Virtua Tennis

Virtua Tennis: World Tour is good, but it's not without its double-faults.

Dreamcast star performer Virtua Tennis has been revitalized for the PSP. The result--a hair-pulling difficult tennis game that embodies every last detail from the Sega original. Watch as your blood pressure rises through toils of tricky mini-games and seemingly never-ending World Tour events.

Mario Top Spin?
Though store shelves are hardly stocked with tennis titles, there have been a handful of console and portable tennis games over the last few years to keep racquet-happy gamers' tennis addictions at bay. Less experimental titles like Top Spin and Smash Court focus heavily on realistic play, while games like Mario Power Tennis and Outlaw Tennis rely heavily on a humorous, fun style of play. Virtua Tennis: World Tour falls somewhere in the middle, serving up a fundamentally sound game of tennis mixed with entertaining (though mind-numbingly frustrating) mini-games that test your ability to knock down bowling pins, hit an on-court target, and take out a vengeful, tennis ball shooting, tank boss.

The Road to the Top
The main single player mode in World Tour is, well, World Tour, an almost identical recreation of the Dreamcast mode of the same name. Previous series fans will slide right into gear with the mode on the PSP, as players compete in calendar year events with a custom made character (male or female) to eventually rank up to the number one seed. Mini-game training challenges build player stats and are essential for a shot at winning increasingly difficult tournaments. The only problem here is that difficulty in training events is tweaked so high that the average player is likely to be easily deterred, even on the simplest setting. You'll need to complete these events in order to build stats, but the skills with which you need to beat them can only be acquired from winning the very same events! Ironic, don't you think?

Game, Set, and Match
Despite some obvious shortcomings, World Tour is the best bit of tennis software the PSP is going to get. Period. Four-player Wi-Fi multiplayer runs buttery, while quick play options and Tetris-style ball games give the casual racqueteer the option to jump right into the action. World Tour's animations are simply spectacular--possibly the best of any current tennis title--meaning over-the-shoulder forehands and under-the-leg returns blend in fluidly with a player's step. A line-up of tennis pros are on-board, including Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, and Venus Williams, though the stepped-up AI may have you changing the channel come Wimbledon 2006. You'll pay Roddick. My thumb hurts.

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