Tennis is the one sport ideally suited to a videogame. Now we’re not about to suggest it’s better played from the comfort of your couch, but when you dismantle its basic fundamentals and find yourself likening its gameplay to that of the legendary Pong, it’s hard to argue. Since 1999, Virtua Tennis has been proclaimed the best of the bunch, seducing gamers with its ease of use while maintaining scope for expert mastery. It’s this that lends it accessibility to all, whether you’re an avid Tennis fan licking your lips for strawberries and cream under the Wimbledon sun, or an indifferent browser, flicking past the BBC’s coverage with a sigh.

Following on from World Tour, VT3 has great heritage, following its impressive debut transition to the small screen. It was a small landmark for the series, proving it worthy of handheld existence and playing almost exactly like its console counterparts.

You start, as before, in World Tour mode by creating your own player, choosing your weight and height and donning whatever outfit takes your fancy. Appearance wise, you choose from a few hair styles and eyebrows and choose their colour. It’s pretty slim by today’s create-mode standards admittedly, but it’s enough for general personalisation. Most importantly, there are multiple racquets of differing performance that make up for its simplicity. As you advance through tournaments and earn recognition by sponsors, you earn improved racquets to use, as well as new shirts, shorts and shoes to show off.

The idea is to level your player by playing mini-games, ultimately clawing your way into tournaments that raise your world rank if you win. The starting rank is 300, so it gets very addictive trying to become the undisputed champ. All new mini-games are included, from Tennis Bingo, where you strike the ball at a slide screen of numbers trying to hit the ones you need, to Tennis Bowling, serving to knock down as many pins as possible at once. It all works on a pre-set yearly calendar split into weeks; every mini-game takes a week and every few weeks there’s a tournament. The beauty of it is that you can play at your own pace; you don’t have to enter tournaments you qualify for if you don’t want to, you can focus on levelling certain aspects of your player first. The flexibility here is vast as every mini-game zones in on particular skills. Be it your footwork or volleying, you can choose to replay the games that advance your stats in desired areas as much as you want. Just make sure you don’t tire yourself out. Your overall stamina depletes every week and if you let it drop too low without resting, you can be injured and out of action for weeks.

Pure VT action has been maintained brilliantly with the same simple to learn and satisfying to master controls. X is the panacea it always has been, and there’s the opportunity to slice or lob for the more adventurous. Holding a button and direction longer increases the power/angle. It’s unrivalled in the genre, and feels fluent and lifelike. Winning is about court movement and reading your opponent, where tweaking your style to theirs is paramount. Some like to rush the net often like old ‘Tigger’ Tim Henman for example, so you have to be prepared to lob. The only draw is a new increased tendency to dive for the ball when slightly out of reach. Pros will infuriate you to Johnny Mac status as they slam past you with ease while you stumble, and it’s hardly your fault. That’s the only gameplay complaint to be had though, which isn’t half bad. We had little problem with the analogue and using D-pad control is a faultless alternative.

There is, of course, a tournament mode where you get to play as one of 20 professionals in singles or doubles matches, perfect for testing out their differing styles that are noticeable in play. It holds up fairly well graphically too, bar the shiny looking character models and pixilated vomit crowds – the courts look polished and have nifty little effects like wearing and skids. The music is dodgy dated electronic rubbish unfortunately, but the foreign commentating in different parts of the world is cool. With Quick Matches ideal for bus journeys and Ad-Hoc multiplayer just dying for intense bouts with your mates, it’s not hard to find yourself popping this in your PSP for a quick burst, and that’s after you’ve whittled away countless hours ranking and levelling in the World Tour for the devilishly tricky tournaments of later stages.

There is a downfall though: VT3 has a perfectly good older sibling that it fails to outdo in any major way. There are more players, new mini-games and the AI is marginally smarter, but aside from that, it’s a poor excuse for a sequel. The PS3 version is clearly that excuse, but where the Tour feature is a new venture there, here it’s just more of the same. It may be the great same, but it’s the same nonetheless.

Javid Sangra