Virtua Tennis 2009 game review

Virtua Tennis 2009 is proof positive that the publisher is in rude health

SEGA delivers another winner

SEGA attracts the hardest of hardcore fan-boys, very much in the same way as its Japanese stable-mate Nintendo does. Many of these men (for they are 99 per cent male) are of a certain age and grew up through the 1980s and 1990s with the classic SEGA and Nintendo consoles and games at the centre of their worlds. And many of these so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers decry the recent output of the Japanese gaming giants as “mediocre, at best” and not a patch on their past glories.

And most of them are wrong.

SEGA’s latest outing in its long-running arcade series, Virtua Tennis 2009 is proof positive that the publisher is in rude health and as far as it can possibly be from simply churning out yet another cash-in update to a popular franchise. Whether you are new to the series (in which case, where the hell have you been for the last decade?) or whether you are a hardened VT –nut that heads out to obscure, sleazy West End arcades to check out the latest update from Japan each year (hands up, us!) you are going to love this year’s virtual bat and ball action.

T3 tested out the game on the Xbox 360, which features a new online ranking system on Xbox Live where you can earn prize money in online tournaments, to then spend on better racquets and kit to upgrade your character. SEGA assures us that the PS3 version is pretty much identical and also reminded us that there is a Wii version on the way next month that makes use of Nintendo’s new Wii MotionPlus extra-sensitive motion control.

Which is all well and good we suppose, but we are so taken with the 360 version that we cannot imagine going back to flailing our arms around the place with a Wii Remote, because the level of control you have over the characters in this game via your thumbs is nothing short of incredible.

You can choose to play as or against around 20 of the world’s top players, across a range of highly realistic real-world courts and in various tournaments, such as the officially licensed Davis Cup. As always, the real genius in the Virtua Tennis series is in the deceptive ease in which you learn to play the game, when before you know it you’ve been playing little else for a month and you find that you are desperately looking for all comers to take on via Xbox Live in order to keep crawling up those online leaderboards. This is the high-grade crack cocaine of tennis videogames, in that it’s very more-ish...

Virtua Tennis 2009 also serves up a bunch of new players this year including the likes of angry, air-puncher Andy Murray and the French chick with the coolest name in Tennis, Ana Ivanovic.

Alround gameplay is also noticeably improved with better volleying, much more intuitive serving and long, glorious rallies both at the net and at the back of the court making us actually whoop with joy. Actually whoop. Oh. And there are also the requisite daft mini-games that feature crocodiles, fruit and pirates. Which you will quickly tire of. But let's not dwell on those.

Overall, VT 2009 is pure gaming zen. Sheffield-based studio Sumo has served up another flowing, graceful ace of a sports game.

Links: Virtua Tennis 2009