Monday, February 11, 2008

Preview: Sega Super Stars Tennis: Ace or a Fault with the Wii?


Well its almost common knowledge by now that almost anything 3-D that Sonic Team makes ends up a mediocre game, with yet another failed attempt at bring back Sonic... well failed. We saw this with Sonic Riders Zero Gravity, so should we expect any better from Sega Superstars Tennis?





So we see that Tennis is one of the most popular games on Wii Sports. A game bundled with Wii's and has been very well receipted. Nintendo aced the tennis formula for gameplay, and surprisingly, not one Tennis game has been made after Wii Sports. Which released when the Wii did... November 19, 2006. Here we are in 2008 almost a year and a half later, and still no tennis game? But now Sega has stepped up with a tennis game, and with no word on that Mario Tennis game, this may be the only tennis game we have for a while.


Here is a bit of Gamespots' impressions with the game.

The gameplay here is about as straightforward as you'd expect. You have a regular power swing and a slice, and you can mix the two up for other kinds of shots. Your special-attack gauge is represented by a star underneath your character that will slowly fill up as you successfully keep up a volley with your opponent. Most of the special attacks we saw involve confusing your opponent or cluttering up his or her side of the court. Sonic morphs into Super Sonic, at which point his shots will take random angular turns after he makes them. AiAi flings a bunch of banana peels onto the other side of the court with every shot. Eggman similarly throws a few electrified, spiky balls over the net. These special abilities last for only a few shots, and you lose them after someone scores a point, so they aren't exactly match-winners in their own right. However, they can still give you an advantage at times.

Superstars Tennis has the standard single-match and tournament modes you'd expect out of a sports game, but we were most intrigued by the superstars mode, which gives you a number of themed missions to complete that will subsequently unlock new content (such as the aforementioned characters, new courts, and new music tracks). In the House of the Dead challenges we tried, we had to hit balls across the court at an endless wave of zombies that were shambling toward us. In a follow-up mission, we had to score a specific number of aptly named "zombie combos" by taking down two or more zombies with one shot. Another Jet Set Radio-themed mission had us skating around the court with Beat to pick up spray-paint cans being tossed in front of us, and in the second version of this challenge, we had to use these color-coded spray-paint cans to fill in a design on the opposite side of the court in a sort of paint-by-numbers fashion.

Source: gamespot.com

No comments: