Original Release: Sega, 1999, Arcade
Other Releases: Dreamcast (2000), PC (2002), GBA/N-Gage (2003)
Sega’s tennis entry for the 128-bit era keeps things simple and quick, mixing then-new 3D graphics with older 2D-style gameplay
Virtua Tennis (Dreamcast, Sega, 2000)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Virtua Tennis is part of a lineage for Sega that started with Super Tennis on the Master System, but it really kinda reminded me of the SNES’s Super Tennis. It was the breakout tennis title for its console generation, it bridged cartoony simplicity with realistic features and touches, it added “3D” to the mix as an aesthetic but retained the style of prior 2D tennis titles, and is beloved by a cult following of retro gamers.
Virtua Tennis is definitely more simplistic, though, but also much more friendly to the casual single player. It started life out as an arcade title a year before its Dreamcast release, so it makes matches move much more quickly than usual and boils the action down to just two buttons: Shoot and Lob. You can sort of loosely aim into the opponent’s court, and “charge” harder shots, but the game automatically chooses the shot type for you based on the circumstances. It actually plays much more like an 8-bit era tennis game than anything else.
As someone not deeply into tennis I prefer this type of simplified game. It’s very amenable to just picking up and playing, I was able to win the first three matches of Arcade Mode on my first try, with Super Tennis and its four different shot type buttons to memorize I couldn’t win a match to save my life.
So horses for courses on the gameplay style, but if you’re a tennis expert who wants more of a challenge the game does ramp up fairly quickly. The meat of the single-player experience is a new “World Tour” mode added for the Dreamcast, which starts you out as a pro circuit player ranked #300 and with little cash in your pocket. You raise cash by training and playing in matches, you raise your rank by winning matches. As your rank goes up, you unlock new matches. And cash can be spent at the store to unlock new courts, players for Arcade Mode, doubles partners, and spiffy outfits.
World Tour is pretty good overall, but it does have some very annoying bottlenecks. The “training” challenges don’t actually train you, not once is it explained how to aim precisely, which is what you need to do to pass most of them. They’re more like Super Smash Bros bonus levels where you’re already supposed to have some mastery of the control nuances to complete them. I got through a couple by sheer luck but gave up on them pretty quick; unfortunately, they seem to be mandatory at times to progress and unlock new matches. There is also a HUGE jump in opponent skill between the first and second levels of difficulty, so between that and the training games you can find yourself stonewalled after not too long.
The action is accompanied by a generic chugging rock soundtrack that mostly isn’t memorable but does the job (though the France and England stages randomly go hard, the England one could slip right into King of Fighters without being noticed). The graphics are nothing remarkable now and you can probably emulate this on a potato, but the little 3D TV-style cutaways to the players are well-done and were fairly impressive when this was released in 2000.
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