Grand Slam Tennis - Game Review

The ball speeds towards me. I pull my remote back and swing it in a graceful arc. My tennis playing avatar wiggles her racket then seemingly gives up on the ball, watching it pass by disinterestedly.

I yell something obscene.

This isn’t what always happens in EA Sports’ Grand Slam Tennis. To be fair, it isn’t what even happens most of the time. But it happens just often enough to really aggravate me.

When Grand Slam Tennis works right, which is most of the time, it’s a lot of fun. Although that was not my initial impression.

At first I found the game annoying. I would swing and the ball would bounce past untouched. Eventually I realized I was simply swinging too early. I was swinging the way I would in a real tennis match, where I move my racket slowly and most times just lob the ball over the net. But Grand Slam Tennis is about professional tennis players who whip that racquet around like a lightning bolt. This meant I had to wait until the ball was almost past me before swinging. Once I realized that, I began to do much better.

Swinging the racquet at the last minute also solved my other big problem with Grand Slam Tennis. Unless you want to deal with using the nunchuk to move your player, which is a pain, the game will run your avatar around the court using its best judgment. Your avatar stops running when you swing, so swinging too early will result in your player stupidly flailing the air five feet from the ball.

Once I had the basic mechanics figured out, helped out by some useful tips online, I began to enjoy myself. The game is fast and responsive. The cartoony graphics are clean and bright and it’s amusing to see your opponent dive for a ball or skid two-footed to one side.

You can play either single matches or go into a career mode that lets you travel around the world playing against tennis stars like Venus Williams. You can also play against friends or strangers online. Playing online was a simple as can be; I went online, the game found me an opponent and we played a couple of matches. Playing against a human is, as is often the case, more interesting than playing against the game’s artificial intelligence, as humans tend to have recognizable strategies that you can exploit. My opponent played a net game (even without the nunchuk you can use the Wii remote direction buttons to move to and away from the net), so I tried as much as possible to simply lob the ball past him.

Grand Slam Tennis is one of the first games to support Nintendo’s MotionPlus add-on for the Wii remote. With the MotionPlus you can see your avatar shifting the racquet according to your movements. Tilting the remote slightly will change how it hits the ball.

The MotionPlus made a huge difference in the golf game Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, but the effect in Grand Slam Tennis seems slight. The game is a little easier without the MotionPlus, but if you were to wrap my remote in a bag before I played the game I’m not sure I would be able to tell you whether it had a MotionPlus attached. In either version one hits lob and drop shots by pressing a button, even though the MotionPlus should have made it possible to do this simply by changing the angle of your racquet (something attempted rather unsuccessfully by Virtua Tennis 2009).

For the most part I had fun with the game, but every once in a while it would seem as though my avatar simply started daydreaming in the middle of the game, failing to run for a ball within running distance or failing to swing the racket as a ball passed by.

The game may have a very good reason for this; perhaps my previous shot threw the player off balance or my swing was incomplete. But a crucial part of game design is making clear the reason behind a failure. If a game can visually indicate why something went wrong, then the player will try to do better, but if a failure seems to come out of nowhere, it just feels like the game has betrayed you. In 10 to 15 percent of my shots, I felt like the game let me down. Which is why while playing Grand Slam Tennis I shouted obscenities 10 to 15 percent of the time.