Over the past five years, home consoles have experienced a revolution in high-quality tennis games, thanks to titles such as Virtua Tennis, Sega Sports Tennis 2K2, and Top Spin. O3’s World Championship Tennis is about as far from these games as you can reasonably get without building a time machine and traveling back to 1972 in an effort to experience the heyday of Pong.

For starters, WCT is plagued with flat scenery, egregiously bad character models, an oddly overcomplicated control scheme, a featureless two-player singles game, and a tepid, monotonous career mode. To make matters worse, the game is riddled with bugs. For example, it’s entirely possible to wander over to your opponent’s side of the court midgame—and if you’re lucky, he might even stop moving altogether, prompting you to restart the entire match. This is, of course, in addition to other game-crashing and machine-rebooting bugs.

If this half-assed excuse for entertainment is any indication, PC tennis games have a long way to go before they can match the quality of their console brethren. If you’re dying to play a good tennis game on the PC, do yourself a favor and download the recent Top Spin demo instead. WCT barely qualifies as a game, let alone “good.”

Verdict

It’s a good thing Pong isn’t alive to see this.

PUBLISHER: O3 Entertainment DEVELOPER: Espaco Informatica GENRE: Sports ESRB RATING: E REQUIRED: Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB RAM, 400MB install RECOMMENDED: Pentium III 950MHz, 128MB RAM, gamepad MULTIPLAYER: Internet, LAN (2 players)

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.