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1 Star only because I cannot go any lower

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 15
Date: July 13, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is terrible. I rented this at the local blockbuster where they had several copies just sitting on the shelf. I decided to try renting before splurging to buy. Glad I did. There are many deficiencies with how this game is designed, as listed below:

1) It forces you to use the nunchuck which is an utter nuisance while trying to swing the racquet during play. I was forced to just use wrist movements with my right hand, while trying to point the player using the joystick with my left hand. Did the game programmers even play once on this game before they released it?

2) Like other sports games (tiger woods golf for example) on the wii, this game focuses more on the players than the game. You see the losing players throw and toss their racquets after every game with curses and frowns on their faces. This gets old real fast and is a real annoyance because I wanted to just focus on tennis and not the player attitudes. No way to turn off the player attitudes either. This makes it even more discouraging to play. The Wii Sports Tennis gets this absolutely right with no such nonsense frills.

3) The tennis court selections are nothing more than just surface color schemes. They add little value to game play.

4) The game play is painfully slow, with the swings and pointer movements taking longer to register in the game, so you land up losing all the time due to missed shots.

5) You have to deal with 6 different copyright notice screens and software company logos every time the game starts up on the Wii. This is a real nuisance.

6) The odd way of holding the remote makes it even more annoying. Why couldn't they have just designed it so the game could be played using the motion sensor and standard remote grips, instead of forcing a bizarre remote grip and nunchuck usage for Tennis?

All in all I have decided to skip this much hyped POS game and go back to Wii Sports for now. It is such a joy just to play tennis on Wii sports after experiencing this ridiculous Top Spin 3 nonsense. I wasted $5.99 to rent this.

Lefty? Don't Buy!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 16
Date: June 25, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game cannot be played left handed, which was a major dissapointment. Also cannot create player or play online. Save your money.

NO PLAY FOR LEFTYS!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: June 29, 2008
Author: Amazon User

THIS GAME SUCKS!! How can a tennis game be released that does not play left handed! I guess if Rafa Nadal, Jimmy Conners or John McEnroe (all hall of famers & lefty's) wanted to play they should forget about it. Wii Tennis (a cartoon game) can be played lefty and this supposedly realistic game can't? The programmers who made this game are a joke to their profession and are seriously LAZY! Also, you can't create your own player. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!

A Shoddy Tech Demo, but Full-Priced

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: July 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

As a fan of playing tennis, I was very eager to try Top Spin 3. Since I use my Wii for exercise as well as entertainment, I like to play sports games -- especially tennis ones -- to get some activity. However, although I was initially looking forward very eagerly to Top Spin 3, I found that its execution was seriously lacking.

For one, there are only a handful of players even available, some of which aren't really all that intuitive to guess. I'm not a follower of professional tennis very closely, but even I could see that there are some glaring omissions. Also, there is no character creation, so the individual element is completely absent. They added a few original characters, but they somehow felt that they could not even include a rudimentary character creation mode? Sloppy.

What is most sloppy, however, and utterly disappointing is the game itself. No difficulty settings means that the unforgiving and often very bad control scheme has to be accustomed to on the fly. A pathetically inadequate tutorial does not excuse this fundamental omission. Furthermore, the controls themselves are as far from intuitive as possible; the controller is, for some reason, held sideways. The player's character moves on-screen in a stuttering mess that frequently prevents him from reaching an adequate point from which he may return the ball. The controls, which are supposed to mimic the player's own movements, rarely do this and are token at best. Typically you will try for a special shot exactly as the tutorial instructed, only to have it ignore your movements or misinterpret them.

That doesn't even begin to address the other fundamental problems it has, such as the fact that it doesn't feel like you actually control anything. Even the pop-up help instructs you to time your swings to match the on-screen player. Why, then, are we instructed to swing at all, if the game itself tries to anticipate our swing and then make us match theirs?

I thought that Top Spin 3 would surely be more satisfying than Sega Superstars Tennis which, while a pretty good game, lacked in tournaments and was too harsh when it came to unlockables through them. There also wasn't that much responsiveness depending on specific motions by the player, which Top Spin 3 was supposed to address. Unfortunately, however, it didn't. Sega Superstars Tennis remains a vastly superior game, both in entertainment value and tennis authenticity, even with the super moves.

