Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis

Do you hold yours in the penholder or shakehands style? Rockstar presents another top quality gaming experience.

	Version Xbox 360	Developer Rockstar San Diego	Publisher Rockstar	Genre Sport

By Stephen Rowley

Ask any gamer what they believe to be the most recent (or perhaps the best) videogame involving the sport of table tennis, and the smart money is going to be on them answering with Pong. OK sure, there have been some Korean oddities and university projects involving motion sensors, but nobody has cracked the nut of an accurate portrayal of the sport. And no doubt due to a perceived 'lack of interest' in such a title - quite possibly an accurate perception - nobody has even really tried. So, trust Rockstar Games to not only go against this perception, but to also end up delivering a game in a near perfect form that gamers didn't even realise they were missing.

To crib from recent game industry lore, Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis is a lot like Pong, only it's Pong on fire, going 130 miles per hour through a hospital zone, being chased by helicopters and ninjas ... And, the ninjas' table tennis paddles are on fire, too. Table Tennis (TT) is a blisteringly fast (read: accurate) virtual representation of the sport. In fact, in the goal of bringing the feeling of pro-level table tennis to the videogaming masses, Rockstar's TT is an unequivocal success. As a game, it takes on the feeling of being more like a fighting game; with the wide range of shot types and the need to combo them together to score a point against your opponent. It's also no less punishing on the player's hands, nor in any less need of high levels of concentration and focus.

In fact this whole game is about focus - and we're talking Forrest Gump levels of table tennis-based concentration here - and in terms of gameplay that focus is on the multiplayer game. There is a (very) rudimentary singleplayer game in here, but it certainly will not occupy players for a long time, though it does serve (no pun inten... oh, nevermind) the very necessary function of tutoring you in the skills, and the practice, needed to play (battle?!) against human opponents.

We already stated in our recent preview that in terms of presentation, TT was already a winner, and the finished product has delivered on this promise. The way the pings and pongs of the bouncing ball create a steady, staccato rhythm has a hypnotic, focussing effect to such an extent you don't even realise the music gradually building in intensity along with the on-screen action, until the arena in which your character performs darkens (a visual effect of the game's 'focus' meter).

There are some minor issues, most notable of which is the visual feedback given to the player to show what spin is currently on the ball. The graphic is very hard to see, and as it reflects the colour of the Xbox pad's buttons, may cause problems for the colour-blind (though to be fair, this is a problem with the industry as a whole, not just this game). Besides, it's entirely possible to rely on the game's other audiovisual cues - animation, the ball's path, the pitch of the ball's bounce - to let you bring your game up. And despite the game's apparently sparse design, it's quickly noticeable (particularly within the character animation) that TT still contains the wit and style to mark it out as a Rockstar developed game.

Indeed, the overall quality of TT's presentation in no way belies the game's 'value' (we promised not to use the "B" word; rhymes with 'fudge it') status. And although this game is a 'value' release, costing only 30 of your English pounds (or 40 of your US dollars), the overall presentation doesn't even suffer in areas where some lesser developers would cut corners, as the menu interfaces are nicely presented and relevantly informative, and loading times are not even worth mentioning, other than to mention that they're not worth mentioning. It's easy to agree that, despite the lower price point, TT is not budget diminished in any real, perceivable way.

However, there is a reason why the title is being released at a lower price point, and that is because of Rockstar's original intentions for the game; as Sam Houser put it, "[Table Tennis] is a distillation of game design philosophy, focusing on removing the traditional areas of compromise inherent in managing size and scope and concentrating the hardware's entire power on one activity". That compromise would have been to spend less time on making the multiplayer experience, in particular the Live experience, to create any kind of singleplayer mode(s) worthy of more than just tutorial/practice status.

But to mark down the game for not including much in the way of a singleplayer experience, indeed for completely achieving the developer set goal for the game, would be an idiocy. Nonetheless a warning is required; the score at the end of this review is for the multiplayer only, there is no caveat to minus from the score if you have no plans for such play, simply a strong suggestion that you either simply buy something else more suited to your needs, or get your priorities straight, make some new friends, get online and start humiliating them with your mad paddle-skillz.

The instantly understood yet ultimately, deeply nuanced control system invokes the feel of genre top-hitters Virtua Tennis and Top Spin, and subsequently delivers an intuitive yet rewarding gameplay experience - most evident when playing against human opponents. Table Tennis has the potential to explode onto the Live scene, and the collective multiplayer consciousness of Xbox.

Until the Wii comes along with its fancy-pants controller and its recently demoed table tennis game, if indeed such is ever released to the public, Rockstar's Table Tennis effortlessly holds the uncontested trophy of best table tennis game.