Smash Court Tennis 3

Jul 19, 2007

The upcoming football and basketball seasons are still weeks and months away and the baseball season is hitting its dog days of summer mid-season stride. So, where does the sports fan look for excitement? Professional tennis. With the French Open and Wimbledon as recent memories and the U.S. Open just over the horizon, this is prime time in the tennis world. This fact wasn't lost on Namco Bandai. Its Smash Court Tennis 3 is hitting the shelves at the perfect time to catch the attention of tennis-loving PSP owners. But with one stellar court game -- Sega's Virtua Tennis 3 -- already available for the system, can this newcomer legitimately make a run for the title?

If you've played a lot of VT3, the first thing you'll notice when you see SCT3 is how nice the thing looks. The players just look a heck of a lot better and more realistic. The animations are smooth and there are nicely done reactions between volleys. The backgrounds may be a little more detailed in Sega's offering, but the graphics nod definitely goes to SCT3.

You can hit the court as most of the biggest names in the sport. On the men's side, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Andy Roddick are all available, and on the women's side, while you won't get to play as Wimbledon champ, Venus Williams -- a VT3 exclusive -- you will be able to play as Justine Henin, who's owned the French Open for the past three years and is available only in SCT3. All told you'll be able to hand the racquet to sixteen different pros.

While the two games are remarkably similar in terms of modes and basic gameplay, the deeper you get into SCT3 the more it distinguishes itself as a tennis sim. By comparison, VT3 is clearly an arcade game. For the most part, the action in SCT3 is a step slower than in Sega's game. It plays at a pace that's closer to the real thing. And because you're allowed an extra beat to get to the ball, the game is unforgiving if you're out of position. In VT3, as long as you're relatively near the ball, you can return the thing. Here, though, you not only have to be near the ball to return it, you have to be in a realistic position to do so. If you've been caught playing too close to the net and then try to hit the ball while you're backpedaling, your player won't attempt a shot. At first I thought the game was buggy until I realized that in the real world, I wouldn't have been able to get a shot off. It can be frustrating to find yourself handcuffed, but it's truer to the sport.

Also adding to the sim feel are the game's controls. While you can get away with playing with only the face buttons initially, eventually this simplistic strategy will catch up to you. Success is based on timing and using the nub to influence the direction of your shot. Different shots are assigned to the face buttons -- slices, lobs, etc. -- and the effectiveness of the shot is the result of holding down the button and then releasing at the right moment. In addition, fiddling with the nub will help you spot your shot. It'll take some getting used to -- and there's a pretty solid multi-level tutorial mode that'll help you -- but eventually these advanced controls will have you killing your opponent with perfectly timed drop shots and unhittable lobs.

While you may be happy just to plow through grass, clay and indoor exhibitions and tournaments as your favorite pro, the real game is in SCT3's Pro Tour Mode. Here, you create a player, and then -- starting at #250 in the world -- attempt to make your way up the rankings. Along the way, you'll get to upgrade your skills in some mini-game-style challenges and do cool stuff like get sponsors. You can also choose doubles and mixed doubles partners to compete with. And, apparently, someone in development has been playing a little too much Pokemon. The only way you get a player to join you as a partner is by beating them in a head-to-head duel.

Where VT3 shines -- and SCT3 stumbles a bit -- is in the available mini-games. VT3's roster of tennis-based distractions was huge and crazy fun. In SCT3, you're only offered three mini-games. They're just as bizarro-world as those in Sega's game but not nearly as much fun. In Pac-Man Tennis, you play on a giant Pac-Man-maze-looking court with Pac-Man as the ball. Every time the ball bounces, it takes out a mess of Pac-Dots and the winner of each point gets the number of Pac-Dots "eaten" during the volley.

Galaga Tennis is even more confusing and less fun. You play on a court that's floating in space and try to hit aliens with the ball while avoiding being sucked up in an old-school-looking vortex thingee. I think. The third mini-game, Bomb Tennis, again, isn't very much fun, but it is really disturbing. You play on a regular court with a bomb as the ball. The longer the volley, the more likely the ball is to explode. If you score a point, more bombs get dropped on your opponent's side of the court. Eventually there are so many bombs around that a well-placed shot will trigger a chain reaction of explosions, leaving your opponent dead in the middle of the burnt-out crater that used to be his side of the court. If you're a terrorist that's always dreamed of screwing with a professional sporting event, you may dig this.

While it would have been cool to be able to take on the world in Infrastructure mode, the best you can do with SCT3 is hook up with friends via ad hoc. To its credit, though, it does go VT3 one better by offering a limited number of modes that can be played Game-Sharing-style off of a single UMD.

Despite being possibly the greatest invention of all-time -- okay, that's just my bias -- the PSP has always suffered from an inconsistent roster of available games. The tennis crowd, though, has nothing to complain about. Earlier this year, it got Sega's Virtua Tennis 3 and now it gets to volley away with Namco Bandai's Smash Court Tennis 3. Both are excellent games. The pace of things and the more demanding controls in Smash Court Tennis 3 may bum out those expecting more of an arcade tennis experience, but anyone looking for a truer-to-life sim-style take on the sport should definitely check this one out.