2009's Top Spin 3 was, to its own rights, a good tennis game. The genre had been suffering from an outright drought for a couple of years, and what there was (ie Virtua Tennis 3) I felt did an overall poor job of imitating the sport on any level other than an aesthetic one. The Top Spin series had always done a decent job of balancing realism with accessibility, but moreover, tipped the balance in the favour is realism like "a big fat fucking retarded fucking black girl on a see-saw opposite... a dwarf", much to my delight. Yet TS3 was by no means perfect. Overly sluggish movement, bland audio, dismally inaccurate animations (Federer's serve- come on!) left me feeling vaguely cheated, seeing as though I had forked out $120 for a merely "meh" title.
Of course, critics disagreed with me, evening criticising Top Spin 3 as catering only for diehard fans, yet it didn't fully cater for me. This just reinforced what I already suspected: that I expected far too much from a tennis game, and being a fan of the sport was little more than a handicap when the time came to revel in playing a recreation of it.
When I read that yet another sequel, Top Spin 4 would soon be released, I greeted this news with mixed emotions. On the one hand I was excited to see how the developers would improve on its predecessor, yet at the same time I badly didn't want to set myself up for more disappointment. Furthermore, a new developer, 2K Czech, was taking on this mighty challenge, and this, coupled with screens resembling Top Spin 3 almost perfectly, left me with a resounding foreboding feeling.
I yesterday downloaded the Top Spin 4 demo, and despite its being needlessly large at 1 GB for merely a single tiebreak, I walked away impressed. Rather than redesign the mechanics of its predecessor, as I had hoped, it tweaks the gameplay mechanics, mimicking some of the nuances of tennis much better than 3 did. Serving with the analog sticks works far more smoothly this time around, the press and hold feature of more subtly implemented, allowing for an easy power/control choice, and on "Hard" difficulty, the AI foregoes cheaply ridiculous reach in favour of wily tactics, and provides a fair challenge.
The much lauded "TV style presentation" wasn't quite as smooth as I had expected, and the audiovisual department hasn't seen quite the overhaul I had hoped, but hell, it's gameplay that will keep you coming back to a title, not the other shit that we are immediately struck by. Top Spin 4 may not have implemented the commentary feature that fans like me begged for during its development, but 2K Czech impressed me. The nicest thing I can say is that I am still playing, and occasionally losing at, the demo. The computer even makes faults and unforced errors every once in a while- wow.
I probably won't but this game, seeing as though I'm meant to have quit altogether, but it's nice to know that in my absence, the genre is plodding onwards.
-Thanks for reading.
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