Tuesday 13 October 2009

What I’d Like To See

…is a proper full ATP Tour Tennis game – preferably on Wii. Me and my girlfriend have a Wii, and we have EA’s Grand Slam Tennis for it, it’s pretty fun, but the entire season is reduced right down to the four Grand Slam events (and only from R32 – 5 matches, rather than R128 – 7 matches) with each Slam preceded by a few single-match warm-up events.

The reality of professional Tennis is slightly more complicated. Yeah, the Grand Slams are the highlights and pinnacle of the sport, but they are but 4 events in a Tour consisting of dozens. Aside from missing out dozens of Tour events, Grand Slam Tennis also ignores the rankings side of Tennis. I reckon the ultimate virtual Tennis experience would more accurately replicate the ATP Tour, bringing together the Slams, the Masters 1000 series, the ATP 500 and 250 series, maybe not the entire tour, but enough to let the player compete in 18-24 tournaments.

ATP rankings are calculated from a players best 18 results, for the top 30 players their rankings must include their results from all 4 Slams and 8 of the 9 Masters tournaments, even if they have better point scores from smaller tournaments, plus their best results from up to 4 ATP 500 tournaments and best results from 2 ATP 250 tournaments. Players who fail to qualify for Slams or Masters substitute with ATP 250’s or Challenger tournaments.

It gets deeper than that, but for a game, I reckon they could stick with the Top 30 format, if you suck so bad you don’t qualify for Tournaments they can always let you have a Wildcard smile_tongue.

Aside from the tournaments it’d be nice to have a few more current players. Grand Slam Tennis has a small collection of current Top 20 players (around 8 for the men) plus a collection of legends extending back to to the McEnroe-Borg era. I reckon it wouldn’t be unreasonable for game developers to model the full current top 20 (maybe even 30), maybe equal that number with legends, they can then “top up” the numbers with made up players – possibly even randomly generated players, so that there’s a full roster of players for playing a full 128 man Grand Slam draw.

When you consider the hundreds of players modelled for large scale team games like FIFA soccer or Madden NFL etc etc, I don’t think asking for 40-60 real Tennis players is beyond the realms of feasible possibility.

I think it would be way more fun to measure my skill and achievements through rankings rather than titles alone, particularly if there are only 4 titles to be had, plus a ranking based system levies the possibility of replicating the ATP Tour Finals, which would also be pretty cool.

I haven’t mentioned the WTA, I don’t particularly understand the women's ranking system, it’s different from the ATP system, but I don’t suppose it would be that difficult to combine the women's tour into the same game.

So, EA, finger out, proper Tennis game please, and if you could sort out bounce detection on any future Tennis games you may develop, that’d be lovely, nothing worse than losing the point on a ball you made because the game registered a double bounce when the player could only visibly detect one.

freedoms_stain, better than Helen at Grand Slam Tennis smile_tongue(although not as good at real live Tennis smile_sad), out!

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