Hit Ping Pong Balls Rather Than Hookers - Rockstar Table Tennis

Author's Rating:

Pros: Simple but challenging gameplay

Cons: On the shallow end of the feature set game

The Bottom Line: 
Wow for the first time in like a billion kajillion years I altered my review style a bit.

Author's Review
When you think Rockstar Games, chances are you think of Grand Theft Auto, the franchise that turned gaming on its ear over the last half-decade and made a certain not-gonna-be-mentioned-here ambulance chasing lawyer infamous. Perhaps though, others think of their Midnight Club racing series, or hold a soft spot for Manhunt, The Warriors, Max Payne, or God forbid, State of Emergency. All these have something in common – the urban, violent, trendy style that Rockstar has used to make their name and roll in the dough, Hot Coffee scandal or not. It's that excess cash that allows for perhaps their most eyebrow-rising game yet – Table Tennis. Yes, that table tennis, better known as ping pong. How ironic is it that a game that's completely non-violent and rather conservative end up being even more controversial than GTA, at least in gaming circles? But it exists and with Rockstar San Diego (developers of Midnight Club) at the helm, it's easy to see that though Table Tennis doesn't really fit into Rockstar's catalog, it's easy to see the game was crafted with the sort of polish and care that many have claimed Rockstar doesn't possess.

Simple & Effective
Table Tennis is not a complicated sport – that's why it's such a widely played game. However usually when a simulation is made of many sports, the game ends up far more complex, turning away a potential audience. Not so with Table Tennis. Instead, the game emphasizes simplicity – after spending 10 minutes doing the various training drills which explain everything, anyone should have a grasp on how to play. Even if you do skip the training and head right into regular matches, the game's concept is simple enough to grasp. Using either the right thumbstick or the face buttons, you can play 4 different shots – a basic topspin shot that is the core mechanic, a backspin shot for slowing down rallies, and right and left spin shots that sharply push the ball in your intended direction, showing off the surprisingly realistic physics Table Tennis has. It's a good visual effect too, as it's easy to see the ball make the move that a regular topspin shot couldn't deliver.

Beyond that, almost everything is designed with user-friendliness in mind. Every shot has a special glow around the ball, that shows what kind of shot was used to return the rally, color coded to the button mapped to the controller (but you're on your own with the thumbstick option, though it isn't too hard to figure out). If you're able to get an advantage, returning the shot with the same shot type will give an extra advantage towards scoring a point. The controller vibrates when you're pulling off a hard shot, but will buzz even more violently if the shot is headed off the table and out of bounds, giving you a chance to ease off the force and get a better play in. On the other hand, if an opponent has hit the ball out, the game automatically holds off your return rather than you getting sucked into returning an obvious point for you. Perhaps the only 'complicated' aspect is serving the ball – there's a bit more effort required for a good serve, and the game doesn't do a real good job of explaining it in the training drills.

...But Hard to Master
One could look at all this as a hint that Table Tennis is some sort of creampuff, hand-holding game – but it's not. Yes, playing on Easy and Medium isn't going to be an ultra challenge, however the first time you sit down and play there is a bit of a learning curve, figuring out the nuances of the game. You learn quickly that the reason all these player advantages are there is because you're going to need them to survive. AI opponents can be fierce, and if you're an Xbox Live player, chances are there's hundreds of skilled and unforgiving opponents looking to destroy pride, confidence, and hearts. The action is amazingly fast paced, requiring you to be on your toes every single shot – there's little time to be distracted, or the ball will end up sailing by. Each of the selectable characters has their own traits – some are all about accuracy, while others are so powerful that they become player favorites...but become your worst nightmare when the shots returned are so fast that returning them at all is the goal, rather than any fancy stuff.

Table Tennis exemplifies the 'easy to learn, hard to master' mantra because of this. From personal experience, I completed all the training drills and figured the game was going to be a cakewalk...then did a real match and ended up fighting for the victory because a little robotic thing shooting ping pong balls at me is far different than getting thoroughly destroyed by that damn Jesper and his rocket returns. In time, the key is to balance the shot selection, whether it's returning shots with power or going for soft shots by pressing the Left Bumper. If the going gets too tough, there's also a Focus Shot (by holding the Right Bumper while you hit a return) that slows down the game to allow for more accuracy and more importantly, a bit of time to set up your return. I don't use it too much because it's not 100% effective, but it's a good thing for new players who might be surprised at how rapid-fire the action is.

