Virtua Tennis 2

You might have not thought of it but if you mull over for a second you will find that the first ever tennis game was Pong. Those of you out there who are unaware of Pong, Pong was a antiquated tennis game with a little exception, it had no net. Pong was a huge success and up till now very few tennis games have made their mark, among those Namco’s Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament is prominent to some extent. Not even the big names such as Electronic Arts have not been able to develop a tennis game.

But one thing revolutionized the tennis games forever and that thing is SEGA Dreamcast. SEGA released arcade styled Virtua Tennis and it really hit the spot but due to SEGA’s hardware failure only few people were able to get in touch with it. but later on its sequel was also developed on PlayStation 2.

And to make it more exciting for your taste buds SEGA has gotten the rights of 16 real players names and comprises both male and female players such as Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Magnus Norman, Lindsay Davenport, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Patrick Rafter, Ai Sugiyama, Mary Pierce, Alexandra Stevenson, Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario, Tim Henman, Carlos Moya, Tommy Haas, Cedric Pioline, Monica Seles and Thomas Enqvist.

Grand Slam Tennis

Grand slam tennis by EA sports is the first game to support Wii Motion plus but is woefully let down by the complexity of the controls and the hopelessness of the player to control the avatar. EA sports has ventured into the tennis genre after almost 10 years and many people were hoping that the result would be at par with EA’s other offerings. This is the first game to have all the grand slam titles included in it. The game offers 23 different past and present players including 23 past or present players, including Serena Williams, Justine Henin, Boris Becker, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray. The game is letdown by the difficult control schemes.

The controls and angle of the rackets must be all so perfect that even a slight mistake on part of the player warrants a fault or point to the other player. And sometimes it feels that the AI randomly chooses to give away points by not running towards the ball or not swinging the racket at the right time. There is no practice mode, only thing close to a practice mode is a tutorial with the ball machine and that doesn’t help in the improving the experience for the player. An extra feature is the Get Fit that calculates how much calories you’ve burnt while playing the game. This game is for people who don’t mind the steep learning curve and uncontrollable avatars.