Top Spin 3 Hands-On

This owes itself to a new gameplay engine that's been, according to 2K developers, built from scratch in order to be more faithful and respectful to real-life tennis, while attempting to put more power in the user's hands to make specific types of shots. This, in our unskilled hands, meant that we hit lots of lob shots down the middle, and threw up a serve or two off our shoulder. Towards the end of our second match, though, we finally began to get the timing down and started to hit shots with slightly more force, albeit with little to no accuracy. For example, if we wanted to hit a groundstroke down the line with some force, we were forced to hit LB (to get to the proper angle to hit the shot) and immediately follow it with the left trigger and A, timed properly, using the left analog to place the shot. If you're better at video games than us, well, you will be able to do this before you finish two matches.

Where Top Spin shines is the same place it did last time around: Create-a-player. Having created ourselves with unrealistic attributes in games for 15 years now, we can say with some authority that this might be the deepest create-a-player mode we've seen in any game, ever. Fire Pro Wrestling has more in the way of moves and actions, but for strictly editing how a player looks, Top Spin has it beat. You'll need to pick up points to unlock more outfits and such, but out of the box, you'll be able to design a player to look more like anything -- human or non-human -- you want the player to be. Using the game's "Sculpt" mode, you can adjust one of 20+ hotspots on a player's face to tweak their skin just the way you'd like. If you're more like us, you can instead just pick a spot and hold down the buttons for all you're worth and end up with something that looks like Fran Stalinovskovichdavidovitchsky from "Dodgeball", a face with triangle shapes. You can add the Mike Tyson facial tattoo, which made our female character even more foreboding.You can even adjust items we didn't know faces even had -- did you know that you and I have a granularity? And it can be adjusted to one of six different settings? The bottom line is that if you can't make a realistic-looking you in Top Spin, you're a cyborg from another planet and you should really go back to where you came from. With that in mind, a disturbing message greeted us after we picked the race and sex of our player in the mode: "The gender and ethnicity you have selected will be used to provide your specific settings in the Player Creator". Foreboding.

Wii

We didn't get a chance to play the PS3 version, but we did get to sit down for a short time with the new Wii version of Top Spin, attempting to see if it was worth putting Wii Tennis away for.

The answer depends on a lot of things. Certainly, the Wii version of the game has very little in common with the 360 port. On the bright side, the Wii version features party games (apparently, people with 360's and PS3's don't play video games at parties).

On the dark side, the difference in graphics is what you might expect. The Wii version has visuals and player models that remind us a lot of the NFL GameDay series that 989 Sports put out. On the Playstation 1. Blocky as they are, they are still faithful to the real-life players, so you will get a different experience than playing with Mii's.

Gameplay-wise, the gameplay is reasonably similar to Wii Tennis, at least on the low-level basic back-and-forth volleying level. Putting a shot in down the line using the Nunchuk was pretty fun, but there still remains a question of how accurate the game will be in depicting shot types and styles in concert with the Wii control setup. That's something which, unfortunately, we didn't have the time to master and say with any level of authority.

What you're going to see in Top Spin 3 is a pretty authentic-looking simulation of tennis, albeit one with a serious lack of real tennis players. Adding Seles, Boris Becker, and Bjorn Borg as legends is a pretty sweet move, and create-a-player allows you to add virtually anyone you can fathom into the game, but there's just seemingly far too few real players to go up against to make the Career Mode significantly playable. Perhaps with that in mind, 2K has revamped online play to create a rankings system that resets itself every two weeks, the idea being to simulate the events and timeframe of a real tournament. Whether that will excite people who don't have the time to commit months and months to a top-rated online persona or discourage people who don't want to have to prove themselves every two weeks is hard to say.

Sadly, you won't get a chance to play against the real Maria, who confided that she's not much of a gamer. When asked about her greatest gaming moment, she said, "I think I beat Roger [Federer] once…most players don't get a chance to beat him." As he's one of the featured players in the game, you too can be on a pedestal with Maria Sharapova. You might wanna pack some earplugs.

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