Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament 2

Written by Byron Blunk on 8/2/2004 for PS2  

I am a sports game junkie, nut, addict, call me what you will. Consequently, when my buddy Yan asked me if I would like to review a sports title for him, I looked at the calendar and started drooling. NCAA Football 2005, maybe an advanced copy of Madden 2005…oh the humanity of it all when I read Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament 2. Tennis? Are you kidding me? As your average American, my tennis knowledge consists of four things; Kournikova is hot, Roddick is an idiot for dumping Mandy Moore, McEnroe has a talk show now, and Kournikova is hot. All kidding aside who didn’t love Pong, and since any tennis game is just Pong with better animation I gave it a shot and popped it in my Playstation.

First off, you cannot just hop into this game and start having fun right away, you need to spend time with the tutorials and take your lumps early on in your pro career before you start to see any glory. While this is well and good for the single player aspect, it makes the game less friendly to gathering around the PS2 with your friends and smashing each other’s brains in. When Mario Tennis is superior to you in multiplayer, you have done something wrong.

After the tutorial, you can select from the different modes of play available to you. Arcade allows for quick single player action, and as usual, Exhibition mode is available for you to play against a friend. Challenge mode presents side-games that help you with your service, volley, and other aspects of your game. While the focal point of SCTPT2 has to be Pro Tour mode, where you create a player and head off to become the world’s number one tennis player.

You can customize you player’s clothing and appearance like NBA Ballers or NFL Street. While customizing height and weight is important, it strikes me as slightly esoteric to customize what your player does while waiting to return your opponent’s serve. Then again, this is a tennis game and true fans will get enjoyment out of this feature and even the ability to coordinate your wristbands with your shorts.

A variety of shots are present in your arsenal, including drop, lob, running, smash, flat shots for going hitting that winner down the line and a highly customizable service attack allows you plenty of options to end that long rally. Make sure you take the time to practice though as accuracy is key and a mistimed shot will have you screaming at the chair judge rather than holding up the trophy, where as a “nice” shot will be difficult for your opponent to return. Mistiming a shot is easy at first, as SCTPT2 lacks the needed definition to give you proper depth and height perception. Because of this, it can be tough to pick up exactly how high a ball has bounced, and this can affect your timing for the return shot. However if you play the game long enough though it will become instinct rather than conscious thought

Through challenges, you earn attribute points to make your player better, and you can buy better equipment in the pro shop that will add to certain abilities or you can waste money on purely cosmetic features like hair color. If you are looking for a little more power there is probably a new racquet down in the pro-shop that will add 5 points to your attributes, but is it worth spending the 800 points you struggled to accumulate?
Did I mention that during Tournament mode you have the option of normal play, where you play out every point of every game of every set, or the slightly more condensed but possibly more entertaining, mission play. In mission play, you sit back and watch the action from afar until a “turning point” pops up. Those familiar with MVP Baseball 2004 are familiar with this semi-simulated approach to gaming. Whenever your player gets in trouble during the simulation, you are forced to jump in and take control yourself. What you will then find then is two-fold. First you usually have a game or possibly a set to win, but in doing so you also have a goal to shoot for. These vary in task from serving an ace, or beating your opponent using 2 drop shots during a game, to even coming back from 0-40 on your opponent’s serve to win the game. Your overall performance in completing these turning points will affect the rest of the simulated match. Complete the task and you will usually find yourself victorious, while failing and still managing to win the game or set you are currently in, can have little or even a disastrous effect on the rest of the match. Mission play tends to get a bit repetitive, but switching to normal play eliminates that, just do not overlook it in the options menu as many are apt to do. You can save mid tourney should you choose to play the whole thing out, which is a nice touch as a 5 set match could be quite time consuming.

The graphics leave you wondering why they bothered licensing real player’s names and likenesses, as for the most part they are blocky and blurry. While the courts and stadiums are vivid and accurate, with progressive wear showing up on the grass courts for a nice touch, in the end, how hard is it to code a green rectangle? Hey, at least they took the time to put in a chair judge, ball boys, and fans in the stands—albeit fans that look like cardboard cutouts.

The sound is passable, however I would not put too much faith into the opening screen that proclaims the use of Dolby Surround Pro Logic II, this wins the *yawn* award since we are talking about a tennis game here. There isn’t too much in the way of surround sound needed when dealing with a north-south representation of a tennis court, and aside from generic clapping and the occasional squeak of a tennis shoe on asphalt, there’s nothing worth plugging the rear speakers for.

At least there are sixteen licensed players included such as Andy Roddick, Lindsay Davenport, Tim Henman, Kim Clijsters, James Blake, Marat Safin, Serena Williams, Jennifer Capriati, and of course Anna Kournikova (isn’t she some sort of underwear model?). So at least you will find yourself competing against actual tour names, even if the likenesses leave something to be desired. I would rather lose to Andy Roddick than John Smith from the USA who looks an awful lot like Andy Roddick.

I do not want seem too disapproving of this game. As far as tennis games go, this is a quality game. The ball physics are very good, the player animations are decent, and contrary to the multitude of tennis games I have run across in my lifetime, you can hit the ball out very easily if you select the wrong shot type, or direction based on your player’s direction of approach. That said, it is still a tennis game, and unless you play in the real world, it gets boring quite fast. On the other hand, if you are a tennis fan or are still hopelessly addicted to Pong, you would want to give this title a look.