Simon Read's New Star Games specializes in sports games where you manage not a team but the career of an individual athlete; the New Star Soccer series demonstrates the virtue of this, providing a style of play quite different from either the high-res "you are there" gameplay of conventional sports games or the spreadsheet-like play of sports management games.
New Star Tennis is his latest outing; as the name implies, you're a tennis player on the international circuit. You plan activities week by week, including training, participating in a tournament, relaxing by playing minigames (darts, kart riding, going to the casino or betting on the horses), or shopping. Equipment can allow strength and stamina training, but also apparently to attract sponsors, you have to live some kind of extravagant lifestyle, so you need to buy crap for the sake of buying crap.
When actually playing tennis against an AI-controlled opponent, the game is a somewhat odd combination of a "player skill" game and a "character skill" game -- that is, you're moving your character and triggering tennis strokes, but accuracy and power is apparently affected by character stats, which you increase by playing the training minigames. As well, the keyboard UI is a bit difficult to master -- the game works considerably better with a joystick controller.
The need to train is a problem, in that the training minigames are moderately tedious, and you need to spend quite a lot of time with them to be competitive in tournaments.
In New Star Tennis, the life-sim/player management aspect of the game feels less original than in the New Star Soccer games, perhaps because tennis, unlike association football, is not a team sport; and the lack of team connection, also, reduces the feeling of connection to the real world. That is, without the panoply of national and international leagues, and the ability to move from team to team as your career advances, the game feels flatter.
Still, the New Star games are invariably well conceived and executed; the players you oppose seem to have different styles and respond in believable ways; and in general, if tennis is a sport you are interested in, New Star Tennis is worth a look.
"When actually playing
"When actually playing tennis against an AI-controlled opponent, the game is a somewhat odd combination of a "player skill" game and a "character skill" game"
Hmmm, in CRPGs that's not called odd?
This does sound like an RPG. A sports one - which makes a nice break from killing conveniently evil creatures (with weak stats, usually) monotonously.
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Philosopher Gamer Blog
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"The need to train is a
"The need to train is a problem, in that the training minigames are moderately tedious, and you need to spend quite a lot of time with them to be competitive in tournaments."
This at least is in line with training for most sports, so I guess you could write it off as a 'life sim' aspect.
Training
Well, yeah... But I'm mindful of the idea that "a story is like life with the boring parts removed." Certainly, playing any sport at a professional level involves lots of tedious practice -- but part of the advantage a game offers is avoiding the tedium. In other words, a game that is in some sense a simulation of something real should probably also be "like real life, but with the boring parts removed."
Grind
"like real life, but with the boring parts removed."
Not really sure or on topic, but aren't the massively successful MMORPGs an inversion of the formula? :)
At least for some, there seems to be an awful lot of fun in tedious repetition.
No one likes grinding
Grinding is widely regarded as the weakest aspect of MMORPGS. Personally, I see it as a testament to human inertia. The traditional cRPG game dynamic clearly doesn't fit MMO very well, but we still use it, because it's something we're familiar with. Then again, I never liked that dynamic anyway (even though I like playing RPG on the computer).
A large part of various efforts aimed at making MMOs more accessible involves speeding up the grind. A friend of mine (a hardcore gamer, by the way) once wanted me to join him playing a MMO on a pirate server. Why not just play the trial viersion, I asked. Well, the trial version didn't have a x16 experience multiplier... :-)
Also, there are gameplay mechanisms that mitigate the tedium. One of the more important ones is instant gratification, e.g. when killing an NPC doesn't take long, and it always drops some loot, and as soon as you pick it up, some other enemy begs for you attention, so your attention span never needs to exceed 60 seconds.
Also, MMOs take advantage of their social aspect. It's one thing to perform some arbitrary abstract exercise for the sake of exercise. But doing it for the sake of your party, or your guild, or your friends who are already level 50 and you need to catch up with them, may feel completely different.
Another interesting mechanism is how MMOs offer a way for you to play without playing. A friend of mine has just recently gotten hooked on Eve Online. She's a miner, and doesn't have much experience, so her gameplay involves approaching some asteroid, pressing the button for turning the "mining laser" on, waiting for two hours, and going back to base. And she's fine with it. She does her other stuff (such as work - she's a network admin) while the game runs in the background. When something interesting happens, she jumps into game for a few moments, does the interesting bit, and gets back to her other tasks.
There's something odd here
There's something odd here with the assertion if in real life something involves boring stuff, it 'fits' the game to have boring stuff in it.
Even weirder is an almost apologetic noting of just 'an idea' that games could be made more fun.
I've been around roleplayers a long time and often there seems to be this set of priorities - in number one spot, realism. And coming up second (or even third), fun. A kind of bizarre dedication to something called realism, not because that's fun in itself (if it were that would indicate fun has first priority) but simply dedication to realism for dedications sake. Almost like some people tap the top of each fence post as they go along, it seems in some of my darker moods.
~~~
Philosopher Gamer Blog
& also my web comic!