Virtua Tennis 2009 Hands-On

Although we've seen relatively little of Nintendo's new MotionPlus peripheral, it's clear that developers are anticipating its release in June. Wii Sports Resort is likely to stake its claim on the charts fairly swiftly, and EA is bundling the peripheral with Grand Slam Tennis and Tiger Woods 10, in Europe at least. Further support comes from Sega, whose Virtua Tennis 2009 will also take advantage of the increased motion sensitivity when it launches this summer. We managed to get an impromptu play with the game during a recent visit to Sega's offices, as well as talk to a member of the UK-based development team.

If you do invest in a new MotionPlus peripheral, then you'll definitely have more control of your shots in VT09. You can control the power and direction of your shots with incredible accuracy, and subtle flicks of the wrist will add spin to the ball. It soon becomes second nature to perform shots such as lobs, and a soft movement of the remote will also result in a weak shot in the game. If you have experience playing the game in real life, you should find yourself getting the swing of things within the first couple of games.

However, that's not to say that you'll be hindered if you're playing without the latest Wii peripheral. The standard control system works differently but rather well, with a small bar that moves from side to side that shows you how to hit the ball. The idea is to swing the remote when the bar is in the centre, which results in the most powerful and accurate shot, but deviations can actually be to your advantage, especially as you try to precisely knock balls down the line just out of your opponent's reach.

However you're playing Virtua Tennis 2009, the game gives you the option of plugging in a Nunchuk for manual control of your player. We found that the game did a good job of taking care of the running, leaving us to concentrate on the shots, but the option's there, depending on how much control you want to take. You can play the game in four-player mode, and Virtua Tennis supports many different controller configurations simultaneously--a good thing, given the potential cost of all the peripherals involved.

Sega is also producing PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game, but in terms of features, the developers promise that all three games will be exactly the same. That means that the Wii version will offer online multiplayer, which will now be accessible from the main menu, as well as the World Tour mode. Sega also wants to emphasise the realistic elements of the game this year, which means that you'll have to really fight for the chance to play someone like Roger Federer, in contrast to last year's game.

That doesn't mean to say that the minigames have been banished from the Career mode, though; they'll still play a vital part in improving your character's skills. In fact, a couple of new games have made it into this year's game. In Zoo Feeder, you must feed fish to penguins and bamboo to pandas. VT fans will also be pleased to hear that Meat Defender is back, no matter how wrong that may sound.

Virtua Tennis stalwarts will also let out a collective sigh of relief when they hear that Sega has fixed the diving problems from the last game, in which players would constantly leap around court whenever the ball was out of reach. In fact, animation has been a major focus for the development team this year, with more-subtle routines mixing with full motion capture to combine playability and realism. The team claims that you'll be able to spot Boris Becker just by the way that he moves, and Monfils will make a return, after his unique playing style made him a popular player in Virtua Tennis 3.

We spent most of our preview session playing the game itself, so we confess to not digging into the subtleties of the package itself. That said, Sega promises that the World Tour will offer 46 hours of gameplay, with 1,500 items to buy in the store as you progress. The developers are also saying that they've paid much more attention to the game's audio, with different crowd noises to reflect the change in atmosphere between amateur and professional matches. The development team cites the Nadal-Federer Wimbledon 2008 final as an example of how they've been influenced in re-creating the atmosphere of a grand slam match.

There's a real chance that the Wii version of Virtua Tennis 2009 will be the version to buy, but we look forward to seeing more of the game on the PS3 and Xbox 360 before drawing any conclusions. Stay tuned to GameSpot for more information as we get it.