PlayStation 3 owners fare a little better, benefitting from the fact they hold a piece of hardware that has some resemblance to the handle of a racquet. Inexplicably, the camera jumps from first- to third-person in between each shot during play, a perspective shift that will make even the most focused player feel as though they're playing on the deck of the Titanic minutes before it sank. However, these map poorly to your motions, the racquet failing to turn as you swivel your wrist (and as the wrist is the only piece of the body the Kinect needs to pick up on, it's a fundamental flaw), while lobs are read as gentle forehands. Reasoning that the average living room floor is considerably smaller than a tennis court, Sega auto-handles your character running for the ball in the Wii Sports style, relegating the interactivity to swinging your empty hand around to set up strokes. While playing Virtua Tennis 4 with Microsoft's motion sensing camera is relegated to a bespoke Motion Control Mode specifically designed for the task, the execution is a resounding disappointment. "Better with Kinect" proclaims the Xbox 360 packaging, a bald lie that will disappoint every person it convinces. They're additions that give the illusion of expansion without messing with the secret recipe that earned Virtua Tennis its place in the canon. Virtua Tennis 4's innovations come not in ground-level play, the way that lobs and volleys are handled, but in 3D television support, Kinect and Move control options (Wii MotionPlus having already been introduced in Virtua Tennis 2009) and an overhauled World Tour mode. So it falls to the gimmicks and framing of the package to attempt to introduce relevance in an increasingly competitive niche. There have been tweaks made to the core engine with characters less likely to leap into cross-court dives, and more balanced AI but they are just tweaks, and the game has all of the delicate balance of its earliest predecessors: easy to pick up and play, difficult to master. Viewed at the ground level of matches, it remains the best video game approximation of the sport available. Its breezy court play, with its arcade heritage, is as fresh and comfortable today as it was 12 years ago. And it's a tension that runs through Virtua Tennis 4's centre court.īecause the fundamentals of Virtua Tennis cannot be improved upon.
It's the great unspoken tension at the heart of the sequel-driven games industry. That way, it can be improved and built upon in sequels and the initial investment recouped time and time again. No, a publisher wants the recipe to be delicious, but somehow flawed or lacking.
VIRTUA TENNIS 4 KINECT AMAZON PROFESSIONAL
So it is with Sega AM3's Virtua Tennis, an arcade game that translated the stretch-and-dive drama of professional tennis with such assured brilliance that, aside from a conspicuous lack of female players, precluded a sequel.īut while perfection may be the goal of every game designer, it's the enemy of the businessmen that pay for the game designer's computers, electricity and crunch-period pizzas. Occasionally a game maker happens upon a flawless recipe on the first attempt, a kind of perfection that would be compromised if any of the ingredients were added to or taken away from.
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