The Game Boy Advance probably isn't the first system that springs to mind when people think of the best places to play sporting titles, but Mario Tennis: Power Tour offered a great time to anyone willing to give the handheld game a try. Released in , the gameplay was similar to that of Mario Power Tennis on the GameCube more on that later , with the gameplay being centered around earning power shots. Moreover, there are both offensive and defensive power shots available, which offers a good level of variety and strategy to the gameplay.
Surprisingly, Mario Tennis isn't the only Game Boy Advance tennis title worth checking out, as Virtua Tennis provides simple yet addictive gameplay on the limited system. The game's visuals are, unsurprisingly, very lackluster, though the gameplay is wonderfully well balanced and still thoroughly enjoyable today.
The second, but certainly not the last game from the critically acclaimed Virtua Tennis series to appear on this list, Virtua Tennis: World Tour, released on the PSP in As would be expected with a PSP title, the game didn't offer too many differences to the main series, but it's still a fantastic tennis game to play on the go.
Like most games in the Virtua Tennis series, one of World Tour 's main strengths is its wide range of game modes. Along with the main World Tour mode, players can compete online, play in tournaments, and take on some of the series' quintessential minigames. Released in the year , Mario Tennis is one of Mario's few sporting titles that doesn't implement any sort of power-ups in its core gameplay and instead offers a surprisingly realistic physics-based tennis experience. With an impressive Metascore of 91, Mario Tennis is the highest-rated Mario sports game ever when excluding kart racers, with just Mario Kart Super Circut 93 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe 92 being ahead of it.
Retro gaming is appealing for a variety of reasons. One of which is because winning can be more rewarding. Retro games like Super Tennis came with an instruction manual. It's yet another thing we miss about games like this.
Super Tennis is one of our favorite tennis games because of the amount of polish for its time. It was released in and contained characters with different play styles. Fine details like ball runners who grab balls caught in the net enrich the experience. Yes, EA Sports was in the business of making tennis games. They've dipped their hands into nearly every sport by now. Tennis is less prevalent in video games, but it boasts numerous fans worldwide for the sport as a whole, so of course, EA Sports was going to make a game or two.
We are waiting for Grand Slam Tennis 3 since there has been a shortage of decent tennis games in recent years. Featuring top players like Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova, the game was praised for its online gameplay. It doesn't quite measure up to other franchises like Virtua Tennis and Top Spin , but that won't stop many from picking up this tennis classic. The game that kicked off one of tennis's biggest video gaming franchises deserves recognition for that and more.
Don't feel alone if you hadn't heard about two out of three of these consoles. The console versions integrated a campaign mode, adding to their appeal. We're glad Sega decided to release Virtua Tennis 3 as a multi-platform game despite being out of the video game console market. The Sega Dreamcast may have kicked off the Virtua Tennis franchise, but Virtua Tennis 3 was a significant improvement over the first. Had this game built more on Virtua Tennis 2 , it would have ranked higher on this list.
Virtua Tennis 2 and Virtua Tennis 3 are strikingly similar and unfortunately contain most of the same faults. Now we're getting into some of the most influential tennis games in history. The original Top Spin is a feature-rich game with one of the most aspirational career modes in sports games.
The career mode allows you to sign with sponsors, which in turn unlocks clothing and fame. Virtua Tennis is a masterclass, but where so many failed, Top Spin surpassed Virtua Tennis by having an awe-inspiring career mode. Tennis for Two deserves special recognition for being possibly the first video game ever made. A pair of controllers enabled players to time hits and adjust return angles.
A year later, Higinbotham upgraded the display from five to 17 inches! If anything, Pong seemed like a step back from Tennis For Two , in that its abstraction of tennis was even less realistic, boasting a square ball and a court that had the ball bounce off of its edges.
However, Pong ushered in the era of home gaming when it leapt from the arcades to cheap TV devices. And the game itself still holds up surprisingly well, due to its intuitive nature and varying deflection angles, and the ball getting faster the longer a rally goes on.
By the time of the home micro, programmers were ambitiously attempting to recreate sports in a somewhat realistic manner given the limitations of the machines , but most of the tennis games were woeful. Match Point bucked the trend, with a fairly decent representation of a court and some surprisingly fast gameplay. You could say it was an 8-bit smash! If you were into rubbish jokes. You get plenty of shot types, arcade-oriented rallies, a touch of speech and even players desperately diving to make returns.
Virtua Tennis revolutionised tennis games in part through thumbing its nose to realism. Sega just did what Sega always does and transformed the sport into a breezy arcade experience, with speedy games, intuitive controls, and a selection of bizarre mini-games to help you train. There were also some truly terrifying representations of the tennis greats of the day, providing a glimpse into the first Wimbledon to occur after the zombie apocalypse.
With this entry, Sega either — depending on your opinion — took its game to an entirely new level, or repeatedly smashed its teeth out with a tennis racket. New controls enabled you to slice, and new characters enabled you to do so as a woman, but play was significantly harder from the off. Still, a hugely ramped up year-based World Tour mode afforded a considerable amount of depth to anyone who wanted to spend a lot of time with the slightly less zombie-like roster of players.
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