Sega Superstars Tennis takes a page from Nintendo's playbook -- that page would be called "Super Smash Bros." Of course, there's a very different type of smashing going on here, and it's much less violent. This quirky Sega title takes a ton of your favorite Sega characters and squashes them and their respective worlds all into a silly tennis title, complete with themed courts, music, animation, etc. Does Sonic serve up an ace, or should the Sega cast go back to where they came from?
As a fan of Camelot's Mario Tennis series, I could not help but draw comparisons, and in my opinion, Sega Superstars Tennis is about as simplistic in gameplay as that series is -- which is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your tastes in sports titles. Fans of Mario's sports games will be able to jump right in, while more experienced gamers as a whole are likely to be bored or put off by the simplicity. There's simply not much to tennis to begin with in video game form, and when it is simplified so much, it's even less to be excited about. Players hit a ball back and forth, trying to position their players in the right spot to get the maximum strength out of their hits, fake our their opponents, and steal a win. As far as basic tennis is concerned, it's all here, and the different characters have different styles of play which give them different strengths and weaknesses. The controls are simple, and the game gives players three options of play -- Wiimote and nunchuk, Wiimote by itself, and Wiimote flipped on its side, NES style.
While using the nunchuk to navigate characters is fine, I found the motion controls to add to importance to the proceedings -- it felt much more like Wii Tennis playing this way, only somehow not as fun because I felt I really did not affect the ball's course with my swing. The NES style was the one I tended to stick with most -- though many minigames and missions require you to use this setup, anyway, which is a very odd design decision. All in all, the controls sometimes felt flimsy somehow -- something about the engine and its mechanics made me feel less in control than I'd like to be: it took a while for me to adjust to the fact that swings kind of "charge up" if you press the button early, and oftentimes I'd press a button only to not swing at all, perhaps because I couldn't hit the at all, or what have you. Some frustrations were had with the main gameplay itself. This felt alleviated at times while playing the minigame/mission fest that is Planet Superstars Mode.
In this tour of Sega history, players will play tennis-oriented minigames based on different franchises in Sega history, from staples like Sonic and NiGHTS to Space Harrier, Poyo Pop, and House of the Dead. While the missions did give some single player incentive to play and unlock various music tracks, characters, minigames, and tennis courts, most missions that one cleared did nothing but open up the next mission, and they often became repetitive. At least they made an effort to include a lot of interesting ideas which force players to hone their skills in order to succeed -- trying to hit specific sections of the opposing court to make graffiti tags in Jet Set Radio, for example, was frustrating for a while, but forced me to figure out how to make my shots hit spots where I wanted, and did help in standard tennis matches later on. Some games, like the Super Monkey Ball and Puyo Pop stages, could get a bit boring due to their repetitive nature, and the fact that it was difficult to make the tennis balls hit objects in specific ways. Space Harrier and Virtua Cop are interesting ideas for tennis-themed minigames which pay decent tribute to their source, but in the end feel too slow and a bit too sloppy to be worth playing for more than a few minutes.
Where Sega Superstars Tennis manages to make itself a bit more than mediocre is in its presentation. The graphics themselves are nothing horrible to look at but nothing astounding, though the courts are occasionally interesting to look at -- though, unlike the Mario Tennis games, the courts never actually affect the game. As a whole, there is a lot of fanservice to be had, from vague Sega characters of lore to the way the courts pay tribute to their respective franchises. As a matter of fact, the soundtrack unlockables are a pretty good set of sweet Sega songs -- a shame there's no remixes, but the tracks present hold their own and effectively carry out their purpose. The various characters' voices and animations ring true of the heroes (and villains) you know well. All of the characters seem relatively balanced in performance, but their special moves can seem pretty useless most of the time, especially against a CPU opponent -- there were many times when I actually lost points by using my super moves because I couldn't tell where the ball would end up but the CPU could. This is just another example of the rough design at work. Despite the well-rounded presentation and copious amounts of extra missions to perform, the raw design itself still feels a bit lacking.
