Love - 60: Virtua Tennis 4
Love - 60 is a series about tennis videogames.
By Omar (@siegarettes)
For whatever reason, I love tennis videogames. I don’t play or watch the sport in real life, and I only became interested in it after playing Mario Tennis 64 as a kid. Since then I’ve gone on to spend a lot of with a virtual racket and ball.
Among its contemporaries, the Virtua Tennis series is probably the quintessential modern tennis game. Originally developed for arcades, it’s one of the more accessible games in the genre.
The most standout difference would be how shots are performed. While other games ask you to closely time your shots to the interception of the ball, Virtua Tennis requires you to press the button as early as possible for the strongest hit. This makes the game less about timing shots and more about controlling space. Reading the trajectories and getting in position early allows you a larger backswing and a stronger shot. There are no charge up shots, or complex motions, just reading the space and choosing the right shot for the job.
Actually, the most standout difference is probably the minigames. In an otherwise straight faced game, Virtua Tennis 4's campaign has training games that range from the plausible to the absurd. My favorite is probably Egg Collector, where you run over eggs to hatch chicks, then bring them over to mother hens while avoiding basketballs being fired at you. In a nod to Sega's Flicky, building up a following of chicks before bring them home will net you more points.
There’s also games where you flip cards until you’ve got a high poker hand, one where you hit soccer balls at an automated goalie, and another where you rally a timebomb, attempting to let it explode on your opponent’s side.
It speaks well to Sega’s brand of design, an unapologetic sense of gaminess in contrast to the sports genre’s meticulous facsimiles of broadcast style presentation.
The campaign is good fun as well. A board game style world tour that involves the careful use of tickets to move around the board, carefully managing your stamina and playing minigames to develop the stats of your custom character. You can also earn some absurd outfits to kit yourself up in.
If anything, Virtua Tennis’ problem is that it got it some mechanically right from the off. It’s a bit like the Tetris of tennis games in that respect, where anything outside of the solid core mechanics is just extra. Virtua Tennis won’t do much to surprise you, but it will entertain you, and maybe make you laugh on occasion.