I'd been wanting to mention for months prior to its release that I thought Rockstar's Table Tennis had an excellent chance of being a very, very good game.
Some things even I am unwilling to go public with.
It made sense, though. Rockstar's signature is the gigantic but ragged Grand Theft Auto games. In a much smaller game world, with a much smaller set of behaviors to emulate to correspond closely to reality, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to create a highly polished, focused game. And the mechanics of a one-on-one confrontation corresponded, to some degree, to the mechanics of a fighting game.
Table tennis is also potentially an excellent game mechanic. Speed, power, spin--there's plenty there to make an interesting game.
Add in a career mode and some interesting mini-games, and you'd have a well-rounded sports title.
To a large degree, that's what Rockstar made--an extremely polished, faithful representation of the sport. The graphics are spectacular, the animation is top-notch, sound effects are fantastic, and the ball physics are superb. The A.I. opponents play with widely varying (but not unrealistic) styles. And while I don't play multiplayer, people I fully trust have raved about the quality of the multiplayer experience.
It's even cheap. Released at $39.95, I saw it advertised at Fry's for $29.95 last weekend.
And I wish I could stop right there. Unfortunately, a few paragraphs up, I wrote about adding in a career mode and some interesting mini-games. I mean, that's an easy design decision, right? Every sports title has both of those by default, right?
Well, yes and no. Yes, they do, but no, not in this game. And that's the design decision that unfortunately removes the game from the 9+ range where it would otherwise belong.
There is no career mode. There are a few tournaments you can play in, but there's no sense of progression--they exist primarily to allow you to unlock various players after you beat them. That's disappointing enough, but the tournaments themselves are very poorly designed. The strenth of your opponents is based entirely on the round in the tournament that you happen to be playing. So each opponent has a basic strategy, which doesn't vary, but their skill level is keyed to the tournament round.
It's lousy design and it works just as badly as it sounds. If you lose in a tournament round, you just have to reload. And reload. And reload. It's a brick wall. Until you win, you're stuck. This can get incredibly frustrating (and boring), and the lack of hard-wired opponent strength means you'll never develop a rivalry with anyone--if you meet them in the first round, it's an easy win. If it's the semi-finals, it's going to be extremely difficult.
What's particularly disappointing is that it would have been very, very easy to have a true career mode with reasonable depth.
Mini-games? None. Another disappointment, only because it's such an obvious feature to include.
I'll tell you how much I like this game: if Rockstar announced that they were releasing a career mode add-on for $14.95 via Xbox Live, I'd buy it with no complaints. That's how impressed I am with the rest of the game. The ball physics alone are stunningly good, and that as the core of the simulation makes everything else feel very real (EA Sports, please take note).
Two other small issues. The more significant is that your player moves with less precision than he swings, and the game's controls are otherwise so tight that it stands out as a minor but noticeable issue. Second, there are times when your player blocks your sight of the ball. It rarely results in a missed shot, because your swing is already in progress, but it does feel unnatural at times (although I don't notice it very often).
With a robust career mode and mini-game selection, Table Tennis would have been a minor classic in the sports game genre. It's that good at what it does.
If only it had done just a little more.