A few weeks ago I was looking up Wii U games to see if the console was worth buying sometime in the near future, mainly because Ps4 and Xbox 1 would not be worth my while in the near future because of their price and there will only be a few games for a while.
But anyway I found a few games that are classic Nintendo style that would make it worth my while. But then I saw Wii U tennis…and I was like wait a minute. I wonder if it’s a sequel to the Wii Console's first game…Wii Sports. And of course one of the games in Wii Sports was tennis.
Sure enough it’s virtually the same game as before, but this time with online capabilities. I still have my Wii console from a few years ago and I still have the game so I pulled them out. I remember liking the overall game, but I got bored after a few weeks and never played it again, mainly because you could only play the computer…which can get boring.
Man, when I pulled the old Wii Tennis out…after about hitting the ball 10 times I remember why I liked it. Every time I hit the ball it was all me. I could hit it hard, soft, short, deep, flat, loopy, topspin, backspin, side spin, down the line, up the middle, or cross court. And you can angle the racket in different ways which affect the angle of the shot. Just like real tennis I rarely could make the ball go in the same place twice, and the spin was always different.
My mistakes were all me too. If I swung too late the ball would go wide down the line. If I swung too early the ball would go wide crosscourt. And if a swung extremely late I would shank it off into the crowd. Oh, and if I swung way too early I would completely miss the ball and watch it go bouncing by me.
Nintendo always makes their games with gimmicks and Wii tennis is no different. And also they want to sell these games so you can’t make the learning curve too difficult. For those that have not heard of the game or played it, this is how it is different from most tennis games: So the first thing they did was take moving the players out of human player’s hands. So the game controls every player’s movement all the time. Second they made it where you could only play doubles, one player is at the baseline, and one is at the net player and they more or less stay there the whole point. And third you can control both the baseline player’s and the net player’s swing.
This game is all about the swing, as I said it’s all you all every time when it comes to your ability to time the ball and vary how you hit. Of course you have to adjust to how your opponent hits it too(which is where the real difficulty and fun starts), and when you add online play with the variety of shot to choose from and just like in real tennis no 2 players hit the ball the same…the possibilities are endless. Oh, and Wii U Tennis forces every player to use the Wii motion plus which is a more sensitive controller for better detection of how each person moves the remote compared to the original Wii remote.
As far as sim tennis goes this game would be the best of all time by a long, long ways if they made it where you could: move your player, and there was an option to play singles.
When I went looking for Wii Sports I saw I had bought Grand Slam Tennis back then too. When you play these two games back to back you get an appreciation of how much work Nintendo put into the swing mechanics of Wii Tennis. In Grand Slam Tennis you can choose flat, topspin, or slice. But no matter which way I moved the remote around all the topspin shots landed in the same place more or less and all had the same trajectory and angle. Same with the slice and flat shots. EA sports
.I read a review on Wii U Tennis somewhere and at the end of the review the guy said he didn’t like that so many balls hit the net, which is music to my ears. In the first Wii Tennis if you try to hit a ball that’s at your ankles hard, it will go into the net many times. If you go out there and hit all flat hard balls, you will get your share of net balls too. This can only be overcome by perfectly executing these shots over and over and your skill will allow you to get the ball over the net and in. Or hit a softer less riskier ball if you can’t skillfully execute those shots.
The old Wii remote would mess up from time to time and hit a flat ball when I tried to topspin or hit a side spin when I was trying to topspin(those are always interesting to watch).
It would be interesting to see an ITST tour for this game because of the way you can hit the ball and the ball is hit at you…this game was made for ITST. There are no stats for players. Your forehand and backhand stats are the muscles in your own physical arm, elbow, hand, and wrist(and your brain I guess). The 3 things holding it back are a lack of user controlled movement, doubles only, and the fact there that there are only 2 serves(hard up the middle, or slow up the middle) causes it to not be ITST friendly.
If someone is hitting the ball at you with “100 power,” swing earlier. If someone can execute the down the line winner against you,(and in this game it isn’t easy, there’s no just pointing down the line to get it to go there)hope they can’t keep doing that. If someone is giving you all sorts of backspins, sidespins, topspins, and junk balls to mess up your timing, concentrate more and/or get on the practice court. And of course the scenarios go on.
I can even hit the topspin 4 cross court angle shot, but not without risk. Out of 10 slow easy to time balls I can hit it near perfect 2 times, it goes wide 2 times, it hits the net 2 times, and 4 times I don’t get enough angle/spin/pace on it and its effect is minimal.
Once you have the Wii U, Wii U Tennis is downloadable for 10 dollars to own. You can try it 24 hours for free, or you can rent it for 2 dollars for some short length of time. If an ITST person has tried it, or will try it in the near future I would love to hear your thoughts on the game.
After watching a few online videos of Wii U Tennis I saw some of the upgrades.
1. You can choose to use a short swing(which seems much easier to time) or a long swing where it seems how you follow through matters
2. On slow balls you can choose whether to hit a backhand or a forehand and the Mii character will adjust to what you want.
Also in all the video I watched everyone chooses basically to hit the ball flat and hard and occasionally they would “accidentally” put side spin on the ball. I’m sure there are more ways to hit the ball than in the original Wii Tennis, but of the video I watched everyone chose to hit flat. Oh and watch the amount of errors coming off these rackets and judge for yourself if the hitting is sim tennis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AIwyLmV4H0
5:09 – all short swings with no follow through
7:26 – 1 full swing with follow through
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR9F1CIGXTI
1:40 – Online match 1
5:40 – Shows how you can run-around/choose backhand or forehand
6:00 – Online match 2
10:00 – Online match 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-sl0YjuLz0
4+ hours of online gamplay
I skipped forward to 3:25:00, he starts a game there and is experienced enough so there arent just 2 and 3 ball rallies
