WTA Tour Tennis (PlayStation 2)

Seasoned arcade publishers Sega and Namco have done well for themselves with their respective tennis franchises, producing games that are far more fun than one might expect. Now, Konami is trying its hand at the sport with WTA Tour Tennis. The results are mixed, and a few key gameplay and graphical issues keep it from reaching the same level of quality as other tennis franchises.

For the acronym impaired, WTA stands for Women's Tennis Association, and the game's roster consists of 20 players who have competed in the WTA Tour, including some of the most recognizable names in women's tennis. Jennifer Capriati, Martina Hingis, and Serena Williams are present, though oddly, Venus Williams and Anna Kournikova have been omitted from the roster.

WTA Tour Tennis offers three basic gameplay modes: tour, exhibition, and tournament. The tour mode emulates the real-life WTA Tour by putting you through a series of ladder-style tournaments. The exhibition mode lets you customize a single match of tennis, and the tournament mode is a mix of the tour and the exhibition modes, letting you customize the length and the seeding of a ladder-style tournament.

The game mechanics are similar to those of Sega's Virtua Tennis games, but the pacing of the game is noticeably slower and more methodical. When serving, you can choose between three different types of serves. The flat serve will shoot the ball straight down the court, and the spin and slice serves will cause the ball to curve sharply to the right or the left, respectively. During play, you can hit a straight flat shot by pressing the X button, or you can hit a topspin shot by pressing the circle button, which sacrifices ball control for speed. You can also give your shots more power by double-tapping the button right before you make contact with the ball, but it will take a bit of practice before you'll get the timing down on this technique. As you play through the game, you may notice a few gameplay quirks. For some reason, players are unable to hit a lob shot, which can be used to score against players who ride the net, and they will never dive for a shot that's just out of reach. The inability to dive, compounded with AI's susceptibility to smash shots, keeps the matches much shorter than they should be and makes rallies all but nonexistent.