Virtua Tennis 4

I started playing this game late in the day on Saturday and when I put it down and went to bed at about 2:30am I actually felt excited at the prospect of playing more the next day.

I played so much on Sunday that I had a headache by the time I stopped which lasted through most of Monday.

I played Career Mode almost exclusively and I have a thousand complaints about it but find the game so playable that I still couldn't stop today (Tuesday) when I played for an bit to remind myself about the game.

An initial glance at the layout of the Career Mode suggests that there is going to be too much messing about and not enough tennis being played.  This turned out not to be true.  There are several types of training but these are fun and add to the game.  Nothing else on the Career map (above) takes any time to do.

You start in Asia and move through Korea and China and then there are alternative routes to take, as there are at several points in the game.  The picture above shows the first significant place where your possible routes diverge.  At the bottom of the screen you can go to the right and take part in a tournament in Shanghai if your star rating is high enough.  If it is not your only alternative is to go straight down.

Your Star rating can be improved by giving to charity, doing well in practise matches or minor tournaments or taking part in publicity events.  The most stars are won by taking part in major events and winning them.  This last fact means that if you miss a major tournament you have a reduced chance of qualifying for the next one.  You can still take part in the four grand slams by playing in a qualifying tournament but the intermediate major events are off limits.

An additional factor is that you can only move through the map seen above by the number of spaces dictated by the tickets on the right of the screen.  You spend a ticket, move that many spaces and the ticket is replaced by one with a random number on from one to four.  If you do not have an appropriate ticket to get you exactly on to the tournament, you are not going.  In my first play through I missed the Shanghai tournament for ticket related reasons and from then on never caught up with the number of stars I needed to qualify for subsequent ones so I never attended one of these intermediate events, even though I was pretty soon winning every game I played in.  This was annoying.

My Player (this end with stupid hair) Squares-off against Roger Federer.

On the court, despite my boasting about winning all the time, there were plenty of disasters.  My biggest problem was pressing the button to hit the ball before my AI opponent had hit it so it did not register.  Sometimes, I would press it too late instead.  There were times when I was convinced I was getting no response from the controller.  I once lost a whole game through this repeatedly happening but I've got to admit that when I really concentrated it did not seem to happen and winning points was easy.

In spite of these frustrations, Virtua Tennis 4 now has its hooks in me and I will be suffering more headaches in the days to come.