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Virtua Tennis 3

How to fail in converting your console game to the PC

While Sega handled the arcade and PS3 versions in-house, development of Virtua Tennis 3 for Xbox 360 and PC was handed over to the UK-based Sumo Digital. The Xbox 360 version is probably the most advanced version of the game with extensive support for Xbox 360 Live online play. For the PC, the name of the game was clearly "do a quick and dirty conversion" and there has been little to no effort towards a proper PC version.

The most obvious sign of a botched port is the controls. Some hare-brain decided that you have to use the keyboard at all times in the menus, even if you actually play with a gamepad. And since the game is almost unplayable with the keyboard, everyone will pretty much have to play with a gamepad - except in the menus, where you have to use the keyboard. Yep, the one you will be bashing your head against.

Control reconfiguration is also limited - you can change the keys and buttons used for actual playing during a tennis match, but there is no way to change any of the keys used in the menus. Navigation here is also inconsistent - in some places you have to hit the selection key on a "return to main menu" option, while in other places you use the back button (backspace), and in the case of selecting your player's outfit, hitting the selection key doesn't actually select that outfit piece so you could change it - it throws you back to the previous menu accepting all changes.

There is also no way to play against your friend, unless you have two controllers - you can't hold a two-player game on the keyboard, and you can't play with a keyboard against a gamepad user. This limitation also applies to the court games, where you play the different mini-games of the world tour mode against your friend. However, this mode won't even start without two gamepads plugged in - this to me this is a bit silly, as many of the court games would work just fine with the players taking turns playing with just one controller. While the Xbox 360 version had exemplary online support using Xbox Live, PC version has no online play whatsoever - not even LAN play. In short: it's two gamepads or no multiplayer at all.

Xbox 360 achievements have also been tossed to the trash bin. You still do receive some emails to your coach when you reach certain goals, but all you receive is some extra accessories or sportswear to use and there is no screen to track these goals.

Visuals and the technology

Visually, Virtua Tennis 3 looks fairly good on the PC. While some of the advanced shader effects of the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions have been dropped or simplified, things still look acceptable. The hardware requirements are also fairly low - in practice any SM2.0 card will run the game and cards such as GeForce 6600GT 128MB are just fine with all the settings maxed out with the exception of texture resolution (you need a 256MB card to properly use the highest setting).

On the processor side, almost anything goes as long but as long as it has SSE2 support - that means Athlon XPs are out. Even if the CPU power of almost all Athlon XP processors would be enough for the game, the lack of SSE2 command support rules them out.

All settings at maximum...	...and at minimum. Almost no visible difference in quality.
All settings maximized...	...and minimized. Lower texture resolution shows up mostly in replays.

Under the hood, everything is not well with the game engine. Sumo Digital QA apparently only plays the game on NVIDIA hardware, as the game constantly crashes on any ATI card we tested the game on. Self shadowing - the shadows characters cast on themselves - also look horrible on ATI cards, while everything looks fine on NVIDIA hardware.

Self-shadows with ATI Radeon X1900XT - notice the ugly shadow cast by the tennis racket.

Self-shadows with NVIDIA GeForce 6600 - note how the edges are much smoother.

2D bitmap graphics of the menus also scream "quick and dirty port" - they are apparently exactly same files as on the Xbox 360, and that means they are probably done for 720p native resolution, and there are some unavoidable scaling artifacts in the PC version.

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