Contempt of court

by ERIK LEIJON

Even the most obsessive sports fan will admit that pro athletes are the worst interview subjects. Regardless of who suits up for the Habs or Als, chances are they’ll spew the same dozen sports clichés in circulation since Bob Gibson grumbled a few words to a green St. Louis Post-Dispatch beat writer.

For at least a decade—specifically when releasing a non-licensed sports game became commercial poison—sports games have been nothing but tired clichés. Top Spin 3 (Multi/2K Sports, Pam) is fun in a vaguely familiar kind of way; this new tennis title is pretty much the same tennis game we’ve been playing since Virtua Tennis.

The Pollyanna in me wants to believe Top Spin 3 is giving 110 per cent, playing its heart out, taking it one game at a time, but Top Spin suffers from the same lack of next-gen creativity currently plaguing all sports games. Having a career mode that begins in a ghetto park surrounded by a chain-link fence is the gaming equivalent of Saku Koivu crediting his teammates for playing hard.

Featuring an official soundtrack with Stereogum-approved indie bands du jour is like Carey Price saying he has to stay focused.

DULL SERVE: Top Spin 3

The controls in Top Spin 3 have been slightly altered, since instead of pressing a button to swing, it’s now required to hold, then release in proper time. Anyone previously conditioned to play a standard tennis video game will be completely flummoxed at first, but after a few hours it becomes second nature and each match will unfold as usual.

Changing the controls is a misguided attempt at innovation in two ways, since mastering shots and serving well is far more difficult than in the past, but it also doesn’t feel any more like real tennis than a furious game of Pong would. In the eight years since Virtua Tennis redefined hitting a ball with a racquet, consoles have leapfrogged two generations and computers are infinitely more powerful.

Yet, the only change on the tennis video game court is to go from pressing the swing button to holding it. Substituting genuine improvements for needlessly tinkering with the control scheme is an inexplicable, industry-wide epidemic.

In Top Spin, it’s actually harder to make trick shots now than it was in 2003, and for reasons unknown the power metre for serving was removed in favour of guessing a serve’s strength.

Perhaps I’m being especially negative towards the harmless Top Spin 3 when countless sports games in recent years have pushed the bile to the tip of my throat, but Top Spin 3 is unique in not even being able to get next-gen presentation right. The cast of characters is a strange mix of real tennis stars (quite a few notables are absent), past legends and fictitious players, while the player creator mode is as painfully boring as any other unless picking your digital duplicate’s mascara colour interests you.

The in-game presentation is lacking, with none of the ball marking technological improvements seen on tennis telecasts. The game modes are precisely what we’ve become accustomed to—nothing more, nothing less.

Oddly enough, the dumbed down Wii version of Top Spin 3 was more enjoyable than the XBox 360 version, largely for being so easy to pick up and play. There’s a reason gamers are responding to graphically archaic and options-bereft sports titles on Wii: they feel nothing like the same tired clichés we’ve been force-fed for the last decade.

Top Spin 3 was the product of game studio thinking: not as an attempt to accurately re-enact the sport of tennis, but rather through one too many late-night Top Spin 2 sessions. There might not be an “I” in team, but there is one in innovate.