Leona Lewis said:
Thanks for the tips! I suspected that the game has a hidden depth, and hopefully I'll be able to put these to good use once/if the game becomes difficult enough to necessitate strategic play.
AI on max difficulty can be quite challenging, even when you get good at the game. Online play is highly strategic as well (against decent opponents), the game actually has a lot of depth - the variety of different playstyles possible(playing them effectively that is) is far better then any tennis game I've played to date.
One thing the game explains
very poorly and is by far the most important thing to good-play, is timing&positioning when you start to hit the ball.
The game's "assist" that can't be turned off will always make sure you get to the ball and hit it if you just spam the button - but any shot that is started in wrong-position and wrong-timing will be either slow, mishits, or both.
The worst thing about this is that it's hard to even tell the difference when you first start - the assist will auto-drive your player for
several seconds for certain shots. On flipside when you do learn how to do shots properly - it can be very frustrating to accidentally press the button early - and then you watch helplessly for 5+ seconds how your player walks up to the ball, takes a SLOW swing - and completely botches the shot, and there is Nothing you can do about it once you pressed the button.
Nonetheless it's the best video-game tennis to date IMO, and it really lends itself great to portable gaming, I doubt I'd have ever got a platinum for this if I played it on stationary machine.
