Top Spin (PS2)
Oh, how the mighty have fallen
Tags: Top Spin (PS2) Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Nov 10th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Top Spin (PS2) (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Sports | No | ||
When we last saw Top Spin, the title was Microsoft’s first and only tennis game on the Xbox, and was highly praised as one of a select few titles that could come close to the genre’s king, Sega’s Virtua Tennis series. The game looked sharp, played sharp, and had Anna Kournikova as a cover girl. Not too shabby.
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Zoom ahead a few years, and my how things have changed. 2K Games bought the Top Spin license from Microsoft (along with pretty much all of its other sports franchises), and neither that series nor Virtua Tennis has had an installment released in ages, more or less leaving Mario to dominate the genre. Perhaps sensing the lull in the genre and hoping to fill the gap before the release of Top Spin 2 on the Xbox 360, 2K Games has ported the original Top Spin to the PS2 with a few minor changes (Kournakova is out and Sharapova is in). However, perhaps it was the move to PS2 or maybe it’s the years of dust, but Top Spin simply isn’t impressive anymore. Hell, it’s downright embarrassing.
The first and most immediately noticeable area where Top Spin is lacking is the graphics. The Xbox version of the game is two years old, and the PS2 version actually looks a great deal worse. I fired up my ol’ Dreamcast just for kicks, and I can honestly say that the graphics in the PS2 version of Top Spin aren’t even that much better than the original Virtua Tennis, and that game is a half a decade old! Considering that the Xbox version’s graphics were once considered cutting-edge, to see the PS2 version receive such a downgrade is quite troubling.
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Another element that’s gotten a lot worse in the move to the PS2, and one you wouldn’t even consider, is saving. Top Spin requires nearly 2,000 KB to save a career match, roughly ten times as much as your average PS2 game. For a game like RPG Maker 3 to use this much space on my memory card is to be expected, but tennis!? Maybe the Xbox version was just as inefficient, but with the Xbox hard drive, space wasn’t quite an issue. PS2 owners may be far less willing to devote a fourth of their memory card to this game.
As for the gameplay, it hasn’t gotten any worse over the years, but it hasn’t gotten any better either. The gameplay is still sharp, but it’s still annoying using the L and R buttons for special shots and having to both position and time your swing and time your button press to coincide with the little bar that pops up. It’s not very intuitive control, and complicating the gameplay like this has always made Top Spin less accessible than Virtua Tennis in my mind.
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Aside from this, PS2 owners will have to put up with little moments of load times all over the place, going so far as to make you wait after every point. Combining little annoyances like this with the huge hit to the graphics and the wildly inefficient saving, Top Spin strikes me as a rather sloppy port, and while this sloppiness may not have affected the gameplay, everything else is damaged so thoroughly as to make the entire experience far less pleasant.
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There is a good game of tennis buried here, but it is buried so deep under so many problems that only the most devoted tennis fans will have the patience to find it (and those who still refuse to buy an Xbox, no less). It’s sad when a franchise that was once a contender for the throne falls so low as to look worse than titles that in better times would have been considered second-tier, like Outlaw Tennis. Here’s hoping that this is just a sign that 2K games is placing all their effort into Top Spin 2.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ The gameplay is still great + Mmmm... Sharapova |
6.9 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- The graphics are horrendous - Why the heck does a tennis game require that much room on my memory card!? - Load times are annoying |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| If you're any big fan of tennis, you already have the (vastly superior) Xbox version, or you're waiting for the Xbox 360 sequel. If you aren't you'll have no interest inthis crippled version of a once-great tennis game | |
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Tags: Top Spin (PS2)
Posted by Jake McNeill on Nov 10th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
