"And you thought tennis was boring to watch..."

I like to watch tennis, but quite frankly, the men's game makes lawn bowling, cricket, and watching senior's men golf much, much more exciting these days. So, when Sega comes out with this "Virtua Tennis", I'm very skeptical, and for good reason. Tennis is one of those sports that does not translate very well to video games. In fact, this is the first arcade tennis game I've seen, through there are several console tennis games.

However, I have a big problem with this game. First of all, there are only eight players to choose from, one from each country. However, Jim Courier, Mark Phippoussis, Pioline, and Goya are not exactly the biggest names on tour. In fact, I'm pretty sure most gamers have never heard of at least three of these guys, let alone all of them. And, they are not the best players in the world (Agassi & Sampras). Also, besides the words of what each player is supposedily good at (e.g. "Courier...Various Shots"), it doesn't give you a stat indication on how good the player actually is. Then again, I can't tell the difference between a Henman and a Courier. All eight play a lot alike to me.

Secondly, this 3-D is really only 3-D when you see the frozen smirks of the digitally added faces of the winners of each point (which didn't translate well either). Otherwise, it's nothing more than a fancy game of "Pong" using tennis rules.

The graphics of the court weren't much to look at either, which was pretty nice, but also looked very fake at the same time. When the player hits the ball, I didn't hear the kind of sounds that you expect if you at the actual thing, which seemed out of place. The voice that occasionally told you the score or who one the game sounded very stiff and not very excitiing. Heck, when the character won or loss, he didn't look very excited either. Gee, like the real thing.

Basically, the game is shortened to one final game in each of five rounds, winner wins the best 2 out of three games. You get "cash"points based on how long it took to beat up your opponent. There are no rallys, no turbos, and you can't get on fire after winning a point. Heck, there isn't a fatigue factor either, which really disappointed me. The game didn't seem very exciting.

And the AI is pretty suspect as well. The first two rounds are easy, but the only noticable difference in the last three rounds is that the opponent, regardless who it is, is much quicker. The computer isn't exactly any smarter, just quicker. If your hand-eye coordination is *really* good, you'll out-smart the computer easily and beat this game handily. (Sadly, my hand-eye coordination is very bad. Enough said.)

So, overall, this is a very merger game that doesn't seem to be interesting as other sports games do (NBA Showtime, NFL Blitz 2000, etc.). Heck, even Golden Tee '99 was better than this game. And it doesn't have the features that we've come to expect out of other games, like stats, and customability. (That would have been really great, to create a custom tennis player.) Overall, a very disappointing game that I would not recommend.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/00, Updated 01/23/00