“Brace Yourself…”

I have never been so frightened in my life.  Forget Resident Evil 5, forget PS3 update load times, HOME bubble dancers or broken Fallout updates…Virtua Tennis 2009 is hands down the most disturbing game experience of the last year. Picture, if you will, the serene intensity of real world Tennis. Now throw in a cancerous loop of guitar rock and drums, mind-numbing mini-games, player models that look like they’re from an Anne Leaky exhibition, a excruciatingly long career mode, and the control responsiveness of a Mack Truck and you have Virtua Tennis 2009.

While I could spend a chunk of your time explaining what Sega was trying to accomplish, I think it’s best I just cut to the chase and declare Virtua Tennis 2009 as one of the poorest excuses of a professional sports-based game ever to be inserted into the current generation of consoles. If you want to play tennis with your tv, you might as well forget current-gen consoles and pick up EA’s “Grand Slam Tennis” for the Wii.

(Should you choose to read ahead, please know that you may poop your drawers in fright.)

It must be trying for developers to get excited about designing a product like Virtua Tennis for the 360 and PS3, especially in the age of Wii Sports Tennis taking on a new life thanks to Nintendo. Shipping the sordid leftovers of the far superior Wii version to the other consoles with such fanfare seems completely defeatist. Instead of enabling tennis aficionados (like myself) to revel in the beauty of the sport and all its inner graces, using an archaic analog controller, it chooses to omit all fun from the game, leaving behind a wake of poorly animated zombies that spasticly mimic an advanced form of Pong.

Upon spending 30 minutes molding my “customizable” player into something that slightly resembled myself after a tragic car accident, I realized I was in for a ghastly ride. All of the negativity aside, a glimmer of hope arrived when I saw the navigable world which would serve as my player’s developmental palette. Filled with mini games, calendars, practice matches and world stadiums, the game menu proved intriguing and my spirit was lifted. “It can’t be so awful!” I mused. “It’s a tennis game. How bad can it be?”

“How Bad Indeed!”

One hour later my brain began to liquefy an attempt to evacuate from my ear and nasal canals, as I chugged, make that sloughed, through Career Mode. After embarking on a whirlwind tour of practice matches, asinine mini-games and frustrating training exercises, did I realize that the game was going to go nowhere for an indeterminable amount of time. The individually crafted mini-games (which build your 3 basic attributes of feet, serve, and smash) became irritating after about 2 rounds and the timed training even more so. Despite the fact that I grasped the needs of the countdown challenges, the fact that I could change my stances and defenses made no difference in the game. Even as an RPG fanatic, I found the amount of character building both tepid and stiff.

Amuzingly, I couldn’t manage please my coach in the training exercises, yet I still couldn’t lose in the ranked matches as long as I hit the ball hard cross-court every single time. I was pulverizing the competition with a simple strategy when it counted. It seemed I would be at Wimbledon by nightfall. Alas, my hopes at a championship were shattered after a 3 hour butt-numbing romp and 15 or so matches (equal to 43 weeks in game), I raised my rank from the lowly 100 to 89, earning what seemed like some serious cash.

I feigned excitement over having money to buy new gear but in the world of Virtua Tennis, purple shorts cost $3600 and offer no visible “enhancements.” I chose to spend the money on vacations in order to restore my player’s depleted stamina bar; And I took alot of friggin’ vacations. Apparently, Virtua Tennis is damn exhausting- The more you play, the worse you are for wear. To make matters worse, a night at home (which is free) doesn’t put but a dent in your energy bar. So instead, you end up taking a 2 week vacation for $1000, thus leaving behind a shitton of matches in the dust. (The schedule repeats, so fear not fellow gluttons of punishment!) Hence, you spend more time micromanaging your career than actually playing tennis, or in my case, you spend more time feeling filthy and ashamed for ever inserting the disc.

“Gonna get McEnroe on yer ass…”

No matter how they tried to spice it up, Virtua Tennis remains a blight on what used to be a gem in the Dreamcast’s crown. In a genre where sound is essential to recreating the ambiance, Sega chose to hire a monkey to work the mixing board. For example, grunts from opposite court will emit from behind you! The repetition of the same 4 voices serving as every player will drive you totally McEnroe. Sneakers don’t shuffle, but rather squeak like they were lifted from NBA Live. Then there’s the music, please don’t make me hum it. It wraps itself around your brain and squeezes the life out of whatever motor functions you retain. I liken the sound design akin to having a rabid weasel crawl inside your mouth and attempt to find a way out..

As if the nuances of sound design weren’t enough to puncture my eardrums, there’s the whole issue of graphic presentation. To start with, most players have a skin tone or color that rarely matches up with any known tint in the Milky Way. Rafa, for instance, looks like he was raised in Freddy Kruger’s boiler room furnace, with a nice rigid sheen of burned skin. Sharapova might as well be Asian and everyone else looks and lurches like lidless zombies from a Romero flick. The animations are seldom fluid and the simplicity of the controls leaves plenty to be desired.

Countless times I hit the ball whilst flailing and tumbling across the court, countless times resulting in a match endding 40-love, thus proving my dominance as the town spaz. The lack of care in the animations and mechanics isn’t just lost on the players. The crowd, the ball boys, all the “details” that attempt to create the mirage of the wonderful world of tennis, are just as stiff and lifeless as the game itself. The glorious cheers of the repetitively drawn crowd were buried under the whimper of my disappointed sobs. Why place ball boys in 8 locations if they’re never even gonna move?

I have a hard time believing that any of the players who lent their good names to this half-assed emulation, ever even saw the actual character models. Everything is so poorly rendered its hard to believe they let it hit the shelves. If there were ever a year that a major sports game has been phoned in, this might be it. In the name of objective journalism, I went on to play as inappropriately rendered “crispy burn victim” Rafa Nadal through the entire Arcade Campaign. 80 minutes later, I had won every tournament with my “complex” strategy that I had carried over from Career Mode. It was upon entering every major stadium that I noticed the void of corporate sponsorship and licensing, unlike EA’s “Grand Slam Tennis” for the Wii, which layered in plenty of real world logos, sponsorships and actual club names. Virtua Tennis ’09 only suggests the famous locations and offers none of the big name gear and products found in EA’s  far-superior new franchise.

I imagine corporate sponsors fled at the sight of hundreds of racket wielding zombies, searching for a safer place to lend their likenesses and recognizable names. I think that’s the biggest rub: Tennis games used to be simple, sexy and most importantly, fun to play. We wouldn’t have video games if it weren’t for the birth of Pong, so video game tennis needs to carry the torch of our console’s forefathers. If anything, tennis games should be getting better, not worse. With abysmal graphics, lackluster sound design and oversimplified mechanics, Virtua Tennis 2009 proves that the Wii is the only place to play pixelated tennis anymore. Double Fault on Sega for letting this one slip over the net with a deafening thud.