Tennis
We’ve had the table tennis table at work for a long time now, well over a year, maybe even two, but it’s been sitting unused and unfolded for a while now. But a couple of weeks ago somebody put it up again, and I’ve found myself playing. A lot.
I’ve never really played table tennis before, so despite having now been playing it for two weeks I still haven’t won a single game against all these other people who have actually played it before. I can have moments where it clicks and I start to play quite well, but I’m still losing out because of too many mistakes and being unable to put proper spin on the ball. Practice makes perfect though, and I’m sure I’ll be owning the table before too long.
I also downloaded the Rockstar Present’s Table Tennis demo for Xbox 360 while I was getting Galaga (which is classic of course, but seems to be missing an option to ratchet up the speed, making it almost completely unplayable for me who is used to the arcade hack to make it not so slow) and I wasn’t particularly enamoured with it. The table is so tiny, and your player so big, that it’s difficult to tell really what you’re doing. In a tennis game it’s obvious when the ball goes to the right hand side of the court that’s where you need to be, but in this I never got a good sense of feedback from what I was pressing on the controller to what was appearing on screen. At times it seemed like I could just stand there and do nothing apart from press one button and I would return it, only to have me miss it next time around without any clue as to what was different. It certainly felt nothing like playing the game for real.
I had originally been interested in picking this title up, but not anymore. I will say that it’s absolutely fantastic to be able to download console game demos though, one more area that Microsoft got very right. Let’s hope Nintendo are paying attention when it comes to the Wii.
