Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis

When it was first announced that Rockstar would be making a table tennis game, many saw it as a joke or a hoax even. Rockstar is obviously known for their GTA series, a violent shooter, so it’s easy to see why many would doubt Rockstar would even attempt to pull off a table tennis game.

As more and more screenshots started to hit the net, the more hype this game started generating. The graphics are very sharp and definitely look next-gen the second you look at them. Also with games like Top Spin 2 starting to pick up on the Xbox 360, many started to look forward to Table Tennis’ release.

Table Tennis comes with a budget price, and you’ll be glad once you start it up. There isn’t much to choose from at all; you got your standards: exhibition mode, tournament mode, and online play. There isn’t any kind of story line mode, nor can you create your own player. Whether or not this is enough to justify the price is a personal opinion.

Rockstar took the fundamentals of real life table tennis and mixed it with the gameplay features of other tennis games such as Virtua Tennis and Top Spin 2. Now, considering that many see table tennis as a separate sport from tennis, there is a potential market for ping pong players out there. For example, unlike Virtua and Top Spin, Table Tennis offers extremely fast paced gameplay, and not to forget the long rallies you will have with your opponent, these are definitely some of the things you won’t see in other tennis games.

You can get addicted to Table Tennis easily; and this is really what you should be hoping for when buying this game. This is pretty much all Rockstar offers; if you don’t want to keep coming back and playing your opponents online or off, you will quickly forget about the game. The gameplay is as repetitive as it gets and your addiction to it is the only thing that will determine how long you will play this game.

The tournament mode is challenging but it’s really nothing more than an excuse to get a few achievements when it comes down to it; it’s only an extended exhibition mode with adjusted difficulty. It might have been interesting to take your own created player against the pre-made characters; but no create-a-player feature is present in Table Tennis.

Rockstar did include some very nice features in the control scheme of Table Tennis. One of the features included, and that I have always wanted, is some kind of indicator when your player is aiming too close to the out-of-bounds line. Table Tennis uses the rumble feature to let you know how close you are to the edge of the table; the harder the controller vibrates, the closer you are to the edge.

Other than that, the game follows the control scheme of other tennis games, you have your face buttons for different shots; A for top spin, X for left spin, B for right spin, and Y for Backspin. The cool thing is that each shot will have a different glow behind the ball, so it will be easier for you to know how to counter each shot based on what spin your opponent uses.