Virtua Tennis is an idiosyncratic franchise in that they don’t release a new game year after year akin to similar series. Despite this if you played them in order you would be forgiven for thinking it was actually an annual franchise, if you stray away from noticing graphical differences. Nevertheless the series has some how retained it’s original playability and it was only with the previously released Virtua Tennis 3 where I felt the series should probably start to deliver more.
Virtua Tennis starts to mix it up with a new World Tour mode. Here you can use an advanced create-a-player feature to essentially mimic yourself. Although we haven’t seen much on what sounds like a massively improved creation tool we have been promised the normal spiel of the hundreds of possibilities and advanced facial tweaking that you come to expect from these modes.
Nevertheless the World Tour will naturally play out your rise from the bottom to the top. Here you will be trained by older and respected legends of the sport while you compete in various competitions around the world. Once you’ve cleared the standard offline you can take your character, with your stats and skills online and compete for multiplayer global standings. Whether this will simply be a leaderboard or an active part of the community is yet to be seen. Personally I would like to see tournaments based on these rankings with constant leaderboard positions sold as your seed for a competition. If the system is well implemented you can really see were the hours will be lost in this game.
The game will also come with a complete roster of the top and current tennis players in the world today. As previously mentioned you are trained by some retired veterans of the sport and these will be playable characters as well. More of a lean towards older players would be interesting especially when you factor in the possibility for staging dream matches between old and new.
As expected the game will ship with five new mini-games bringing the number up to twelve. Now I know that all these mini-games are scalable and complex while being entertaining but twelve seems slightly on the small side for a game nowadays. Nevertheless you know they will be just as good as the originals from the Dreamcast versions but there is no excuse for the meager number. Quality not quantity, I suppose as long as they don’t stick the knife in with downloadable mini-games.
Virtua Tennis 2009 looks to be another well defined version of the game. While the third rendition looked brilliant with it’s 1080p smooth visuals it lacked original modes and features that are needed to bring the game into the next generation. 2009 definitely has enough of those and although some modes might appear to be thin on content, past history tells us to expect the quality over quantity rule to prevail. It might not be totally reinventing the franchise but 2009 is looking like a positive step forward.
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