SEGA Superstars Tennis

After doing a bit of research and continuing my quest to complete all games I own on the previous generation, I started up SEGA Superstars Tennis without honestly having the intention of finishing it. I was looking through my collection of non-backward compatible games with online achievements and this was the one I chose to start. I cleared out the online stuff and then just carried on clipping away at the solo bits and before I knew it, the game was complete. That makes it sound a lot easier than it is.

Superstars Tennis is essentially a basic tennis game. You play as various characters from a multitude of SEGA based games including Sonic, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio and Golden Axe to name a few. You play on a variety of themed courts, some of which make playing tennis more difficult than it should be as the lines become hard to see.

You can play singles or doubles but doubles is a pile of garbage unless you are playing with another human player.

However, the tennis element is only a small fraction of the game. The majority of playing time will be spent in the Superstars mode which is basically a collection of mini games where you have to do a variety of stuff in keeping with the SEGA games theme. For example, Jet Set Radio games focus on hitting the ball to the other side of the net to complete graffiti tags whereas Sonic mostly focuses on collecting rings. This isn’t true for every game though. Clearly where they couldn’t think of any appropriate mini games, you just have to play tennis – which is fair enough when you consider there are 101 challenges to complete in this mode.

Graphically, it’s cartoony and the animations don’t interfere with the gameplay which is good. But the music is sinfully irritating, especially the Samba Di Amigo stage. Thankfully this arena is just a tennis match that’s over quite quickly but I still hate it which is testament to how annoying it is.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Achievement wise, completing the game is difficult and takes a massive amount of perseverance. There are a lot of fairly quick and easy achievements that will come from just playing the game, probably the trickiest of these is for hitting three perfect serves in a row. However, if going for the completion, a lot of tennis will be played so this will likely come through attrition.

Outside of Superstars mode there isn’t a lot to do. The first port of call is probably playing tournament mode but the achievement states you need to win the final stage. What it doesn’t tell you though is you need to win all of your matches without dropping a game to get to the ‘final stage’ so it’s a bit misleading. This also unlocks the ‘hidden stage’ which there is another achievement for beating. I’m pretty sure this was just a glitch though and beating the final stage is meant to unlock regardless of how you do it.

There’s a lot of other stuff to do but before that, playing through all of Superstars mode is required to ensure that everything is unlocked that you can then do in either singles or doubles matches or game modes. There’s not really a lot worth mentioning about it other than the fact it takes a while. There are various achievements that can be obtained while playing specific levels and you will unlock all the characters, play against most of them and unlock all the game modes.

One playthrough of Superstars mode and beating all the players and classic doubles pairings will likely leave you with two achievements – getting AAA ranks in all of the Superstars challenges and getting 7 chaos emeralds in the Sonic mini game.

Firstly, the sonic game… my god this is a piece of work. In order to get the 7 emeralds, you have to run around on court collecting rings while avoiding robots firing electrified balls at you. Bombs will also appear sometimes instead of rings. You get three lives. The worst part about this is several times when playing, a line of rings would spawn where I was standing and more often than not, exactly where I would be standing, a bomb would spawn costing me a life through bad luck. It became infuriating after a while, almost controller breaking.

However, once you get used to the pattern and learn how to manipulate the robots, it’s doable and very much rewarding once you get to the end.

Getting the AAA ranks in all the missions is the long road in this and it really only comes down to 2 things; the Jet Set Radio tags and beating the Alex Kidd tennis tournament.

The tournament matches are a bitch as you have to win all the matches without dropping a single point. Once you work out the patterns of play this isn’t so bad with the exception of the Alex Kidd tournament. For some reason, even if you set the difficulty to easy, these three guys play like pros and seem to hit cross court winners with ease.

Making the tags without missing a shot is just an episode of screaming. I mean there are certain depths of shot you can hit but I swear to god the game has a mind of its own sometimes. This is fine for some of the other challenges but when you’re not allowed to miss, it’s a massive ballache. This is coupled with the fact that you need to get the right colour spray cans to drop on to the court, only 4 cans drop at a time and some of the tags have six colours. Oh, and sometimes sponges will drop which if picked up, will wipe off your tags. Essentially what this means is a lot of things have to go your way for success… which brings me on to my biggest bugbear with the whole game.

When you have a selection of small challenges when you are going to need to restart a lot, the least the game could do is have responsive menu controls. After pressing pause, you need to delay for a second before it will allow you to scroll down to the reset button. This may not seem a big deal but when you are trying to retry for the tenth time after missing the first shot, it becomes incredibly old really quickly.

Multiplayer

There is also a small amount of online achievements for playing the game and getting wins in both doubles and singles matches and the only real way to do it now is with friends but there is one really annoying one where you have to get on the in-game Superstars Channel and no one really knows how this is decided. What I did was keep playing a massive tie break and it eventually unlocked during the game. Again, this felt more like luck than skill.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While there are a lot of frustrations with playing SEGA Superstars Tennis, especially if going for the completion, it is a very rewarding feeling if you get to the end. It’s also one of the more fun tennis games that doesn’t take the tennis too seriously.