Virtua Tennis: World Tour [PSP]

Dreamcast hit Virtua Tennis remains one of the best games in the now-departed console's impressive library. Accessible and well suited to quick five-minute bouts, it ought to make a perfect handheld game, and so it has proven. Sega's Virtua Tennis World Tour is gripping, controls beautifully, and is one of the best PSP multiplayer games around.

The meat of Virtua Tennis' single-player game is the World Tour mode. You start by creating a pair of players, one male and one female, by defining their facial features, size, weight, and so on... rather like a couple of EA games we could name. At the beginning of the game, your dynamic duo is, well, crap -- he's ranked 300th in the world and only able to enter a handful of events.

Luckily, that state of affairs doesn't last too long. In the weeks when there's no appropriate contest to enter (which, at the start, will be the vast majority of the time) either of your players can play training games to boost their skills. Successfully completing these imaginative, 30-second slices of fun rewards your player with skill improvements, but even if you don't hit the (often lofty) targets, you'll receive a small bonus anyway.

Once a suitable match comes along, you'll find essentially the same Virtual Tennis game you probably know and love from its long history on other platforms. Getting your player into roughly the correct area and hitting a button is all you need to do to pull off a successful shot, so the learning curve is gentle. Dramatic, well-produced animations accompany each move, so even a novice player can dive around like a pro.

More experienced players will find that despite this easy-to-learn exterior, there's more than enough depth to keep them playing for ages. The AI puts up a stiff, convincing challenge, and producing a truly world-class pair of players will take a significant amount of time.

Even when you're playing at the far end of the court, the graphics are clear enough that visibility is never an issue. The ball has a subtle trailing blur effect which serves both to emphasize its speed and make it easier to see against the sometimes busy backgrounds. The players and stadiums don't look quite so good, but you rarely see them up close. During a rally, the flow of the player animations is top-notch.

While the loading times aren't too bad by PSP standards, there can be an irritating pause at the end of some points. It seems like it takes a second or two to load the umpire's next voice clip, and as you are sometimes still straining to reach the ball at the time, it's intrusive. The menus aren't the best, either, exhibiting similarly annoying loading pauses and a generally unintuitive design.

Fire up a multiplayer session, and these concerns will be forgotten. So will anything else you had planned for the next few hours. Virtual Tennis' user-friendly controls and high-pressure gameplay make it the perfect multiplayer experience. It's ad-hoc only, so you'll need all the players to be in the same general location, but if you can manage the organization needed for a four-player doubles match you'll find few better ways to fill your time.

Much like the Dreamcast game before it, this slick conversion should please just about anybody. It's at its best with a crowd of friends, but the single-player mode does have enough substance to make it a worthwhile purchase even if you don't anticipate much chance for group play. In short, it deserves to be a smash. Sorry.