Virtua Tennis 4 (PS3)

If you've ever wasted a serious amount of time in an amusement arcade, then you'll have no troubling recognising Virtua Tennis 4, the latest instalment in the popular Sega series and rival to the Top Spin games. The reason you'll find it so familiar, unfortunately, is the lack of any huge progression in the basic game-play. I last played Virtua Tennis in its second incarnation, and nothing much seems to have changed with the mechanics. Virtua Tennis 2 was an old favourite that I kept returning to for the arcade mode - something quick, fun, and easy to dive into. Part of the game's mass appeal was its arcade facility that let the newcomer quickly jump into the action and be almost instantly familiar with the movement and controls for a character. Though the onscreen characters are pretty accurate representations of Federer, Nadal, Murray et al, the training games to grind your character's stats are slightly offbeat and unrealistic. Not quite a Wii sports game, but you're thinking along the right lines. This latest version takes that to a different level - some of the mini-games for your character in career mode border on the bizarre. There's the traditional smashing of moving targets to practice your swing, but the games to hone your agility take a surreal turn, seeing you play against an opponent in a massive wind tunnel, or run around breaking eggs that hatch into chicks that you try and shepherd to their mother without being flattened by tennis balls whizzing at their heads. The career mode plays out in the manner of a board game - Sega doesn't have the licences to the tournaments so you end up travelling around the globe using numbered cards to advance along the steps, either training, competing, or meeting fans and taking part in photo ops. This is unusual and again, not too strong on verisimilitude, but has a cartoonish fun to it. The big addition to the game-play is the 'match-moment', which is a super-powerful shot that can be unleashed after powering up a bar in the HUD. Each player has specific abilities that should be utilised to exert pressure on opponents - Roddick has his big serve, for example - and playing these shots powers up the match-moment bar more quickly. Despite this admittedly interesting addition, I have to say I found the movement and control of the players to be quite difficult, and the AI of opponents seemed to be arbitrary. Initially, I was being easily matched by Laura Robson when I was playing as Rafa Nadal. On easy level. I obviously improved over time, but there should be a massive skill gap in those players that just wasn't particularly well-represented. The problem with Virtua Tennis is that there's nowhere really to go with the series. Sega seem to have realised this by not concentrating so much on innovations in game-play, but rather trying to push the envelope with the new technologies available for consoles. Kinnect and Playstation Move are both available on the relative systems. But for the gamer who is looking for something new, something exciting, you'd be looking in the wrong place here. Virtua Tennis 4, despite being the first of the games not to have an arcade version, is still a coin-op at heart.