World Tour

Grinding up your skills through practice.

The main single player part of Virtua Tennis 3 is the World Tour mode. This lets you create a custom tennis player which you then get to nurture from the bottom of the rankings to the number one spot. Initially your ranking and the skills of your character are too gimpy to actually play with the pros, so you need to do some training. In the menu you can choose from numerous but different training modes, each improving a certain aspect of your character.

To develop your abilities, the Tennis Academy offers normal training - you get tasks to complete such as hitting a set number of cross-court returns or performing specific type of shots. These tasks get more complex though as the skills of your character improve and in addition to the academy, there are a dozen different mini-games you can play to train up:

Drum Topple, improves ground strokes...	...as does Court Curling.
Avalanche - evading huge tennis balls to improve your footwork(!)	Feeding Time - volleying practice.
More volley practice, defending your prize collection.	Pin Crusher - tennis bowling for stronger serves.

While some of the mini-games are fairly bizarre, most are fun to do and actually require bit of skill to complete. As your ranking and skills rise, you unlock harder versions of the mini-games to train with.