Keeping it Simple
While most sports games go overboard with options and features, Table Tennis goes the opposite, with an almost bare-bones set of gameplay types. There's no all-encompassing career mode that lets you create a player and take them through the ranks, nor any sort of long-running season type for some sort of world championship. Instead, the lone single player options are either basic exhibition matches (that also can be played in a 2-player offline setup) and 4 different elimination tournaments with increasing difficulty. Naturally Xbox Live support is included (besides, I already mentioned it so this is anti-climactic!), but that's somewhat bare-bones as well. There's no kind of doubles play so it's just basic one-on-one battles with friends or strangers. Which is too bad because doubles would rock.

The tournaments are split up by difficulty; the easiest only requires 4 matches to win, and in general your opponents are easy, and unless you draw an uber-challenging finals opponent like Jesper or Solayman, there won't be any bumps along the way – though regardless, the final opponent is a bit more difficult to defeat. Even the 'normal' difficulty tournament (dubbed the Rookie Tournament) is pretty easy until the finals when you're dropped in a match with someone turned up to the Pro tourney level. Call it a sneak preview into the terror that's the Pro circuit tournament. But then, the Pro tourney is where the fun really starts; the opponents are relentless, the action is impossibly fast, the rallies reach the hundreds, and most importantly – the game is simply addictive even if you're getting whooped. There's no question that this is an old-school game in design; Table Tennis has an uncanny ability to get under your skin and annoy the hell out of you because your opponents seem superhuman in spots. If a controller wasn't so expensive there'd probably have been a couple going through the wall of my game room. Yet as angry as you'd get...you'll be back for just one more game – that turns into 20.

Because of the thin feature set, Rockstar SD saw fit to add plenty of unlockable items, though most are designed for Achievement addicts who need those extra points to boost up their Gamerscore, and everyone else probably won't care enough about them to bother, aside from the unlockable characters. Half of the playable characters are locked up, and can be unlocked by either beating the tournaments or winning a set number of overall offline matches, whether they're exhibitions or part of the tournaments. Fulfilling various goals also unlocks the home courts for characters, along with recreational venues for about half of them. The same parameters lead to unlocking new outfits – not a real big deal but again, this stuff is for the Gamerscore Geeks who need every possible point to rise up the overall ranks and not your average player who doesn't care about that sort of thing.

Looks Great, Sounds Great
Like the game itself, Table Tennis goes for a simple visual presentation. That's not to say the game looks bad – quite the contrary. But it's reserved. It's hard to not be – the game only features one table and two players based in about 20 different locations, from empty recreational stages to jam packed tournament arenas. But still, the characters look downright spooky real. Everything about them screams authentic – flowing hair, visible knee joints (weird I know), sweat on their bodies as matches grow more and more intense, plenty of unique movements (watch Liu Ping use his paddle as a fan) and very realistic animations. The only bad animation is the serving, which looks extremely robotic and jarring compared to how smooth the game moves otherwise. Squint your eyes and it might look like two real people playing the real game.

When you first sit down to play Table Tennis, perhaps the first thing you'll notice is the sound of the ball hitting the paddle or the table. That distinctive flat ping is recognizable by almost anyone, and it becomes the core of what ends up being a pretty good audio component. When you're in a match at a tournament venue, all you hear is this sound, until the action picks up. If you're in a competitive match, the crowd will begin to cheer great movies and appreciate the action, while slowly the sound of techno music pops up, adding to the intensity. Once a point is scored, it all goes away and again, it's just the paddle, the table, and the ball taking up your ears. It's pretty impressive when put into perspective. The music is neither bad or good – it just fades into the background and does its job well. When you're in a match at a recreational venue, the music is always there and the audience is gone, so the immersion is different, but the music again blends in and doesn't make its presence felt. The characters have a handful of taunts and other voice samples as well that aren't bad.

The Last Paragraph
And so, Rockstar's experiment is a surprising success. Stripping back almost everything but the core, Table Tennis is an old-school, challenging game that makes up for its lack of features for addictive, deep gameplay that doesn't require hours of training to understand, though it might take months to truly master it. Adding in the $40 price tag, which makes it a budget game for the Xbox 360, is another successful tactic which makes it easier to swallow a game that doesn't have the same sort of budget as the $60 regulars. If anything, Table Tennis proves that Rockstar can make a focused, non-violent game that appeals to everyone regardless of age or experience with games. So chew on that, Jack.