Tough-As-Nails Tennis For Hard Core Gamers

By William Barker

One of my favourite sports is tennis. It's mainly to do with the watching the ladies play in skirts and bloomers on windy days, but hey, it's a cool game on its own right.

This flowing game of precision and power invented by French royalty also translates well into the digital medium, and ever since 'Tennis' hooked me on the NES in 1986 with its back and forth frivolity, I've never looked back.

Except for the time when I was six years old and my legal guardian yelled "Don't look back" during a fateful family drive to Traralgon.

He ran over a Shetland pony he thought was a large rodent and I watched in horror as the road turned crimson...

So, what's new in the third instalment of the Top Spin?

Well, the biggest difference for what is (in my unhumble opinion) the best tennis game ever made, is the gameplay.

Sure, the graphics have been improved and everything looks a lot sharper and the tennis courts and stadiums come across as more realistic and Sharapova looks so good you could almost lick the screen, but it's the way the game plays that marks the biggest difference.

There is a steep learning curve in Top Spin 3 that could put casual gamers off (unless you put the difficulty on easy), but if you've played any of the other Top Spin games you'll revel in the challenge.

In essence, this brilliant piece of console coding takes digital tennis to the next level; it's not quite a simulation, but it comes tantalisingly close.

Most tennis sports games can be mastered in a few hours. With Top Spin 3 you're still picking up new methods, techniques and tricks days after starting out with it.

Let's take it from the top: there are a number of modes to choose from after you've watched the boppy intro including exhibition, multiplayer, career and so on.

Initially I went with the in-depth career mode, which first tasks you with creating a player. It's a lot of fun as you can make freaky-looking players with big foreheads. The attention to detail is amazing and you can literally spend hours tweaking facial features, body types and even tatoos.

You can also choose to attend tennis school, which is a good place to start because as I've mentioned this game is tin-pot tough.

Once you've created a player and want to start spanking balls, you enter tournaments and try to improve your ranking until one day, you can walk over to the net and punch Roger Federer in the face after being beaten in straight sets.

It's good to see a range of real players in there too, such as Federer, Roddick, Ancic, Nadal, and even The Poo (Mark Philippoussis).

There's also a number of 'classic' players in there like Boom-Boom Becker and his ilk, which adds a bit of fun to proceedings and can make exhibition games more memorable.

Okay, so each win in the career mode awards you with experience points which can be spent on various skills: power, speed, forehand, backhand, serve, returns, volleys etc.

To begin with I found increasing my players speed was a wise move, followed by power and then using XP points on backhand and serve and so forth.

As well as competing in tournaments and round robins across the calendar year, gaining experience and beefing up your player RPG-style, you can also buy equipment and clothing.

But the best single thing about Top Spin 3 is the gameplay. 

It's so damn hard that even when you grow proficient at it, beating your opponents - whether human or AI controlled - is hugely rewarding.

The controls are similar to previous games. The left stick controls your player, and the four control pad buttons each perform a different type of stroke: normal, top spin, slice, lob. 

But now you can also use the right stick to fine tune your shots and while tricky to master, it adds massive depth to the game. You can also use the right stick to serve which is pretty shmicko.

Another facet of the steep learning curve is timing. Unlike other tennis games timing is essential here. If your stroke play is out by a millisecond, the shot will often go out or not even connect at all.

Positioning is also super important in Top Spin 3, so getting your player in the right position to be able to club a big forehand winner cleanly down the line is essential to winning.

Running around the court button mashing will achieve nothing in this game. It's super tough to beat and takes a lot of concentration to play well, but this is how sports game should be.

Getting enough angle and control on the ball to get it to go where you want, and at the right speed and with the right depth, takes a lot of practice.

But when you do reach the zenith, it's one of the most rewarding experiences.

There's also the 'power shot' system, but it's so hit-and-miss that I barely used it, instead focussing on my whipping backhands of justice.

As a result of the hardcore gameplay - and also the excellent online world tours and tournaments - the game's replayability is massive. It's almost without equal.

There is the scope for literally years of happy gaming here, but the flip side is that losing games happens frequently because it's so demanding, and if like me you're a sore loser, your control pad is going to have lots of bite marks in it and you TV set is going to cop a beating.

The frustration factor got to me on more than a few occasions [He's a real cry baby when I beat him- Ed], for instance when the game comes down to tie-breakers that are lost by a bee's doodle, causing me to scream obscenities to Ches, the Taiwanese God of video game desolation.

On the whole you get over your frustrations and soon rediscover that Top Spin 3 is a masterfully coded game.

Here's a tip: start the game on 'easy' instead of 'normal' and you'll probably find the game much more approachable.

Visually Top Spin 3 looks very nice. The weather effects look good, as do all the courts and backdrops that show off an impressive amount of detail.

For a game as precise as this, relying on nanosecond-perfect timing and positioning, the player animations have to be accurate and detailed, which thankfully they are.

The motion capture makes the players movements and strokes look awesome - very lifelike and fluid - and there's a range of different camera angles from which to view the action.

Replays are also very cool, and allow you to relive your best rallies from a range of eclectic angles, and these replays show off the game's detail quite nicely, such as how the t-shirts swish around realistically as players dart about.

The players move around the courts fairly realistically and the audio element is more involving this time around, with more grunting, better racquet-to-ball connection effects and some decent menu music too.

The game looks fantastic during heated rallies, moving along at almost 60 frames per second and it's one of those games that I like to sit really close to the TV for, because the detail can't be appreciated at long range (and you don't have to get up to kick/punch/spit on the screen when you lose).

Tennis ball physics are excellent - the ball moves around realistically - and there's a neat little heart-rate monitor that shows how anxious your player is.

While the single-player career mode is a long-term undertaking that is hugely rewarding, it's the multiplayer games that often bring the most joy.

Whether you're playing a mate in the same room or going head-to-head with a stranger from Croatia online, the game is utterly absorbing. 

Because there's so many nuances to the gameplay, human vs human matches are rarely cut and dry, and even after dropping a set in straight games, it's not hard to rally and strike back with some crafty moves.

The online tournaments are simply sensational, and the statistic tracking is also a very tasty feature. 

Setting up games via Xbox Live is a piece of cake and Top Spin 3 is arguably one of the best online multiplayer sports games to hit the Xbox 360 in 2008.

Like a frail Shetland pony's viscera scattered across a quiet country road after violently impacting with a speeding car, Top Spin 3 can seem to be a putrid mess that causes the kind of trauma that would damage a young mind for decades...

But at the same time Top Spin 3 can also be one of the most rewarding, exciting, involving and downright intense sports games you'll ever play.

Yes, the learning curve is steep, and yes, the controls are more complex than ever before, and yes, I can sometimes come across as a patronising harlequin, but at the end of the day know this: Top Spin 3 takes tennis sports games to the next level, and has changed the field of play forever.

This is what the die-hards have been waiting for - brilliant, nuanced, in-depth digital tennis that is tough as nails. 

In conclusion, Top Spin 3 is tip top tennis.

Game: Top Spin 3
System: Xbox 360
Players: 1-4
Online: Yes
Developer: PAM
Distributor: 2K Games

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)