But it does! The suspense it builds is fantastic: you know you're not going to reach the ball in time and yet you keep going for the pages to move down, faster, just in case that helps.

One thing it does need is a "stay where you are" option.

The reason it does not work is because θi ≠ θr on page 5 and it hurts my little mathematical heart. Well, not really, but I enjoyed this game nonetheless. I did manage to do some hacking and I revealed a shocking secret: You can't win!

One of the difficulties of creating something like this is that it's not sufficiently complex enough to emulate an actual game of pong. The number of "frames" in the book is 180 which are all "hand-rendered" whereas traditional pong renders each frame individually and has a much larger, yet still finite, set to work from.

The replay value dies off quickly because of the limited number of choices coupled with the same original start point. While a game like chess always starts the same, there are enough choices to keep supercomputers busy. Still, this little book amused me more than it probably should have.