31-Jul-2006 Virtua Tennis makes the leap to 360 and prepares to serve up next gen thrills Well, how about this for a flashback? Way back in 2001, I'd finished university in a blaze of vomit and booze and had a good two months' grace before I was expected to get a job. I was young, free and in sunny Oxford, amidst the beautiful people. I should have sown my wild oats and made hay while the sun shined. Instead, I spent two months playing Virtua Tennis. A finer arcade tennis sim there's never been.
Well, perhaps until now. Fresh from its success on Virtua Tennis Tour and OutRun 2006 on the PSP, Sega has recruited Sumo Digital to make this, the first Virtua Tennis game for the Xbox 360 ever. We were fortunate enough to get an exclusive hands-on with the game's latest code.
VT3 handles exactly as you'd expect it to. Compared to Top Spin 2, it's a lot less forgiving of how you strike the ball and your players are of a more realistic scale - they don't fill the court with overmuscled frames and they have to spend ages running from one side of the court to the other. If you try to play like you play other tennis games, you'll find yourself spending most of your time lying face down on the court, with the ball pinging past you. The game is about positioning first and power second; you have to get your player into position and only then can you start winding up for a shot. Most of the time, we were running from one angle to the other, diving, sprinting and trying to handle the ball's new real physics system, confused by its accurate spin.
When you're in position, there's the traditional choice of shots. You've your usual top spin to power shots quickly past your opponent, slices to send it out wide and lobs to send it past your opponent. However, unlike Top Spin 2, you'll be finding yourself using all these in about equal proportions; the lob isn't the last-ditch defensive shot you'd expect, as most shots on the defensive are last-ditch. Holding the button down for longer winds up the shot for longer, adding power. And that's it. In fact we were a little confused by the lack of controls; only three buttons and the Left thumbstick seemed to be in use, making this even more limited. Despite this, we could still pull off loads of moves, and the only limitation we found was how crap we were as we initially learnt to cope with the upgraded system. We picked it up quickly though.
New mini-games are also promised, to back up the excellent ones of years gone by - which will also return, including the much loved ten-pin bowling style training sessions. These were severely lacking in Top Spin 2 and in last month's Table Tennis. Hopefully, more Monkey Ball-style party games will be introduced, as fun throwaway games are severely lacking on the Xbox 360 in general - let's not even touch on Top Spin 2's abysmal effort at multiplayer hi-jinks.
There's still a lot of work to be done here. The spectator models are curiously flat, and there were occasional graphical glitches that will need cleaning up. However, the character models were immediately recognisable as the people they were meant to be, with a wide range of expressions. We didn't spot a repeat animation while playing the game, which was welcome after Top Spin 2's limited range. The guys at Sega claim they're going to make the game as close to photorealistic as possible in the detail levels, and, looking at this, they're already well on the way.
If anyone can bring excitement and an enormous variety of experience to a tennis simulation in time to sate our Wimbledon ambitions, Sega can.
If anyone can make an arcade game exciting and knows how to handle a Sega game, Sumo can. It looks like I could be spending another summer indoors...
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