WTA Tour Tennis

WTA Tour Tennis

The kind of tennis game you just don't want to play.

Women's tennis is a big deal right now. The competition is fierce, the top ranking switching often, and the roster of players is unique in style, character, and background. It's no wonder that Konami decided to grab the WTA Tour license. It's just too bad that the developers at Konami didn't get any farther than creating a tech demo, then packaging it and trying to sell it as a videogame. WTA Tour Tennis is really an excellent example of a well produced game, but missing in the most crucial area -- gameplay. It's sad to see that a game with so much time given to graphics and presentation completely misses where it counts most.

WTA Tour Tennis is set up for a single player or as many as four players to vie against their friends (for four players, make sure to use Multitap). The three main modes are pretty basic stuff: Exhibition, Tour, and Tournament. Exhibition enables players to compete in a single or doubles tournament; winner takes all. Tour is essentially a re-creation of the career a professional tennis player would face, traveling to different matches, winning or losing, and trying to work their way up to the highest ranking in the world. Here, players can choose from as many as 20 different pro tennis players, and set off on their career. Tournament is, well, a tournament of your making. Choose from 20 athletes, set up the length of matches, and the players in the match (either human or AI), and play.

The game provides good, detailed stats of each player's performance, and it offers a pretty good presentation overall, with roaring crowds, the hush before a hit, a timely announcer, and even a little dust and dirt that comes up each time a ball hits ground in the grass courts. It's also packed with great women players. The list is 20-players long, and doesn't include babe-alicious Anna Kournikova or top-ranked player Venus Williams, but it does offer enough great, top-ranked players to counter its misses.

And just so that you know, it's all women. The roster includes Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport, Serena Williams, Monica Seles, Amanda Coetzer, Sandrine Testud, Anke Huber, Ai Sugiyama, Shinobu Asagoe, Alexandra Stevenson, Mirjana Lucic, Katorina Srebotnik, Cara Black, Lina Krasnoroutskaya, Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, Elena Dementiera, Jelena Dokiu, Justine Henin, Kim Clijsters, and Jennifer Capriati.

But to be honest, most people won't ever even rent this game, and if they do, they'll kick themselves later. Or I will. WTA Tour Tennis is a highly polished looking game but it plays poorly. It's as if my little brother programmed it, using pickles for his fingers and a Radio Shack TRS-80 for the engine, and that somehow by dropping a tennis racquet and peanut butter and jelly sandwich into a blender a tennis game would pop out looking hunky-dory.

What's at the core of the problems of this shell of a game are the controls, the motion-capture work, the concept of tennis that's been implemented, and pretty much everything else it there. The characters move slowly and mechanically. They can be seen working through their motion-capture animations before the ball is even hit, which isn't so inexcusable by itself, but coupled with a poor hitting mechanic, you get this well, pretty looking pile of tennis poop. Players are slow to get to the ball, they're robotic and as slow as molasses to hit the ball, and the relative speed of the game is also, well, slow as a sleepwalking snail in slow-motion with lead boots (or well, just one boot, I should say). The game of modern tennis, with its 100-mile-per hour serves and blistering heat, is just not represented.

As for controlling the players and tracking the AI, well, there's another F on the scorecard. It takes a long time to get used to how to master the controls, and by the time I did, I realized what a waste of time my efforts were. There is no meter to show the power, speed, or intensity of the serves, and even when you hit it, well, you don't feel it. The AI is poorly programmed as well. The AI miss perfect set ups for slams, and then hit the ball out of bounds. Or sometimes, the AI will simply stand in front of the ball and miss it entirely. The rallies are hilariously bad, too. I stood there playing patty cake with the AI for about three minutes, but we hit it back and forth without the ball hitting the ground until something stupid happened. The game essentially doesn't re-create the art, science or athleticism of the sport in any of the gameplay, and it makes you feel kind of stupid for playing it.

But on the other hand, WTA Tour Tennis is pretty good looking, relatively well polished, and sports some sexy tennis players well modeled and well textured. The game sports good body textures, and pretty accurate facial models, as well as the right hairstyles, outfits, and clothing of the particular players.

Although there is a certain amount of aliasing here and there, for the most part, it's not annoying or frustratingly distracting. The replays looks smooth and detailed, and the crowds and stadia are all better than average. In fact, the crowds are more interesting and lively than in Sega Sports Tennis.

The best thing about the sound in WTA Tour Tennis is that the developers really paid attention to the high and low sounds of a tennis match. They certainly missed the boat in the gameplay department, so I guess they felt like making it up in presentation and sound. The crowd is loud and lively, and it hushes when a player prepares to serve but roars when a deciding point is scored. The announcer calls the game with an official sounding voice, which adds to the drama of the match. Musically, well, its binky-boinky arcade music, which means it's kind of like fast elevator music for spazzy gameplayers like you and me.


In the world of tennis games, Konami's WTA Tour Tennis just doesn't hold a candle to any other tennis game out there. Sega Sports Tennis and Namco's Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament are far better examples of what's in store for the avid tennis-playing videogame fan. I strongly recommend never playing this game. I strongly request that you run madly away from it at any cost. I strongly, highly, urgently plead that you just don't waste precious time on this title. Unless (and this is a big unless) -- you're paid some incredible sum of cash (like $1 million), or for instance, if Hugh Hefner says he'll invite you over to the PlayBoy mansion for a week, and you can share his bed with the twins he's spending so much time with. Those are pretty much the only exceptions, and they're not ever likely to happen, either.

In This Article

WTA Tour Tennis Image

WTA Tour Tennis

Strap on your tennis shoes and be prepared to experience the awesome reality of WTA Tour Tennis. Meet pros like Serena Williams, Martina Hingis and Jelena Dokic.
Suitable for Persons Ages Six and Older
Platforms:PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, GameCube, Xbox
Publishers:ACE (2), Konami
Features:Number Of Players, Memory Card, Vibration, DualShock, Memory Blocks, Local - VS # of Players, Console-To-Handheld System Link
Release Date:March 26, 2002
WTA Tour Tennis
WTA Tour Tennis