Whatever happened to tennis games?

Almost made me want to reinstall Virtua Tennis. Then I remembered it was saddled with Games For Windows Live for MSN 2000.

Tennis Elbow is a fantastic tennis game that looks hideous and has a stupid name. It’s really good at the tennis part though and has a career mode which is great.

It’s also very customisable to get the difficulty where you want it to be. You can even change the difficulty mid match if you really want to.

I read there’s a new one coming soon. That does not look hideous. There’s apparently the World Tour game on the Switch that has a really good career mode and the rest of it is garbage, I guess.

There are a few on Steam that are just too hard to tell how they are at all, because Steam reviews are all over the place.

I am not a fan at all of Mario Tennis and I’ll skip that, even if I can turn off all the flashy bits.

The AO International game is the same price (seemingly every PC tennis game is $25). Which is better? I don’t know. Can I mod in an actual career mode and beat up on Rafael Nadal in anything, while playing at the actual U.S. Open? I don’t see anything like that anywhere.

Wii Tennis was one of my… favorites.

This is possible with Tennis Elbow. When you start your career you even get to pick what stage you’re at, so you don’t have to start playing qualifiers for junior tournaments and work your way up, you can start on the outskirts of the top 100 and go from there.

There are a couple mods to put the real names into the career mode, (they’re only in “seasons” mode by default) and you can see popular mods here [FAQ] How To Mod + Popular Mod List :: Tennis Elbow 2013 Modding

I know there’s a Tennis Elbow Manager 2 recently released, but I haven’t heard anything about the player game getting a second version. If there is a Tennis Elbow 2 coming soon, I’l certainly buy it because it’s an excellent game of tennis.

Switch has a bunch. Instant Tennis is cheap and looks like a Wii Tennis knockoff and is apparently at least decent. I’ve thought of getting it.

Apparently it’s the same dev and publisher so going with “yes”. I had no idea there was a 4D tennis. I played a crap load of 4D boxing.

Hello, I’m the Tennis Elbow game series author. :-)

Next TE will be TE4 ; its prototype should come within a few weeks ; you’ll find more info here : https://www.managames.com/Forum/topic15-30551.php .

If you like management, then TEM2 also offers you to take the control of your coached players, if you wish to, and features a good part of TE4 improved ball, strike & player physics.

You’ll find its demo here : https://www.managames.com/tennismanager/ .

I must say that it does look good. (TE4, 2019?)

Now this is good news.

If you still have your Wii (or Wii U) hooked up, Grand Slam Tennis is worth a look.

This is the 1st Beta of TEM2 (with some sound Modding).

The v1.0 looks a tiny bit better, as it has been ported to the Unity engine :

The switch didn’t really appeal to me, but I will have to keep that in mind. If they are still doing light but fun games like that, it’s certainly a factor.

They have a ton of ‘light’ games, but it’s debatable as to them being fun or not. Most seem to me to be shovelware and/or phone ports. But I haven’t dropped the $2-$10 on any to check for myself. This is really one of my few complaints about the Switch. I get excited to see a few new games in the store only to check them and see it’s a bunch of trashy looking cash grabs. I’m sure there are some that are kinda awesome (like the tennis one I mentioned seems to be), but most are probably the junk they appear to be.

Yeah aside from a couple of outliers, I like the first party mini games not the other stuff. Good know. Thank you.

Tried AO International on Steam.

Looks nice, sounds nice. Can’t hit a winner past even the lowest rated AI players. 90% of my shots are unforced errors. Really ‘fun’.

Next.

Maybe Pickleball wrecked video game tennis?

Love, love, love tennis games…those and golf are my fav games ever…it does seem weird there haven’t been any GOOD tennis games on the big consoles…maybe PS5.

Just a heads up: Tennis World Tour 2 is free this month on PS Plus.

It’s the PS4 version, and I think it’s $30 to upgrade it to the PS5 version, but I’ve been having some fun with the base (free) game.

Career mode is solid if awkward to navigate. Player creation is too simplistic and there aren’t enough options to make the created player unique.

But the tennis itself is unforgiving-ly good. It reminds me of Top Spin.

Hilariously this report got me quite interested in the game, and I am buying now after reading reviews. I’d love a great competitive tennis game.