	Everybody’s Tennis
	Developer: Clap Hanz Publisher: SCEE Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-2	Words By:
A while back I reviewed Everybody’s Golf for the PS2. It was a breath of fresh air, as the genre had became over-complicated. Tennis has always been a simpler affair so how will the arcade child-friendly Everybody’s Tennis fare? First thing’s first: this is definitely not like Everybody’s Golf - this is Kids’ Golf. The menu screens are awash with bright colours and sunshine, all the characters have gigantic eyes and even bigger smiles and the music could be played in any lift or shopping mall in the country. Everything is all rather twee and refreshing at first but after a while the same four or five musak tracks seriously begin to grate and you want to smash the over-enthusiastic prozac-popping characters over the head with your racquet. The gameplay is even more simplified than a normal arcade tennis game as you only have three types of shot: topspin, slice and lob. Apart from smashes when someone mis-hits a shot that’s pretty much all you can do. The gameplay itself is very basic - at first you’ll just rally from the baseline left-right until the AI opponent gets confused and just spins around. Eventually they’ll get good enough to return those, so you wait for them to try a lob or mis-time a shot and you can smash it past them. Then they’ll get better so you’ll have to add drop shots, and so forth. The learning curve is so shallow that you could compress the first two hours’ gameplay into about ten minutes and people still wouldn’t have any trouble. It gets worse if you play doubles, as ironically your friendly AI will play every shot for you, meaning you’ll rarely drop one point in a doubles game, let alone a game. If it wasn’t simple and self-explanatory enough already the game is also chock-full of hints and aids, like whenever you hit the ball a little speech bubble appears above your head telling you whether you hit it too soon, too late or just right. There are also indicators of where the ball will bounce and when to hit a smash shot. When the ball is hit there is an “explosion” and the ball carries a blueish trail behind it like a comet. I know it’s meant to brighten things up and make tennis nice and happy but the majority of the time it’s more of a hindrance than anything else, as all the pretty colours stop you from actually seeing the ball properly! There’s nothing to really keep you playing in ET, as there’s no create-a-player option and the characters are all as annoying as each other. You praise the game for unlocking another character so you can be rid of the last one only to find this one’s just as annoying as the others! There are no skill upgrades for the characters so you just move on to the best one as soon as you unlock them. The best the game offers in terms of variation are a lot of similar tennis courts and alternative costumes but nothing worth wading through the sludge of tedium that is the gameplay. Everybody’s Tennis fights the eternal paradox - you can’t please everyone. On the surface it looks like Everybody’s Golf, but lacks the finishing touches, the intuitive controls and the little things that made it stand apart from any other kids game. Any adult who likes inoffensive Japanese girls with big eyes and short skirts shout out American catchphrases (aka hentai) will be able to enjoy this game. I think the kids will be able to get to grips with the controls fairly quickly, enjoy the quirky characters and low-level humour and maybe even not notice the dull gameplay. After all, their attention span is probably way lower than the gameplay’s half life anyway.

Best Bits
- Everything’s nice and happy
- Simple controls
- Inoffensive arcade play
- Kids will love it – for a while

Worst Bits
- Maybe I don’t like "nice and happy" ALL the time
- Gameplay is way too simplistic for most
- Shallow learning curve and simple AI
- No incentives to keep playing
- You might have to play it with your kids…


by: Crazypunk