Virtua Tennis 2009
The US Open this year was amazing to watch. I have also recently started getting into playing actual tennis. The combination of those two things, and with a little open spot before the fall rush of games led me to snag Virtua Tennis 2009, to give it a run. I was a huge fan of the Virtua Tennis series, especially on Dreamcast, but sadly, the series hasn’t kept up.
Virtual Tennis 2009 still plays almost like the original. There’s the exhibition mode, which is the same as the arcade machine. Pick your major tennis pro, and go all out in a huge famous stadium. This is the core game at it’s best. Without a doubt, this is a solid core tennis game. The action is fast, fun, and really makes you feel like you are working hard for your points. The second major mode is the career mode. You get to design your custom character, and fly around the world working your way up the ranks. Sadly, this takes FAR too long for it to be very enjoyable. After winning 7 amateur tournaments with only letting 2 points get by me, I was still ranked 95th on the amateur leaderboard. Clearly you’ll need to devote an extraordinary amount of time training, practicing, and playing the silly tennis practice games to level your character up. It’s like a tennis RPG, but with ONLY the grind part. Ugh.
The graphics are pretty dated. Possibly this game is using some average middlewear, since the Wii version looks almost the same as the 360 version. That’s never good. Luckily the fluid motion capture helps you ignore the creepy looking character models.
Again, this game is a fun core tennis engine. That part is definitely fun. Sadly, many of the rough edges, the slow pace & progress in the career mode, and the pretty horrific load times, make me not want to turn it on again. Maybe I’ll give the original a spin on the Dreamcast again, and see what the differences really are.
One Liner: While the core tennis engine is still great, VT2009 feels dated and clunky.
Final Grade:[C]