This is going to be awesome, like Virtua Tennis but with Sonic and co! Ah, bollocks it’s not. It may well star a good few of Sega’s big-name characters but what they get up to is nothing like the adventures you have on the court with Roger Federer and Sébastien Grosjean in last year’s addition to Sega’s Virtua brand. Instead it’s disappointingly ‘fun’ without actually being fun.

About four years ago Mario and all his stupid friends had a GameCube outing in Mario Power Tennis and it’s this that Sega is emulating: lots of characters and each with their own special moves. So instead of Mario you’ve got Sonic, instead of Peach you’ve got Ulala from Space Channel 5, instead of courts based on Luigi’s Mansion there are courts based on Samba de Amigo. And like Mario Tennis but instead of Virtua Tennis you’ve got a tennis game whose main tactic is to wait until the star beneath your character’s feet (or just generally under them in the case of NiGHTS who spends his time floating about like a loon) activates your special power.

Every character has his or her or its own strength; Sonic is fast obviously, Dr Eggman is a power type and everybody else seems to be good at curving the ball. The thing is none of this really seems to matter when you’re serving and volleying, it only really dictates what the special move is. So Sonic turns into Super Sonic and moves a bit quicker, Eggman fires spiky balls at his opponent causing them to fall over and everybody else just hits a shot which initially goes all over the place before landing where you’d expect it to.

As you can see there is little strategy going on here, plus it’s possible to block a special move with your own so if both characters have one saved up it just turns into a stalemate, much like the actual game of tennis itself. There’s only three shots you can make and none of them seem any different as they always send the ball right back to your opponent’s feet so each rally descends into a very dull sequence of shots until you stop concentrating and end up pressing the A-button before moving into the correct position and cost yourself a point. Sure you can try to aim the ball to the other side of the court and to be honest sometimes it works, but usually there is a lot of time for the cutesy Sega character you’re up against to span that distance and whack it back to your feet. In short it makes for a very dull game of tennis and has hardly any of the variety of tactics you can utilise in Virtua Tennis.

Obviously Sega Superstars Tennis isn’t meant to be a serious tennis sim, but wouldn’t it be great if it had the backbone of Virtua Tennis and the special shots? Then we could have used phrases like ‘a perfect marriage between fun and skill’ or ‘actually this is pretty good’ but instead we’re left with ‘just wish it was Virtua Tennis’.

It’s not even as if the chance to play as one of Sega’s characters is even that interesting, especially when five of them are from the Sonic The Hedgehog games and many more of them may as well just be palette swaps. We’ll admit we thought ‘cool’ when Gilius Thunderhead from Golden Axe was unlocked but even before the end of the first game we had grown pretty tired of him. You’d have to be really, really fanboyish to get some sense of enjoyment out of this smattering of tennis-playing Sega characters to find it even remotely interesting, and as we all know fanboys suck, their opinions are worthless and they seriously aren’t funny any more. "Look at the blue skies of Sega!" Shut the hell up, no one gives a damn.

Once you get bored of hitting the ball back and forth you can always try out the mini-games. They’re the same kind of games that you’d find in Virtua Tennis which is one of the only things that received criticism when it was released last year. Here though they’re given a Sega bent and are based on various Sega games. But you’re using them to level up your character so they all just become point-scoring exercises which are even more dull than trying to improve your backhand.

If you do find yourself working your way through all the different cups eventually beating the computer and earning all sorts of trophies and prizes then please slap yourself. There are other tennis games available... well there’s only one, the oft-mentioned in this review Virtua Tennis. It’s ace and it’s also by Sega so we know what is possible when tennis games do things properly and don’t get dressed up in inconsequential characters’ clothes.

Tim Empey