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Slight changes make VT3 just short of perfect

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: March 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

When Sega's Virtua Tennis first appeared on the Dreamcast, it was easily the best tennis game ever made. A follow-up, Tennis 2K2, improved on the original, and was eventually ported to the PS2, GBA, and PSP. However, a rival franchise, Top Spin, soon appeared on the Xbox, and stressed realism over the simple arcade action offered by Virtua Tennis (which was originally an arcade game anyway). The questions were soon asked: a) Will Virtua Tennis return? and b) Will Top Spin influence it?

The answer to the first question has been answered with an overwhelming YES, but the answer to the second may not be so obvious. VT's trademark controls are back - one button each for topspin, slice, and lob shots, with the analog stick controlling both character movement and shot direction - but VT vets will undoubtedly notice some tweaks right away.

The biggest addition is the "running shot", where your character will launch a powerful stroke while charging full-speed at a ball just out of reach. While this allows you to return out-of-reach shots with more force, your court position becomes compromised, as you're often far outside the lines once your momentum stops. What this means is player position in relation to the ball is much more important than in the past two games (which would automatically adjust position for you as long as you hit the button at the right time). In Virtua Tennis 3, it's more difficult to get precise angles and top-power shots, but ultimately, this makes the gameplay deeper and makes hitting great shots more rewarding.

But isn't Virtua Tennis supposed to be an easy-to-learn, easy-to-play experience? Well, yeah, and it still is - it's just that the learning curve is a little steeper. One might wonder if Sega did this in order to give the online portion of the game lasting appeal, and it certainly seems like it worked, for better or worse.

Create-a-player and World Tour are basically the same - start with a scrub and slowly work your way up through the rankings over a 20-year career, playing imaginative mini-games to improve your skills, entering tournaments, and collecting new gear. Outside of World Tour, there are Exhibition matches and Tournemant mode to play (with up to four players, with options galore), and you can also play the mini-games with multiple people via the new Court Games mode.

VT3 has vastly improved visuals. Player models are crisp, clear, and colorful, the courts are full of personality, cheering crowds, and ubiquitous advertising. While some player close-ups still look like brain-dead clones (or worse), the motion capture is amazingly, hauntingly realistic. Federer's casual yet deadly serve is perfect, Sharapova tucks her hair behind her ears, Nalbandian does his one-legged power backhand, Nadal dashes all over the court, Davenport wraps the ball around her racket when serving....the attention to detail is astonishing. The music is the same guitar cheese as before, which is a love-it-or-hate-it detail, but the rest of the sound effects are spot-on (a few overly energetic grunts aside).

VT3 is easily as good as either Top Spin title, and is arguably the best tennis game ever produced. New players shouldn't have a lot of trouble picking up and playing, but long-term fans of the franchise should be ready for a small and sobering dash of realism. A tiny bit of the Virtua Tennis magic has been lost, true, but do not let that stop you from picking this up, as there's certainly enough goodness here to make up for it.

Virtua Tennis 3 comes strongly recommended as a highly enjoyable single- and multi-player experience (thank goodness for wireless controllers!). It's without a doubt one of the finest four-player non-shooter games on the 360 (nice to have a four-player game with no split-screen!!), and even gamers who don't normally play sports or tennis games may very well find a lot to like.

