As one of the first commercially available video games, Pong seems to have an almost academic importance, but not enough credit is given to the simple elegance of its design--two bar-shaped "paddles," one square "ball"--something that was born largely out of technical limitations. There is an obvious correlation between Pong and the newly minted Rockstar's Table Tennis for the Xbox 360, in that Table Tennis is literally a ping-pong simulation. But it also follows the same philosophy of stripping the experience down to its essence, something focused and intense. Rockstar's Table Tennis treats the game like a serious sport, taking incredible care to present some of the most realistic player characters ever put in a game and delivering frenetic and nuanced action.
Table Tennis defies you to not be impressed with its incredible-looking player models.
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.
This will all seem like really familiar ground for anyone who's played any sort of modern tennis video game, but Table Tennis separates itself in several crafty ways, turning the gameplay into something unique. It all starts with the serve meter, which combines both a rising spin meter and an oscillating power meter, giving you more flexibility with how your serve gets delivered. You can choose to go full-bore with maximum spin and maximum shot power and hope to overpower your opponent, you can fake out your opponent with a weak, spin-heavy shot that will bounce twice before they even know what happened, and so on. Once the ball is in play, the game puts a faint color-coded halo around the ball that clues you in on which type of spin your opponent used, and you can take that momentum and throw it right back at them by countering with the same shot type. Color-blind players should take note that, while this is a really nice piece of visual shorthand for most people, they might find it difficult to differentiate between the colors.
As you get into the more-advanced techniques, your four standard spin shots can also be combined to create hybrid spin shots by holding multiple buttons at once, giving you access to shots that blend the speed of a topspin and the curve of a sidespin shot. You also have a focus meter that fills as you successfully return the ball, which you can tap into by holding the right bumper before you start charging up your swing, unleashing an even faster, more potent shot that can easily catch your opponent off guard. There are other small touches at work here, as well, which really help capture the specifics of table tennis, such as the way a ball will bounce off in an unpredictable direction when it hits an edge or how a player can, on rare occasion, recover a shot after it bounces off his or her body. One of the most subtle features, and arguably one of the best little details in Table Tennis, is the use of force feedback. As you charge up your return shot and use the left analog stick to aim it, the controller will start to rumble as your aim gets closer to the edge of the table, giving you a tactile sense for when you need to stop pushing toward the edge. It makes the aiming simultaneously more intuitive and more effective, and it's so simple and so brilliant that it will be disappointing if the next crop of regular tennis video games doesn't implement a similar feature.
Much like the real sport, it's easy to start playing Table Tennis, but there turns out to be a lot of skill and finesse involved.
