Amazon.com: Virtua Tennis 3: Xbox 360: Video Games

19 Reviews

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

Average Customer Review

4.1 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Slight changes make VT3 just short of perfect, March 22, 2007

By	Bert Rinderle (L.A., CA United States) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

When Sega's Virtua Tennis first appeared on the Dreamcast, it was easily the best tennis game ever made. A follow-up, Tennis 2K2, improved on the original, and was eventually ported to the PS2, GBA, and PSP. However, a rival franchise, Top Spin, soon appeared on the Xbox, and stressed realism over the simple arcade action offered by Virtua Tennis (which was originally an arcade game anyway). The questions were soon asked: a) Will Virtua Tennis return? and b) Will Top Spin influence it?

The answer to the first question has been answered with an overwhelming YES, but the answer to the second may not be so obvious. VT's trademark controls are back - one button each for topspin, slice, and lob shots, with the analog stick controlling both character movement and shot direction - but VT vets will undoubtedly notice some tweaks right away.

The biggest addition is the "running shot", where your character will launch a powerful stroke while charging full-speed at a ball just out of reach. While this allows you to return out-of-reach shots with more force, your court position becomes compromised, as you're often far outside the lines once your momentum stops. What this means is player position in relation to the ball is much more important than in the past two games (which would automatically adjust position for you as long as you hit the button at the right time). In Virtua Tennis 3, it's more difficult to get precise angles and top-power shots, but ultimately, this makes the gameplay deeper and makes hitting great shots more rewarding.

But isn't Virtua Tennis supposed to be an easy-to-learn, easy-to-play experience? Well, yeah, and it still is - it's just that the learning curve is a little steeper. One might wonder if Sega did this in order to give the online portion of the game lasting appeal, and it certainly seems like it worked, for better or worse.

Create-a-player and World Tour are basically the same - start with a scrub and slowly work your way up through the rankings over a 20-year career, playing imaginative mini-games to improve your skills, entering tournaments, and collecting new gear. Outside of World Tour, there are Exhibition matches and Tournemant mode to play (with up to four players, with options galore), and you can also play the mini-games with multiple people via the new Court Games mode.

VT3 has vastly improved visuals. Player models are crisp, clear, and colorful, the courts are full of personality, cheering crowds, and ubiquitous advertising. While some player close-ups still look like brain-dead clones (or worse), the motion capture is amazingly, hauntingly realistic. Federer's casual yet deadly serve is perfect, Sharapova tucks her hair behind her ears, Nalbandian does his one-legged power backhand, Nadal dashes all over the court, Davenport wraps the ball around her racket when serving....the attention to detail is astonishing. The music is the same guitar cheese as before, which is a love-it-or-hate-it detail, but the rest of the sound effects are spot-on (a few overly energetic grunts aside).

VT3 is easily as good as either Top Spin title, and is arguably the best tennis game ever produced. New players shouldn't have a lot of trouble picking up and playing, but long-term fans of the franchise should be ready for a small and sobering dash of realism. A tiny bit of the Virtua Tennis magic has been lost, true, but do not let that stop you from picking this up, as there's certainly enough goodness here to make up for it.

Virtua Tennis 3 comes strongly recommended as a highly enjoyable single- and multi-player experience (thank goodness for wireless controllers!). It's without a doubt one of the finest four-player non-shooter games on the 360 (nice to have a four-player game with no split-screen!!), and even gamers who don't normally play sports or tennis games may very well find a lot to like.

Comment Comments (2) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wasn't Broken...wasn't fixed, March 22, 2007

By	Chon-ny "Your Sensei's Sensei" - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

Sega took tennis gaming to new heights with intuitive, simplified controls to go along with fluid graphics on their now defunct Dreamcast console. The formula was simple: three hit types (slice, lob, top spin), a two-hit serving system (hit a button to start the power meter, hit it again to stop at the desired power), and actual players endowed with their particular strengths, be it Tommy Haas' booming forehand or Thomas Enqvist's backhand. The original Virtua Tennis and Tennis 2K2 became the staples for gamers wanting an easy control system, without too much of a cartoon-y feel.
And little of that system has changed with the release of Virtua Tennis 3. There are a few new animations, like a jacknife return, or players falling to their hands as they try to recover from heading in the wrong direction. You'll get to enjoy Roddick's powerful serve and counter it with James Blake's powerful ground game. And achievements are plentiful and easy to come by; I had racked up over 100 achievement points in just under an hour.
Online play was reasonably well done; not all the animations come through as fluidly, and you'll have to get used to the occasional phantom racket, where an opponent seems to get a ball just out of his range, probably the result of a skip in animation where the dive for the ball didn't show. Hopefully, this can be addressed via patch releases. There is also a pretty awesome option to watch other Xbox Live matches, or highlights from other live matches. You can even take your customized character online.
The World Tour finally gets a personal touch to it: coaches communicate to you about slowing down on practice, congratulating you on beating people, and new equipment, while players you meet on the tour set up practice matches which don't affect your ranking, but increase your skill. The mini-games are numerous and entertaining--you get a new one about every seven to ten successful "weeks" of playing tournaments and mini-games. Instead of spending money to get new gear, you receive new rackets, shoes and accessories for free based on your tour success, similar to the Rainbow Six: Vegas gear-ranking system.
The customization options remain horrible in terms of the player's physique and facial features, given the advances in custom player options in all other games.
To be flat out honest? VT3 is basically Tennis 2K2, now in HD, now playable online, now with Xbox Achievement points. Just enough to make it worth it.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Positives and negatives of virtua tennis 3, March 23, 2007

By	Jason T. Hill "jasonhill" (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

For those tennis gamers that have tried all the console games out there for xbox 360, ps2, psp and ps3 this may be the best game to purchase.
It reminds me a lot of the original smashcourt for ps2.
Game play is very arcade like. If you move your racket back early and hit a groundstroke you are rewarded with a blazing shot. The only issue I had with this is that I couldn't 'paint the lines' with my player. You could get close to hitting a down the line shot but there is no way of actually doing it on grass, hard court or clay.
The 20 male players look and play exactly like their real life counterparts.
This is great. Additionally the courts look amazing and the motion of the players is so life-like that it looks like a real match (especially on my 36" sony HD tv).
A negative is that you can't hit a true drop shot to bring your opponent in. The best game for that feature is smash court 2.
However, virtua tennis 3 has the most believable net play (serve/volley & chip and charge) of any tennis video game to date. Major positive!
The world tour mode where you take a created player thru tourneys to build up their rankings and to play against today's greats is a lot of fun.
The exhibition feature is a great way to get a quick match in and that's entertaining as well.
The flawed feature is the tournament mode. You don't play on the same court. Example would be you can choose Federer as your player, beat Taylor Dent on grass and then your second round match is on clay against David Nalbandian. Annoying! That doesn't happen on the world tour mode where the brackets are laid out perfectly.
I was burned by purchasing top spin 2 for xbox 360 which tried to be more 'real' but ultimately had so many different button choices that you could lose your train of thought trying to play it.
Am I glad I purchased this game? Yes. I'd give it a solid B.
I wish they would add a legends area where we could pick Andre, Bjorn Borg, Patrick rafter and Pete Sampras.
The best xbox 360 sports game I own is still NCAA 2k7 basketball.