Tennis 2K2

"A poor tennis game with nothing in common with Top Spin..."

Welcome to the worlds most critisizing Virtua Tennis 2 review... VT fanboys cover your eyes!

When SEGA brought out Virtua Tennis 2, tennis fans the world over regarded it as the ultimate coin-op tennis game, however when they made the transfer to our SEGA home console the Dreamcast, they forgot to take out the coin-op AI of the game, the bit where the machine has to be as unfair as possible to generate the most amount of money, this just leads to frustration rather than fun, as you can play amazing all the way up to the semi-finals and then suddenly 'whoops!' your character becomes a bumbling mis-hitting wreck as all your shots go out (sometimes you can just stand there and hit 'volley' as you recieve a serve and the ball will still go out!), the CPU gets some form of Zen like ability and can manage to perform lobs over you from places like the far right of the playing arena, and im not talking about the court... I mean the far right of the WHOLE stage, next to the crowd!

If you manage to struggle on through this torturous match, and reach the 'Final' then you can forget about winning, In this match wherever you hit the ball you can guarantee it will be 'OUT', if you try any sort of tactic, the computer will fire the ball back to you at any angle and get a point, and sometimes you can even end up face to face with the computer at the net rapidly hitting 'volley' as the ball ping pongs back and forth in a two inch space, and the computer never makes a mistake at this... Not very realistic!
Of course it would be unfair of me to bash this game too harshly, as the graphics are really good for its time, and the game at least has some music while playing, unlike Microsofts 'Top Spin' (My favourite tennis game ever).
Before you think 'Surely Top Spin is just like Virtua Tennis 2' let me remind you that the control system is about all thats reminicent in Top Spin, and even that is deeper than VT2.

Unfortunately SEGA ported Virtua Tennis 2 from the arcades really poorly, left in most of the annoying 'amazing AI' which basically meant that the computer cheated as much as it could to make you lose, so that you pumped more pounds into the game. If SEGA took a little more time on tuning the gameplay, rather than making sure the graphics looked good enough to make you want to buy the game on just how the pictures looked on the back of the box, then maybe Top Spin would still not be king of tennis games!
I know people complain about cheaters on the Top Spin Live servers, but at least you can counter play those sort of people, but with VT2, the computer counters your attempts at anything!
Overall 'Virtua Tennis 2' is a poor tennis game with flashy graphics, and no sense of achievement or skill whilst playing!

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/14/04