Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis Xbox 360

Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis Xbox 360

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Nov 1, 2006 | 1 out of 2 found this Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis review helpful

Pros: Spins standard tennis gameplay into something faster and more visceral; absolutely amazing-looking player models; awesome crowd sounds and sound effects; unlockable achievements well-designed to push you to keep getting better.

Cons: No create-a-player feature; no career mode; no doubles.

In the real world, it's easy to write off table tennis as a stunted summer-camp version of real tennis, even though table tennis is an Olympic sport. This isn't to say that there's not skill and technique involved in table tennis, but the barrier to entry and the physical exertion are much lower. As a video game, though, Table Tennis plays like a high-speed distillation of the gameplay offered by the likes of Virtua Tennis and Top Spin, and like the most addictive of games, the action is easy to pick up but still rich with the kind of subtlety that makes it a challenge to truly master. You have four different types of shots--topspin, backspin, left spin, and right spin--which correspond to the four face buttons on the controller. Alternately, you can use the right analog stick to trigger the different shot types, though this method is a lot more difficult to come to grips with. The longer you hold one of the shot buttons during the ball's approach, the more power you'll put behind your swing, and you can also lean the left analog stick during this charge-up period to influence the direction of your shot, though your table position and the incoming trajectory of the ball figure heavily into where your shot will end up, as well.