The truly good tennis games would come after this generation of consoles, but this is a step in the right direction. In general it seems that developers could not figure out how to make an elegant distinction between using the d-pad to position yourself and using it to direct the ball, so the player has to suffer. It requires too precise an input to play at a somewhat decent level, and the reward ain’t good enough, in my opinion. It just feels kinda random, like THIS time you somehow managed to make the controls do what you wanted. This is barely better than Super Tennis, which wasn’t a particularly good game, but where Smash Tennis absolutely fucking owns that game is in the graphics department. This is seriously a very pretty SNES game with a good if minimal art-style, and it shows that with confidence. If only for that, I think everybody should play it at least once.

Broken ass game from nearly 10 years ago with two awful main modes that require microtransactions to work and with another game mode that asks you to spend several hours (mygm) before letting you do the cool shit that you actually want to do and that is plagued with stupid fucking incessant micromanaging garbage like talking to your players to keep their morale up or whatever. Most of the money seems to go to the fucking mycareer cutscenes that most people either don’t care about or actively hates. Every little thing they tried to do to make the game cool and hip is boomer nonsense that messes with the actually cool things of a basketball games, it just gets in the way between the player and a decent sport simulation. The engine is slow as shit and now you can’t even TAKE FUCKING JUMPSHOTS because the margin of error is so slim that you have to actually like get the timing down to a frame BUT EVERY PLAYER IN THE GAME HAS A DIFFERENT ANIMATION AND A DIFFERENT TIMING SO IT IS SEEMINGLY ONLY OPTIMIZED TO BE FUN IN A COMPETITIVE MYPLAYER MODE BUT BREAKS THE REST OF THE FUCKING GAME AND YOU CANNOT CHANGE THIS WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS STUPID ASS SHIT I DON’T UNDERSTAND PLEASE SOMEBODY TELL ME!!!

It manages to stay fun 30 years after its release, which is impressive for such a game. Like, play most action games of the era, even the well remembered ones, and they kinda suck, and almost always are on the cheaper side of difficulty. Not this one, tho. It’s harder than a game like this would be nowadays, but not by a whole lot, and it’s snappy great to control. It lacks a little bit of craziness to me, it just looks to ordinary, and while it is a good deal of fun, it misses just a bit of balance here and there and some checkpoints are really punishing, particularly in an early game stage. A late game stage (you’ll probably know which one), however, is absolutely trash, a convoluted mess that I didn’t enjoy in the slightest.