I don’t know why exactly, but I was recently recalling SNES Super Tennis with fond nostalgia, and I played the heck out of Top Spin 4 on the 360.
Then I started poking around and there doesn’t seem to be anything (that’s any good) for several years. Where did it go? Why is Top Spin 5 not on my PS4 or your XB1 or my Switch or our PC?
What happened?
I used to love Virtua Tennis on the Dreamcast.
I’m half expecting that someone will announce a ridiculous Tennis Royale game.
Ping-pong is where all the craze is at.
The last bastion for “sim” tennis was Virtua Tennis, and the last entry of that series came out so long ago that it got a Vita port at that system’s launch (and is no longer available for purchase digitally on any platform). There just doesn’t seem to be enough demand for a tennis game with licensed pros these days.
The Tennis Elbow series’ next installment is supposed to be out in a year or two. It’s an indie game (and looks like it!), but has easily the best gameplay and career mode I’ve ever seen in a tennis game. The most recent version is from 2013. It leans toward being more of sim experience rather than, say, the more arcadey trappings of Virtua Tennis.
Some of the Top Spin developers released the poorly-received Tennis World Tour about a year ago. Never played it, owing to its alleged terribleness.
I have no idea why Sega lost interest in the Virtua Tennis series, especially since Japan has got some actual tennis stars in the time since the last one came out. Those were always great.
This reminded me of a game I haven’t even thought about for 25 years - 4D Sports Tennis. Hard as nails and I spent countless hours on this making my own character and getting to the Championship. I haven’t played another tennis game since so I assume nothing better has come out in the last quarter century?
On court tennis from gamestar, serve & volley from accolade are the tennis games I remember. The good ol’ c64 days.
SNES Super Tennis was amazing. Whatever the Mario Tennis is called for the Switch is a bit disappointing, but it’s a pretty good Tennis game, if you turn off all the power up stuff.
Fuck yeah.
Hmm, was that the same series as 4D Boxing?
I never played Topspin on the 360, but I just watched some videos. Looks really good, is that series dead?
Tennis champs on iOS is outstanding. Not an console option but I think it is best option currently!
I’ve been looking for a tennis game to play. I was even tempted to install Virtua Tennis 4 on my Win10 machine.
There is apparently a new tennis game, but the word is it is a hot buggy mess.
AO international tennis has much better ‘recent reviews’ than at launch, and some mention that there’s alot of mod content. Should be worth a try when on sale next.
Tennis world tour has been patched a fair bit since release, but not much recent steam reviews to know if it has improved significantly.
Tennis elbow manager 2 came out recently and is apparently pretty good.
I second this question. I didn’t know another entry existed in the 4D Sports series.
Tennis Elbow is quite good. Don’t let the graphics keep you away from the gameplay.
DON’T MOCK ME but the tennis game on the Intellivision was fantastic.
Most of the sports games on Intellivision were incredible for the time.
Almost made me want to reinstall Virtua Tennis. Then I remembered it was saddled with Games For Windows Live for MSN 2000.