Wasn't Broken...wasn't fixed

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 15
Date: March 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Sega took tennis gaming to new heights with intuitive, simplified controls to go along with fluid graphics on their now defunct Dreamcast console. The formula was simple: three hit types (slice, lob, top spin), a two-hit serving system (hit a button to start the power meter, hit it again to stop at the desired power), and actual players endowed with their particular strengths, be it Tommy Haas' booming forehand or Thomas Enqvist's backhand. The original Virtua Tennis and Tennis 2K2 became the staples for gamers wanting an easy control system, without too much of a cartoon-y feel.
And little of that system has changed with the release of Virtua Tennis 3. There are a few new animations, like a jacknife return, or players falling to their hands as they try to recover from heading in the wrong direction. You'll get to enjoy Roddick's powerful serve and counter it with James Blake's powerful ground game. And achievements are plentiful and easy to come by; I had racked up over 100 achievement points in just under an hour.
Online play was reasonably well done; not all the animations come through as fluidly, and you'll have to get used to the occasional phantom racket, where an opponent seems to get a ball just out of his range, probably the result of a skip in animation where the dive for the ball didn't show. Hopefully, this can be addressed via patch releases. There is also a pretty awesome option to watch other Xbox Live matches, or highlights from other live matches. You can even take your customized character online.
The World Tour finally gets a personal touch to it: coaches communicate to you about slowing down on practice, congratulating you on beating people, and new equipment, while players you meet on the tour set up practice matches which don't affect your ranking, but increase your skill. The mini-games are numerous and entertaining--you get a new one about every seven to ten successful "weeks" of playing tournaments and mini-games. Instead of spending money to get new gear, you receive new rackets, shoes and accessories for free based on your tour success, similar to the Rainbow Six: Vegas gear-ranking system.
The customization options remain horrible in terms of the player's physique and facial features, given the advances in custom player options in all other games.
To be flat out honest? VT3 is basically Tennis 2K2, now in HD, now playable online, now with Xbox Achievement points. Just enough to make it worth it.

Positives and negatives of virtua tennis 3

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: March 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

For those tennis gamers that have tried all the console games out there for xbox 360, ps2, psp and ps3 this may be the best game to purchase.
It reminds me a lot of the original smashcourt for ps2.
Game play is very arcade like. If you move your racket back early and hit a groundstroke you are rewarded with a blazing shot. The only issue I had with this is that I couldn't 'paint the lines' with my player. You could get close to hitting a down the line shot but there is no way of actually doing it on grass, hard court or clay.
The 20 male players look and play exactly like their real life counterparts.
This is great. Additionally the courts look amazing and the motion of the players is so life-like that it looks like a real match (especially on my 36" sony HD tv).
A negative is that you can't hit a true drop shot to bring your opponent in. The best game for that feature is smash court 2.
However, virtua tennis 3 has the most believable net play (serve/volley & chip and charge) of any tennis video game to date. Major positive!
The world tour mode where you take a created player thru tourneys to build up their rankings and to play against today's greats is a lot of fun.
The exhibition feature is a great way to get a quick match in and that's entertaining as well.
The flawed feature is the tournament mode. You don't play on the same court. Example would be you can choose Federer as your player, beat Taylor Dent on grass and then your second round match is on clay against David Nalbandian. Annoying! That doesn't happen on the world tour mode where the brackets are laid out perfectly.
I was burned by purchasing top spin 2 for xbox 360 which tried to be more 'real' but ultimately had so many different button choices that you could lose your train of thought trying to play it.
Am I glad I purchased this game? Yes. I'd give it a solid B.
I wish they would add a legends area where we could pick Andre, Bjorn Borg, Patrick rafter and Pete Sampras.
The best xbox 360 sports game I own is still NCAA 2k7 basketball.

Still not as good as Top Spin 2

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 14
Date: April 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Virtua Tennis 3 is still not as good as Top Spin 2. This game is arcady. The easy mode is a complete bore where you can totally dominate with absolutely no problem. On normal difficulty, the matches quickly become a defensive lobbing contest that could go on for a very long time. You can unrealistically recover from just about anything thrown at you to get the ball back over the net but this goes on for too long.

There is also an arcady ball tracer graphic that you can't disable in the options. The sounds in this game are not nearly as realstic as in Top Spin 2. Switching back and forth between Top Spin 2 and Virtua Tennis 3, you can clearly tell the difference in how much more realistic the sounds of the court and sounds surrounding the court are in Top Spin 2.

In Top Spin 2, you feel an accomplishment when you win matches. You stay interested and motivated when playing. Virtua Tennis 3 quickly gets old. There are also many, many more interesting courts to play on in Top Spin 2. In my opinion, sticking with Top Spin 2 is the way to go for tennis on the Xbox360.

Good but there are things that bug me.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

It's a solid title, great graphics and sound. The animation is smooth and well defined. There is not much to learn in the game, just point and swing. The mini games are fun to play, yet becomes frustrating with the higher levels. There are many things that bug me...for example the tail of light that travels behind the ball. I will settle if the ball was going fast, but everytime the ball is in the air, there is the tail behind it. It looks like a comet. Next thing is the training. The computer stand-in makes the training very hard to complete, requiring numerous chances to clear one training. I believe in practice makes perfect, but if the training is on something that is worthless, why train on it, let alone the AI making it more difficult than it is. The players dive more than desired, they are like a wall. They return everything back. The players move a little too fast for me, the players all are on a caffeine surge or something. It's unrealistic.

