CAPSULE REVIEW: This is a fun game with lots of replay value. Frustrating
at times due to difficulty in judging depth/speed, its still very enjoyable
and has a large number of options (about 20? players, 4 court surfaces,
doubles&singles, half a dozen locations) to sustain interest. Generally
the play is close to real tennis (an important point for me). Most worrying
is that there may be a programming error--in a doubles match at match point
during the tie-breaker, it failed to switch my player to the other end of
the court (rather hilarious looking but I obviously couldn't return
serve and thus lost the match). I've only seen this problem once in about
6 to 10 hours of play.

REVIEWER BACKGROUND: I've had this game since Saturday and both my wife
and I have spent a number of hours playing the game already. I play a
number of hours of (real) tennis every week and accurate modelling of
the real game is an important issue to me.

GAME OVERVIEW: V Tennis is a 3D tennis game. You control a polygon-based
character within a match. There are many options including the type of
matches played, which player you use, what surface, playing angle etc.
The basic play consists of moving your character around the court to hit
the ball (hopefully for a winner :-).

CHARACTER CONTROL: Character control is very simple. You use the directional
pad to move the player around and one of the 4 main buttons to choose which
type of shot you will use. The shot options are: top-spin, flat, slice,
and lob. Placement of the ball is achieved by holding the directional-pad
in the direction you want the ball to go, as you hit the ball.

THE PLAYERS: There are something like 20 players to choose from, the number
being evenly divided amongst males and females. The characters are based
on the top tennis players of today with just a slight change in name to
(I assume) avoid being sued. So for example the top men players include
Sampras, Agassi, Becker etc. Each player has a rating in the following
areas: serve, forehand, backhand, footwork and dash-speed (I feel I might
be forgetting one). This is how you can control the "difficulty" of the
game, by choosing the skill (stats) of your player(s). Graphically the
players all look fairly similar (don't expect differences like you'd find
between Tekken characters for instance :-) with differences in colour of
shirt, shorts, hair (different hair styles too I think) and racquet.

OPTIONS, OPTIONS: There's a large number of options in the game and I
think most of them are useful and give the game lasting play value. You can
play singles or doubles with any mix of human and computer players (maximum
two human players). You can play at any of about 7 or 8 locations that
include Japan, Fiji, New York etc. These locations dictate the background
scene and also the music and sound effects heard. You can play on 4
different surfaces: grass, hard-court, clay and carpet. You can play
1-set, 3-set or 5-set matches. There are about 10 different viewing
perspectives to play the game from. These are important as some angles
make reading a shot (i.e., its depth and speed) very hard to determine.
Personally I favour angles 2 and 8. There's also options to control
background music, whether to switch ends or not (its harder to play from
the "far" end) and even the ball colour. There's also a tournament style
option with a save game feature as well as a player editor (create your
own player with its own stats).

REALISM: This was an important question for me: just how realistically
does the game play? My response to this question is mixed. In general it
plays quite like real tennis--I can serve a kicking slicer wide to the
forehand side and follow it in for a volley to the open back-hand side etc.
However to me there are some major differences. Net player's hands are
*fast*. What I mean by this is that computer players at the net pull-off
some incredible shots. You can smash overheads at or near them from
point-blank range and back it'll come. Funnily enough, if you set two
computer players against each other, you'll see incredibly long net
rallies (both players inside the service line volleying the ball).

Secondly, a lot of volleys seem to go up from the volleying racquet in
some sort of wierd arc rather than flat and down. Maybe its a timing 
thing (you don't have much time or visual data to judge ball flight)
as timing does affect your shot but its very unusual--only beginners
volley up like that as a rule.

Thirdly I've so far found one "cheap" way to win points on serve. By
serving very wide and very fast you can get a very high number of aces.
In doubles this is particularly true if you walk your server across to
the normal serving position for doubles (a bit inside the tram-lines).

SOUND: The background music while playing can get pretty annoying. I've
taken to turning it off. The ball sound and other background noises are
very accurate. There is a fair bit of speech in the game including the
scoring, player's names etc. Its also good.

VISUALS: There's not that many polygons defining each players and
nothing like gourad [sp?] shading is used. Still its effective enough
and you find yourself concentrating on play more than how your player 
looks. The courts are adequate but nothing special. I've noticed that on
at least one camera angle a large number of jaggies (no, not the game
machine but jagged lines :-) appear. The backgrounds are quite nice in
a number of the locations.

There's also a replay feature which will show you the last half-dozen
shots of the point that concluded each game. Its kind if interesting as
you can move the camera angle around. The one disappointment is that
only a small percentage of the frames were saved (memory constraints?)
so the motion looks a bit jerky.

Finally its sometimes very hard to accurately judge the flight of the
ball. Choice of viewing angle is particularly important here and I feel
that the default one (angle 1) is a poor choice. However I feel that
this problem is one that is inherent to the physics of the ball flight
(which seems to be modelled fairly accurately--I'm still not so sure
about those top-spin shots) and more importantly the 2D representation
of a 3D trajectory (our two eyes help greatly for depth/trajectory/speed
estimation in the real--read outside of TV--world).

BUGS!?: We've found one bug so far which is a bit worrying. My wife and
I were playing doubles against the computer and were at something like
9-all in the tie-breaker. In tie-breakers you change ends at every 6
points (in real tennis and the game). Anyway the end-change came about
and suddenly my player was up the other end of the court with our 
opponents. My wife was screaming with laughter as my character was
running around but of course we quickly lost (I obviously couldn't
return serve). Whether this was just a one off glitch or is a more
serious bug is unknown at the moment. [Editors Note: This might have
been fixed for the US release.]

FUN FACTOR: The bottom-line (of course) is whether you enjoy the game. In
this area I give the game a big thumbs-up. At my first play (I had just
come back from 4-hours of real tennis) I was quite disappointed though
my wife already loved the game. However the game has continued to grow
on me and I find myself looking forward to going home each day to play
a few sets of tennis.


							Spike
						    Bun Bu RyoDo
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Dr. Michael Barlow		spike@speech-sun15.ntt.jp
Human Interface Labs		Nippon Telegraph & Telephone
Tokyo, Japan.
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