Smash Court Tennis 3 [PSP]

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.

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