Rockstar's Table Tennis - It's a Good Topspin Smash!

Table tennis makes a comeback on video game consoles. I think most people know that pong was one of the first games, ever. Two white paddles and one square ball on a black background, with the constant “bip” noise. Rockstar has given table tennis a little jolt with Rockstar’s Table Tennis for the Xbox 360.

I first came to enjoy the sport of table tennis in college. My dorm had a table in its lobby. Whenever I had some free time, and an opponent, I would be playing table tennis. I consider myself a decent player, but not as good as the pros. If you watch table tennis on television, you will see a very fast and energetic game, nothing I am capable of! Rockstar tried to portray that into its game.

The controls of Rockstar’s Table Tennis are pretty simple. You have four different ways to spin your shot; backspin, topspin, right spin, and left spin. The spins are chosen by the four buttons on the controller, or the right analog stick. I have found using the buttons is a lot easier than trying to use the analog stick. I’m not sure why Rockstar would even have that as an option. Also, the longer you hold in the button, the harder you hit the ball. While you are holding in your hit button, you can aim left or right to change the direction the ball will fly. Holding in the left bumper during the shot will cause a soft shot. This shot will fly soft and cause the ball to barely pass the net, and possibly bounce twice on the table before your opponent can get to it. If you hold in the right bumper, you unleash a focused shot, which puts more speed and spin on the ball. However, you have to build your focus meter by returning shots and having a good volley. Once your focus meter is up, you will hear some beats starting to bump in the background.

I think Rockstar did something good with the serving. You can move anywhere you want on your side of the table. Once you pick you spot, you can press and button to bring up the serve bar. You can aim left or right, by holding in the left analog stick. The next step is to hold in any button, depending on what spin you want. The bar goes from red to green, red being a soft shot and green being a hard shot. You have to release the button when the vertically moving black bar gets to the desired power of your serve. Simultaneously, you have a white border rising up the bar, this is your spin bar. The higher you let the border go, the more spin your serve will have. It is hard to get an ace in this game unless you know the secret. Once you learn the secret, serving can become ace city. I’ll let you figure it out!

When you strike the ball, you will notice the ball will have a color glow to it. That color represents what spin is on the ball. Also to accompany the color is two little creampuff looking things to show the rotation. The ball glows green for topspin, yellow for backspin, blue for right spin, and red for left spin. The colors match the colors of the button being pressed to make it a little easier to distinguish. However, on my standard definition television, it is sometimes hard to tell which spin is coming at you. I have a HD television on the way so I am sure that will make a huge difference in all of my games! The spin is helpful to see because you can counter with the same spin. If you counter right, the ball will be more powerful and spin more.

There is also the choice to have a combination of spins in one shot. If you hold the topspin button (A) and the left spin button (X), your shot will dive down and left. These shots come in handy when using your focused shots. Often times your opponent won’t return the shot, or give a bad return which lets you smash the ball back in their face! While waiting for your smash, or any shot, you can aim left or right for your shots direction. If you start aiming to far to once side, your controller will start to rumble, letting you know your shot will miss the table. What a great feature. Once you feel the rumble, simply hit the other direction and your shot will stay on the table for another volley. You can, however, flirt with the edges of the table. If the ball hits the very edge of the table, the ball will fly off to the side, for an automatic point. When the ball gets close to the edge, the game goes in slow motion so you can see if the ball is going to stay on the table.

There aren’t a whole lot of options for Rockstar’s Table Tennis offline. You have exhibition, training and tournament modes. Exhibition is a simple one match against any opponent you want to face. Training is more of a tutorial. You will have a machine spit balls at you, and you have to complete the task at hand, trying to get a prefect score. There are four different tournaments to choose. You have amateur, rookie, professional, and all-star. From one to the next includes more matches and harder AI opponents. In the amateur tourney, you should have no problem winning the 4 matches to be the victor. Rookie gets a little harder, and doubles the amount of matches. As for professional and all-star, you better be on you’re “A” game if you plan to win. The game gets very, very difficult when you bump up the difficulty. I think trying to win on all-star is more aggravating than the mile high club achievement on Call of Duty 4! With the latter actually being possible! I doubt I will ever win the all-start tournament, but oh well.

The game starts out with 4 playable characters, and you unlock 7 more by winning tournaments and winning tournaments under a given time. The game’s players are all fictional. You can also win different locations and outfits based on how you win games. You can unlock more uniforms if you win by a backhand shot, forehand shot, soft shot, focused shot, making opponent hit the net, etc. Once you win one way, you can not use the same method to unlock another uniform. There are achievements for unlocking all characters and uniforms. It is tough to do, but it can be achieved through tons of play.

The graphics of the game are above average. There is a lot of detail that are put into the characters, mainly because all of the focus is on them and the table. They did not have to worry about the crowd and surrounds as you would with other sport games. Before the game starts, you will see the crowd and arena, but during gameplay, they are out of sight. When a player shoots, you can even see their shirts and hair move the way they should. They players look rather realistic as well. The movements mimic the movements you would see on television, whether it is moving side to side or swing the paddle.

The audio is also a little above average. You hear everything you need to hear in a table tennis game. You will hear the ball hit the table and the ball hit the paddles with a lot of realism. Also during matches, you will hear some chatter of the crowd. They will either chant the name of the player, over and over again, or chant the country they are representing. It is not very distracting, and does not take away from the gameplay. There is also a voice over a loudspeaker to announce who is winning and the score of the match. There is no play-by-play announcer, which does not bother me one bit. They tend to ruin sports games anyways.

There is a multiplayer, which consists of the same game types you can play offline. There is really nothing different about the online play compared to the offline play. The online noticeable difference is the occasional display of lag. Only sometimes the game will skip around a bit, but that is few and far between, base on my experience. There is also a lack of games being played online, but you should always be able to find 10 or so games at anytime. It’s not completely dead, but it’s getting there. With the game selling as cheap as it is, approximately $10, there will always be a few people playing.

My final thoughts… Rockstar’s Table Tennis is the best game of its kind, maybe because it is the only. It has good graphics, sounds, and decent game play. It has some replay value, if you are trying to get achievements or unlock all of the possible uniforms. The only downside, the game gets real hard quick. It will take some time and practice to complete an all-star tournament.