield, and Rugrats, each with unique special moves, rackets, and outfits. As a kid of the 90s, I was thrilled to see nostalgic Nickelodeon characters included in the lineup, but the game isn’t just for me.
“Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis is for fans of all ages,” Adrian Wright, Vice President of Games at Nickelodeon, told me in an email. “We wanted to make sure whether you grew up watching Nickelodeon in the 90s or are a new fan that there was something for everyone.”
The game lets you battle it out in single-player or story mode in equally iconic Nickelodeon locations, like under the sea in Bikini Bottom, inside Invader Zim’s secret base, or on the New York skyline with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Don’t worry if you’re not a sports game pro. Practice goes a long way, according to Wright, who says story mode and challenges are the perfect way to master your game and improve characters.
Garfield confronts CatDog? Not out of the realm of possibility in this game.
Apple
Latest titles added to Apple Arcade like Disney Melee Mania, Lego Star Wars Battles and Lego Star Wars: Castaways seem to be driving the service towards more social and multiplayer games, an area that was lacking at launch.
Apple started laying the groundwork for these new games when it revamped its service in April 2021. Apple Arcade added more 30 new games on its platform in a day and revamped its catalog with categories like Arcade Originals, App Store Greats, and Timeless Classics. The refresh also opened the door to bigger, more console-like games like NBA 2K21 and NBA 2K22, as good as Fantastic from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, and The without path from Annapurna Interactive.
Apple also continues to hone its devices’ capabilities to handle mobile gaming, such as the adoption of 5G and the A15 Bionic chip in the iPhone 13. Along with bigger names coming to the service, as well as more of games with multiplayer and social elements, 2022 could be a big year for Apple Arcade.
You can check out Apple Arcade’s vast catalog of games, with more games added almost weekly, for $5 a month or $50 a year. If you want to try Apple Arcade, you can get a three-month free trial when you buy a new device, or a free month if you’re signing up for the first time. Open the App Store and tap the small joystick icon at the bottom of the screen to launch the service.
