The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Ever since Mario Golf and Mario Tennis for the Gameboy Color showed me the light, I have been a fan of very arcade-y golf and tennis games. However, Nintendo has failed to beat Camelot into make a new Mario Golf and Mario Tennis for the DS or the Wii, so I’ve been without for awhile.
Then here comes Essner, who buys a 360 and with it gets a free copy of Sega Superstars Tennis. It’s a tennis game that’s very similar to Mario Tennis, only it has Sega characters, both the lame Sonic people as well as awesome characters like Ulala from Space Channel 5 and Beat from Jet Grind Radio. Noticing that a new copy of this game was a mere 8 dollars after shipping on Amazon, I decided to give it a try myself. This was a good decision. I didn’t get the game as I expected but the bundle that came with someone else’s 360, which meant I got the Arcade Collection with it for free. (I gotta try Pac-Man CE sometime soon) Also, the game is pretty solid. Probably not like… 60 dollars solid? But certainly 20 dollars solid, and a real bargain at 8.

Basically, if you’ve played Mario Tennis, you’ve played this game. You’ve got two buttons, a lob and a slice, and hitting them in different ways produces different results. As you rally, you build up a “Superstar Power” which you activate with the triggers. Then you get to make a couple of super shots, which are powerful, but very disorienting to use and often end up screwing you over as much as your opponent.

The controls are really frustrating at first to someone coming from Mario Tennis, though. The timing is similar enough to make you think you can play the same way, but just slow enough to make you miss stupid shots if you play that way. It takes some real adjustment if you’re coming from that background. I’m sure Virtua Tennis fans and people who have never played Mario Tennis wouldn’t have that problem, though. The other thing that is all different from Mario Tennis that throws me off is that instead of jamming on a button to build up hit strength, you hold down the button. This is a completely logical decision, but again, it still takes awhile to deal with the transition.

Once you get over that, though, it’s awesome arcade Tennis fun. I’m saddened that I don’t like the selection of “power” style characters, since that’s normally what I use, but that’s a minor annoyance.
You unlock most things in this “Superstars” mode, which is basically a series of minigames to unlock characters, courts, and music. Some are just straight up Tennis tournaments, but some are creative tennis-based minigames. For example, in the Jet Set Radio world, you have to hit tennis balls to paint tags on the court, and in Super Monkey Ball world, you have to use tennis balls to ricochet monkey balls into the goals on the court. Besides a few EXTREMELY HARD ones, these games are pretty fun, if sometimes pointless. (Really? You want me to just run around the court collecting rings? That… doesn’t really teach me ball control like some of the other minigames.)
I especially enjoyed the Puyopuyo minigame. This was probably the best Tennis-related minigame I ever played. Puyos fall in a wall just like in Puyopuyo, and whenever you hit a puyo, it destroys it, as well as any connected in a combo with it. It’s a really solid twist on tennis and a really good adaptation of the game. I played that one for quite a long time.
One more thing I quite appreciated was that several of the achievements have nicely fanservice-y names. Run 6 in-game miles total? Get the achievement OutRun. Collect all in-game music? Get the achievement Magical Sound Shower. Have a really, really long rally during a match? Get the achievement SEGA Rally. The game needed more of these, as far as I was concerned. That’s awesome.

Anyway, especially if you can get the game as cheap as I did, I highly recommend this game. If the idea of arcade tennis to the music of Space Channel 5 or Jet Set Radio sounds completely awesome, you’ll be quite happy with the game, as I am.