Original Release: Virtual Toys, 2010, DS / iOS / PSP
A simplistic budget tennis game that is directly “inspired by” Sega’s early Virtua Tennis games
VT Tennis (PSP, Virtual Toys, 2010)
Where to Buy: No longer officially available (discontinued with all PSP Minis in 2015)
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
As the tin clearly indicates, this is a budget-minded knockoff of Sega’s Virtua Tennis, perhaps hoping you would be too drunk or something while browsing the PS Network to notice it is not an official Sega product.
It’s actually not a bad clone – it captures the basics of the Sega series with very similar gameplay and look, but pared down considerably from even the first Virtua Tennis entry (both in terms of graphics and options). It offers you a basic “career” mode that lets you earn money to buy new t-shirts, shorts and rackets to deck out your guy (or gal) with, and it does seem to have an absolute ton of courts to unlock.
For a sub-$5 simplistic tennis title for casual portable play to kill some time, this all would have been perfectly fine (if stepping on Sega’s toes a little bit, though it would take them two more years to make a comparable mobile Virtua Tennis title). Indeed, that seemed to be the main plan with the central release being an iOS version that was like $3 (seemingly no longer listed from a cursory search). PSP Minis usually ran more like $5 and up, but that still would have been OK-ish if it played well. But this really doesn’t.
I don’t know if it’s an emulation issue, or maybe just a bad PSP port, but on like 80% of exchanges the ball clips the top of the net for some reason. That sends it dribbling over to the other side of the court, so it’s more like you’re playing Senior Pickleball. It’s a bizarre bug and I can’t believe QA didn’t notice it given how frequently it happens in all match types and on all available starting courts. As I said, it may be an emulation thing … however, that’s the main way of playing PSP Minis now since they’re no longer available, so it’s a big problem.
The PSP emulator is usually rock solid though so I would guess this was just a hasty port that hardly anyone ever bothered to play anyway. If this at all somehow interests you maybe check out the DS version instead to see if it works any better.
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