Overall, good game, kinda hard to get used to after playing another title of the same sport.

Players look funky but great gameplay

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: March 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I recently snagged this game for the 360. The first thing I did was to play a women's match between one of this year's top doubles teams - Martina Hingis and Daniela Hantuchova. First of all, they mispronounce Dani's name, so that one's kinda weird. I can only select a few stadiums but the rest are unlockable. With that being said I set it for 6 games, 3 sets at the normal level, and the normal level is very easy. I can do the drop shots that made Marti famous but not the lobs because the computer gets to the lobs right away. For some reason I have not been able to do an ace but maybe that's just me since I need to get used to the controls.

Another name that they mispronounce is Gael Monfils. That one really bothered me as well. However the gameplay is great, I liked taking control of the 20 pro players. The graphics are awesome on my 62 inch 1080p TV. Speaking of the players they really look funky - Sharapova looks nothing like her, Marti looks like the 2002 version, and Nicole Vaidisova looks so pale and funky too. For the guys Nadal wears baggy shorts, and not his trademark pants. They got the individual serves right but the motion seems too fast. Marti also has her backhand, which is awesome. I wonder who did the motion capture.

The replays are also weird. Sometimes they show the replay, sometimes the player reaction. Maybe there is a way to just show replays. Top Spin 2 didn't so Virtua Tennis has an advantage there.

I recommend this game for fans. It's really fun-filled and as good as the Sega Dreamcast version with better graphics. I guess we can just overlook the funky looks and mispronounced names.

Terrible Game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 10
Date: June 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I decided to sell this game right after I played it once. The gameplay is just terrible. It's too easy to hit the ball, and it's just too unrealistic. By simply pushing one button, you can almost cover the entire court. It's not what the tennis game is in reality. So I would say if you really wanna enjoy the tennis game, go for Top Spin 2. Even though Top Spin 2 has been almost one year old, it's still way much better.

Exactly what was promised...a moderately next gen update to Virtua Tennis

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

My dilemma prior to getting this was that I had great memories of Virtua Tennis and Tennis 2k2 on my Dreamcast, and none of the versions since had delivered the goods. Sega Tennis on my xbox was alright but in no way an improvement over the DC originals.
The reason this was a problem for me is due to the fact that I purchased Top Spin for the 360 a short while ago, and was profoundly disappointed with it. I can understand how people that look for timing based moves on every aspect of gameplay and who enjoy a training system that can only be described as punishing would prefer that one, but honestly it just felt like its attempts to make the glorified pong of virtua tennis "realistic" fell flat and turned gameplay into a stressful chore.

VT3 excels in recapturing most of my conditions for success, from an enjoyable career mode (no switching to the other side of the court for single player! hooray!) to the always entertaining zombies-with-tennis-rackets graphics. The latter is a feature in my book, as I find the prospect of being defeated by the undead much more of an incentive to play hard than any point system or ranking could ever manage.
Some problems would be the tendency of rallies to turn into endurance matches and for some shots to be significantly more difficult to employ usefully (I'm looking at you, lob), but that has a way of becoming less of an issue as you grasp the subtleties of the gameplay. It's what I liked about the original: understanding the system added depth, but messing around and relying on your hand eye coordinaiton would get you pretty far as well.

So you get the core gameplay, which works for the most part, and updated uncanny valley graphics, and xbox live competition. It's exactly what I was looking for.

V3T not nearly as good as Top Spin

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: September 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I don't understand how an old game like Top Spin 1 for the normal xbox could be better in a lot of ways than this, but it is.
My mayor concern are the sound and the graphics of the game, they are very very poor.
The play of the game is very boring in easy mode but if you change it you would get beat by any decent player
I have only played mine for 2 days and i'm already looking to sell it and buying top spin 2

Virtua Tennis 3 Best Xbox 360 Tennis Experience

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: May 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This tennis game is way better than top spin. The controls are more inuitive. You are always playing from your players perspective. Shots are easier to control. The customize your own player portion is easier and more fun also.[ASIN:B000IONGWC Virtua Tennis 3]

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