Quick, name the last good tennis video game you've played! You probably immediately thought of either Virtua Tennis or Virtua Tennis 2K2. Top Spin wasn't great, Mario Power Tennis was dismal, Prince of Tennis wasn't bad...for the GBA, and Smash Court Tennis 2 was average.
So, it's pretty much been all quiet on the hardcourt front. I recently got back into a weekly tennis game with my friends, so seeing as how I was strung out on the tennis vibe, I figured now was a good time to give the newest digital tennis manifestation a look-see. The newest tennis game on the market just happened to be Outlaw Tennis. At $20 it's just cheap enough for you to ignore the cover and give it a chance. I decided to figure out if it was worth even that.
Gameplay
Outlaw Tennis owes a lot to the mechanics of Virtua Tennis, as do nearly all tennis games that have come after that venerable title. This is true for both the good, and the bad. Oftentimes, during fast paced volley battles, the Dreamcast would interpret one of your movements as a desire to dive out of the way of the ball. Outlaw Tennis has a similar problem with diving, as well as forcing you to hit completely useless in-between-the-legs shots, despite the fact that you're prepped to wind up and deliver a monster forehand.
Outlaw Tennis tries to liven up the basic gameplay with a few new basic features in the tennis. First off are fights. I've never played any of the other Outlaw Games, but I understand that these are one of the trademarks of the series. You figure they wouldn't suck so bad, then. Blades of Steel back on the NES has a combat system where you could either punch high, punch low, block high, or block low. First one to get punched 5 times went to the box. It was effective, it was simple, and it had just enough strategy to be fairly exhilarating. Outlaw Tennis' fighting consists of you mashing the X,Y, A, and B buttons as fast as you can in order to fill a bar. This usually takes about 2 seconds, and every character fights, and collapses with the same animation. After you easily dispatch your opponent in a 2 falls out of 3 matchup, you'll get a full turbo gauge for 30 seconds.
The Turbo gauge is another addition to the game. You're almost never out of a play so long as you've got your Turbo gauge. This kind of makes the game feel a lot like playing badminton. (It doesn't matter how far out of position you are, the stupid birdie's aerodynamics are such that the thing will eventually slow down, and you can catch up to it...if you have heart.) You can run down shots passing shots that would normally result in you losing the point, and extend the rallies. After you've built up the turbo gauge enough, or if you have the unlimited turbo, you can expend some of it on a bigger groundstroke, or for a big serve.
Also like in Virtua Tennis, you have little crazy minigames that you play to develop your character. However, in Outlaw Tennis, they're just a bit more crazy. One involves you returning tennis balls that a robot is shooting at you, while avoiding the deadly projectiles it's firing at you. Live, and you win. Another has you playing a tennis version of Missile Command. Keep the cities alive, destroy the tennis ball firing bases. They look and sound a bit weird at first, but under the surface, they're pretty much the same as the tasks you were presented with in Virtua Tennis. (Which weren't all that sane to begin with.)
This covers all the basic changes. Then there come a whole set of completely different changes. Outlaw Tennis once again takes the cheap way out and reduces a set of tennis to 3 games. I don't understand the point in doing this. If you're afraid the player's going to get bored playing a full set, just have them play less matches. Why are you warping the part of the scoring that most people actually understand?
But it doesn't just go to 3 games all the time. Sometimes, the game uses the table tennis scoring system, and just has you play a game to 11 with only single faults. Sometimes the game puts you in Casino Mode, where you earn up to $10 depending on how many strokes the rally goes. Sometimes you get bombs dropped onto the field of play wherever the ball last touched the ground while it was in play. This is probably Outlaw Tennis' strongest point. It has takes the game more lighthearted than most and opened up the game to a broader audience.
That is, until it decides to shoot itself in the foot. Just look at the box cover. Is this something parents would buy for their kids? No. But they probably would if it just got rid of the raunchy artwork. Every character in the game is either a racial stereotype or the embodiment of a bad joke. American Tennis Ninja, Cute Japanese Girl Who Hasn't Gotten the Hang of American Culture, Native American Bimbo, Biker Girl, Large Chested Eastern Bloc Female, Bjorn Borg Lookalike, Del Scorcho...they're all here. This adds NOTHING to the game. I know nobody over the age of 12 that would find these caricatures funny, and they wouldn't be allowed to buy this game.
I am reminded of something I said about a month ago in my Death by Degrees review, "Overt sexual overtones, but no nudity, and an insipid storyline that consists of an insipid story combined with random nigh-impossible acts of pseudo-heroic violence. Sounds like something aiming straight for the 12-15 demographic to me." Aside from the part about the story, the same exact thing can be said for Outlaw Tennis. What's it going to be guys? Are you going to put nudity in the game, thereby going all out after the 18+ crowd? Or are you going to put some actual characters in the game that have character and aren't just rude, opening this game up to a much broader audience? Choose one or the other. But don't go half-assed. Even at $20 I think you'll find the number of copies of Outlaw Tennis you're selling isn't nearly what you'd hoped.
Graphics
For the most part things look ok. Nothing stands out as looking particularly awesome, and you'll probably wish the angle was a bit closer so you could see your characters a bit more. The level designs are mostly interesting once you've seen then once, but come off as being pretty generic after you see the rest of what's in the game.
Just like Virtua Tennis, you're able to unlock different outfits to customize your character. Unlike Virtua Tennis, you can't create a new character from scratch. You're limited to the models you've unlocked. Some of the characters have a lot of thought put into their outfits. Other characters simply get different colors.
Audio
Here's the toughest part of this game for me to score. On the plus side, the announcing is done by Stephen Colbert. He's got enough funny lines to be humorous for a little while. Kudos to the devs for picking someone known for being funny, instead of just getting someone they thought could be. On the down side, every single thing your characters say is a failed joke or racially intolerant. On the plus side, the soundtrack has some hilarious tracks like "Dirty Robot" and "Skateboarder's Woe". (Which includes some interesting lyrics, and the nifty refrain of, "I used to skate around the neighborhood, now I just bust it on the internet.") The tracks come off as songs about the game that are making fun of other games' songs about the game, which I found clever.
I guess the high points outweigh the low, since most of the characters' speech consists of 2 to 3 words.
Gripes
There's too much random wastes of time in the game. Why do I have to skip through all the court cross-overs? Nothing happens in those scenes. The characters don't even make it to the other side of the court before they end. The "reactions" are stupid as well. I shut those things off before I finished my first match. Why would I ever need to see my character introduced more than once? Leave it unlockable in the options menu or something if the 12 year olds want to ogle, but it just slows the game down.
The crass humor needs to be addressed in greater detail. There's a Native American girl who will “curse” after losing a point, yelling out “Sacagewea”! Having a character of one race use the name of one of their race's heroes as a curse word is NOT FUNNY. Neither are the characters. Not just because they're stereotypical, no they're not funny because they're utterly devoid of humor. Scrap your material, Hypnotix, nobody's laughing.
Overall
Even at $20, the crudeness of the game is too much to just let slide. It mars what would otherwise be an interesting take on tennis for non purists, much like what Hot Shots Golf does for golf. I could see regular gamers going out to pick this up and play it online if only the guys at Hypnotix scaled back the junior high school humor, and put more innovation into the different gameplay modes, level designs, and fixed up the controls.
As it is though, if you can get past the cheap humor that gets no laughs (even the mighty David Spade would have said "no mas" after 2 of the character designs.) the gameplay is good enough to make this a keeper. However, I think the style and the substance in this case are too intertwined to allow for the majority of the public to partake in anything more than a rental.
