Whilst my love for American Football and IndyCar racing puts me very much in a sporting minority when it comes to this country, I doubt there’s anyone I know who’s never picked up a tennis racket or watched a few sets at Wimbledon each July. The game is hugely popular just about anywhere you go, be it some random London suburb or posh health club on top of a hill with one of those fancy automatic gate entry systems. The fact that anyone can pick up a Slazenger and give the thing a go means there’s a heck of a lot of people out there that think they’re pretty handy when it comes to real-life pong.

For most of us though, the big money tournaments are something we’ll only ever watch as spectators. It’s therefore been left to developers of a whole raft of tennis games over the years to allow us to win countless Grand Slams and parade around in fancy branded tennis gear without looking like a complete muppet. I’m a hardened veteran of such antics, with thousands of games of Super Tennis and Top Spin under my belt, and it was with high anticipation that I slotted in SEGA’s brand spanking new Virtua Tennis 3 into our office machine.

It’s been a pretty long time since the last ‘proper’ home console Virtua Tennis; by my counting, I make it about 5 years. Since that time it’s safe to say that Microsoft have snuck in and claimed the top spot with their Top Spin series, taking the classic tournament and exhibition modes and adding a varied career mode to absorb players into their own slices of tennis history. Virtua Tennis 3 offers this in the form of World Tour Mode, whilst also giving players the aforementioned staple tennis game offerings in addition to multiplayer modes.

Before delving too deeply into such things, peeling away all the options, lovely graphics and horrendous pop-metal soundtrack reveals a solid, hugely enjoyable tennis game at the core. The Virtua Tennis series has always been about simplicity in control, and with the player only having to use the four face buttons (two of which perform the same shot) it’s remarkably easy to pick up the game and just play. There are no combinations of buttons to perform lobs; no extra risk shots or special moves. Press triangle and you’ll lob. Press square and you’ll use backspin. The other two do a classic topspin effort.

The complexity – if you can call it such – comes in the way you position your player and angle your shot. Doing away with the notion of holding a button for longer to get a more powerful shots, VT3 rewards players who instead manage to get their player into a good position early and tap their shot button well in time. You could certainly argue that this is more in keeping with real life, as numerous times you see players drift into a great position and deposit powerful, pinpoint shots with a deft flick of the wrist. Standing a few feet away from the ball and swishing your racket at it to give it a good spanking won’t work here, I’m afraid.

In the same way, stretching for the ball and still expecting to be able to send an epic cross-court victory smash at your opponent just won’t happen. Holding the directional buttons (or analogue stick if you’re one of those pesky new-fangled kids) for a varying amount of time will change the direction the ball deflects off your racquet, with mere taps of left and right peppering the centre court area and longer, more pronounced presses angling the ball in whichever direction is appropriate. Once again, though, you’ll have to develop a sense for where your player needs to be in order to get the most out of your opportunities.
It will take some time for the nuances of the system to settle in, and it’s highly likely that for the first few games you play you’ll end up diving everywhere to get to balls you would have expected to have hit normally, or having shots weakly trickle to your opponent for them to smash past you with glee. Gradually, however, it all sinks in. You’ll soon start anticipating your opponent and moving into positions that will allow you greater angle and pace on your shots. Outdoing other players becomes not only a matter of hitting the ball as hard as you can into the largest patch of space; you’ll need to work on wrong-footing other guy and taking advantage.

So, what of the World Tour mode, then? The other two main modes – Exhibition and Tournament – are pretty much self-explanatory, but SEGA’s latest version of the career mode is a probably where you’ll spend most of your time in single player. You start off by being able to create either a male or female character and selecting your home base on a rotating globe, upon which icons pop up. These icons indicate training mini games that you’ll need to play in order to raise your skills, and also any new tournaments for you to enter should your world ranking be at a high enough level.

The general idea is to complete training games every so often to boost your stats, and then take part in and win tournaments and then upgrade your character with new clothing or rackets they may have won. The more you practice, the higher your player’s skills become and the better they’ll be able to cope with the higher ranked tournaments as you progress to them. It’s pretty much as you’d expect in that respect, and the climb from being number 300 in the world to ousting Roger Federer or Maria Sharapova as kingpin (or queenpin, I suppose) will certainly absorb over a dozen hours of your life.

That’s not to say that there aren’t annoyances, mind. The game attempts to introduce an element of fitness into proceedings by having a stamina bar at the top right of the screen. Taking part in tournaments and training drains this, and if you don’t go to your home and rest you’ll suffer an injury or get ill, which will drain your stats and force you to have to play the mini games over again to get back to where you were. On the face of it this isn’t too bad, but random injuries and illnesses seem to crop up even when the bar is practically full, robbing you of the opportunity to play in any immediate tournaments. Realistic perhaps, but hardly enjoyable when you see a good half-hour of mini game work falling away quicker than Tim Henman’s nerve through no fault of your own.

It would also be fair to suggest that perhaps the mode starts off a little slowly, giving players no real option other than to travel around playing the training games instead of entering tournaments. Being ranked lower than about 200th will see you only having one tournament every couple of months to raise your ranking, and as fun as the mini games are initially they do begin to drag a little in time. They’re certainly an imaginative bunch; hitting balls into windmills to winch crocodiles away from chunks of meat isn’t a training exercise that had occurred to me before, I must admit.

But hey, it’s still good fun at the end of the day. When it’s all done and dusted you’ll be left with a pretty decent custom player to play against your mates with. That being said, one major quibble with the PlayStation 3 version in comparison to its 360 counterpart is the rather puzzling loss of any sort of online mode whatsoever, meaning you’ll have to actually socialise ‘n stuff if you want to experience the multiplayer aspect of the game. It’s actually a pretty big miss given the PS3’s free online service, and as much as a usually harp on about games nowadays focusing too much on online play rather than offline multiplayer, the reverse is certainly as annoying. Given the two versions being practically identical to one another, it’s pretty hard to therefore justify recommending the PlayStation 3 version over the 360 one given it’s been shorn of a pretty major feature.

If you don’t happen to have that option handy and you have a few mates who enjoy tennis games (and who doesn’t?), the game comes highly recommended. The tennis itself is hugely enjoyable and instinctive, and the World Tour mode will absorb you for a good chunk of time. The lack of an online mode does grate a little, but the overall package is so good around it that you’ll find more than enough to do around that. The game is visually pleasing with a whole range of modern stars of both genders for you to play as and against, and if you turn off the soundtrack before it makes your ears bleed the general sound effects are representative of the sport and build a surprisingly good atmosphere during epic rallies. It might lack a little spit and polish, but it Virtua Tennis 3 also serves up possibly the best game you’ll be able to feed your new PS3 at this stage of its life.