NIDZUMI+

Everyone loves a good old game of tennis. It’s an easy to understand and normally so simplistic in it’s nature that anyone can just jump in and have a great time. One of the all time perfect multiplayer experiences and easily the cream of the crop is Sega’s Virtua Tennis series. The last game was criticized for being all too familiar albeit much better looking. The problem that the aptly named Virtua Tennis 2009 suffers from is that because tennis is a naturally simple game they’ve run out of places to go other than refinement.

The main stay of Virtua Tennis is its World Tour mode. Here you create a player from an adequately basic creation system, let’s be honest nobody wants to spend hours creating their star of the future. You’ll then engage in various challenges, tournaments and training sessions all over the world until you reach the top spot in the world rankings. The tournaments are your basic tennis tournaments with both single and doubles trophies up for grabs.

You’ll encounter training sessions with real life former tennis players like Tim Henman. I say training sessions like you get feedback on how you are doing and what you could do to improve because unfortunately you don’t. Instead you get a short description of what you are meant to achieve in a short time period next to a picture of said ex-tennis star. It’s a shame they couldn’t have expanded this into a fully-fledged coach-player feedback system instead of just a series of frustratingly timed challenges.

Finally the lighthearted mini-games make up the rest of the tour and these are as good as they have always been. A few of the newer ones like Pot Shot, that has you serving at a giant pool table and Pirate Wars, where you return balls to hit ships aren’t up to the series’ high standard. Meanwhile the rest of the challenges are enjoyable and ramp up quite smoothly, unlike the rest of the world tour.

Obviously during the world tour your goal is to reach the number one spot on the rankings. You can do this quite easily with a lot of time investment but you might not want to after a couple of hours. The World Tour seems to have scrapped any kind of difficulty setting for the tour and has gone with a natural curve of difficulty. In theory this makes more sense, not only will it be accessible to most players but they’ll also be rewarded by genuine improvement while they play. Instead it doesn’t realize if you are too good for the incredibly beatable Very Easy difficulty that the AI resembles during the first long period of the game.

Now I don’t claim to be the best at Virtua Tennis but anyone new to the series can beat the game on this difficulty. So why do I have to suffer for being a competent player? The game makes you play through the AI on the lowest setting for ages before you get to anything that even resembles a challenge. It would be fine if they realised that you were beating everyone in straight sets without them even getting a whiff of a point and so the game lets you rank up a bit quicker, but it doesn’t. Instantly making the core of the game a completely unenjoyable grind.

Meanwhile the rest of the game is made up by stellar Exhibition and Tournament modes that let you instantly dive into any court and start playing. This also allows for some excellent and fierce local multiplayer where you’ll engage in a tense and strong competition of wits and tactics.

Finally there is an arcade mode that does it exact what it says on the tin, let’s you play through the arcade version of the game. Here you’ll be faced with the tough task of winning five different tournaments in a row to achieve an ‘arcade medal’. Nothing you’ll want to spend hours on but the more modes with difficulty options the better.

Graphically the game is solid and after the stunning Virtua Tennis 3 we wouldn’t accept anything less. Elsewhere the animation is slightly off with a lot of idiosyncrasies popping up in the most random of places. A long animation for a backhand that will often leave you stranded away from any prospective return shots is frustrating but forgivable.

There is also an incredibly awkward animation of winning a trophy that has you standing on the court weirdly surrounded by a bunch of press, fans and tennis officials while you walk in slow motion with said trophy. This is until you disappear then start to fade back in. Wait a few seconds and you’ll pop and suddenly jump 60 degrees to the right. Now I don’t want to discredit what is an average game for something so small and insignificant but surely somebody noticed this. Anyone?

Finally the music is your normal Virtua Tennis arcade-esque sounding fanfare. Heavy rock riffs, ridiculous sounding synths along with something that sounds like some kind of tennis alarm. You can’t hate the soundtrack even though you will end up muting the game because simply it wouldn’t be Virtua Tennis without the soundtrack.

It saddens me to say this but if you played Virtua Tennis 3 you are probably better off waiting for a serious reduction in price at best. The game is not friendly for veteran players, has awkward quirks and generally doesn’t offer enough improvement for your money. With that said if you are new to the series or haven’t played it since it’s days on the Dreamcast, Virtua Tennis 2009 is a fairly adequate and enjoyable tennis sim that’s worth checking out if you have the patience.