Consolation Prize

A demo of Sega Superstar Tennis is now available to download from Xbox Live Marketplace, sized at a reasonable 677MB.

The demo allows you to try out a single player match choosing from either AiAi of Super Monkey Ball fame or Shadow the Hedgehog. Characters play slightly differently to oneanother due to a specialist skill and a signature “superstar” move. For example AiAi can curve shots more easily and can transform the tennis ball into a bunch of distracting bananas which boomerang back to the opponent with a bend “Beckham” would be proud of.

The game controls quite well and on first impressions felt very similar to the Virtua Tennis series of games I’ve played in the past. There are however a few differences to note when it comes to shot selection. The “A” and “X” buttons produce either a fast or slow shot respectively, but if you want to perform a lob or a drop shot then a simple combo has to be pressed, “A” followed by “X” gives you a lob whilst reversing the action will produce a drop shot.

As you’d expect this game uses characters and locations from different Sega franchises and in the demo there were a couple of locations including a court based on Sonic the Hedgehog with cute characters, palm trees and golden rings, and also a court based on Curien Mansion from House of the Dead which has the undead groaning and spectating from courtside.

As with Virtua Tennis there are mini-games to play, but instead of being used to train your characters attributes they’re included here just for fun. The mini-game on offer in the demo is a simple score attack game at the Curien Mansion location whereby you have to defeat the oncoming hordes of zombies by hitting them with tennis balls whilst avoiding any tennis rackets thrown back in your general direction. Surreal as this may sound it proved to be good fun and brought a smile to my face at the absurdity of it all as Samba (from Samba de Amigo) squares off, racket in hand, to take on the shuffling undead army.

I was actually prepared not to like this game but in the end found I was having a great deal of fun even though annoyingly in the demo the single-player game gives you a limited timespan to play a match and will simply just stop with the message “Time Up” . The demo is certainly worth a look if you’re after a simple, but fun, tennis game, and if you happen to be a Sega fan then that’s an added bonus.

I’ll have to give it a chance. I was not going to try it at all but I like Virtua Tennis so maybe I’ll like this too.

i kinda hate shadow ,shadow is my fake brother….