To boot, Sega Superstars Tennis also had three control schemes, which Top Spin 3 would have benefited from; the movement in Top Spin 3 is atrocious and unresponsive at the worst times. Having an option to handle it automatically would have been a great relief. However, they opted for the extremely awkward option of holding the Wii remote sideways, for no valid reason.

All in all, Top Spin 3 plays like an unfinished tech demo that should never have left the studio. It's a poor excuse for a tennis game, but moreover it's a poor excuse for a game overall. With horrible music, barely adequate sound effects (and an absolutely gratingly annoying umpire/judge voice that belches out his calls), and mediocre graphics, it looks like an unfinished PS2 game that they thought they could slap a full asking price on and sell.

This game isn't even worth bargain bin trips. Give it a miss and buy Sega Superstars Tennis instead, or wait for a more satisfying realistic tennis game. Top Spin 3 isn't it. In fact, it isn't much of anything at all.

Greatly disappointed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: July 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is greatly disappointing. The primary problem I had was that you have to play with the numchuck in your left hand, which makes you feel like playing tennis with a 2 foot rope tied between your two hands. As a result, the swings are not natural and your balance during play is nothing like real tennis. Maybe it would be more natural for people who hit both two handed back-hands and fore-hands where your left and right hands are allways close together. Having to control your character's running motion and the direction of the ball via your left thumb on the numbchuck expounds the bizare unnatural feeling. The game requires you to hold the controler in your right hand also in a strange manner with your index finger against the trigger button, and worse than the normal way to hold the controler in other games which is more like a tennis handshake type grip. i could only take this for about 15 minutes after which I smashed my elbow into a light while trying to time the serve swing with both my arms in the air. I won't play the game again. A big waste of money.

Top Spin More Spin Than Top

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: July 17, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I very much enjoy the simple WII version of Tennis, and so thought the same mechanics would be used in Top Spin 3, with maybe just different courts and one on one play. I was sad, when I discovered that the nunchuck was required, and angry at the awkward control scheme. Waste of money...absolutely no enjoyment value, for me, on this game.
To me, the genius of the WII platform is the simple, interactive nature of it. They've left simple behind, with this one...

They hyped online play... THERE IS NONE!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: July 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

'Nuff said. You'd have thought that they would have at least warned Wii buyers that they were gonna stiff us on the online play, but it appears they made an orchestrated attempt to hide that fact so that Wii buyers would buy it. Mine's going back without even being opened.

Very disappointed in Top Spin 3

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Overall this game was a huge disappointment! The graphics were poor and the game was boring. I wanted to sell this game after playing it just a couple of times. I'll think twice befor purchasing a new game without checking out the reviews.

On time release should not be Nintendo's #1 Priority

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 24, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Completely frustrated is the only way to describe my overall attitude towards this game!
I like the playability, the graphics are more than enough (You do not own the Wii for the graphics) but HOW IN THE WORLD do you market a game designed only for right handed play? No Rafael Nadal in the Wii version, makes sense now! Could they at least put this on the box to let us WEIRD LEFTIES know before purchasing that THS GAME IS NOT FOR YOU!
Furthermore (i know it was my fault for not reading reviews before purchasing the game), the print advertisements for this game pre-release all centered on the player creator capability, something that seems nowadays almost standard to gaming. Not available on the Wii i come to find out.
Nintendo should be ashamed of themselves for marketing a product like this, knowing that once their consumers open the product there is no returning it. Do they relize that they ARE NOT COMPETEING with the other gaming devices. They still have a nitch, and i, like i think most other Wii fans, would be much happier waiting a couple of extra months for a game to be developed with a total "Wii Experience" that cannot be found anywhere else.

Not what it was billed as

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: June 25, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Im so disappointed. Two of the main reasons i decided to buy Top Spin, was that amazon billed it as having online playability, and also billed it as having a player creator that allows you to make your own 'people' that look real.

The wii version comes with neither. Also the tutorials are crap. I expect a tutorial to be interactive and tell you whether you're doing what you're supposed to do. Top Spin has no 'tutorials' in that sense, it just has 10 seperate screens where there are typed instructions for how to do a certain 'action'.

I will give points for the music-- its fantastic, but Im thorougly disappointed with everything else. Even the 'fun games' mode is nothing more than regular tourney play with a slightly different 'point' system.

So disappointing.

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