Game of the Day 3/31/2016: World Court Tennis

[celerystalker]

World Court Tennis for the Turbografx 16 is part of Namco's line of tennis games that brought us Family Tennis and Super Family Tennis, among others. It is, of course, a tennis game with all of the match modes to which you may be accustomed with tournaments, singles matches, and doubles matches that support up to four players. That's cool and all, but what's really cool is that some asshole at Namco decided that it also needed a Dragon Quest-inspired Quest Mode... yep, there's a full-on tennis RPG to play here!

You see, the evil tennis king from Chicago has made a mess of things, so the good king adorns you with shitty equipment and $500, then sends you out in the world to find the six tennis arenas to take down the tennis king's henchmen and fund the magic ball, which will allow you to return the tennis king's serve much more easily. Yes, this is all very real, and not some early April Fool's Day joke. You roam an overworld, getting challenged to random one game tennis matches, with cash on the line. This allows you to buy better shoes, shirts, and racquets, which raise your stats, greatly improving your chances of winning. Win matches, buy equipment, and take down those evil tennis goons!

As a tennis game, it has decent graphics and sound, but very good play control. You don't have quite as many types of stroke as, say, Super Tennis, but the important stuff is there, and it feels good. It doesn't look much better than an NES game save having more colors on screen at once, but it gets the job done, and seeing your little player jaunt about in a Dragon Quest-style map with his gear on and get challenged to a tennis game by a guy who looks suspiciously like Rick from Splatterhouse is definitely amusing, and does actually givs some fun depth to the single player experience beyond simple tournaments.

Played this one? Have memories of it or maybe Final Lap Twin, which had a similar Quest Mode but with single lap races?

[Emperor Megas]

The RPG mode is the ONLY reason I own this game and Final Lap Twin. I've not played either yet (like 75%of my collection) but when I learned about the RPG modes from Turbo Views I was sold on them.

[goldenband]

This is based on the engine used in Family Tennis, which is easily the best tennis game on the Famicom/NES. The gameplay is essentially identical, enough so that I could go straight from Family Tennis to World Court Tennis without missing a beat, and it plays very, very well -- better than almost all 16-bit tennis games, really.

(I do like SNES Super Tennis, but the ball dynamics in that game are off-kilter, and you can serve infinite aces too easily.)

I've only tested the waters in the RPG mode a little bit, but it seems like a fun conceit.

[Scissors]

I'm not that big a fan of tennis games, but I like this one. When I was younger, I could never get very far in the Quest Mode, but I wound up playing it again last year and was able to beat it for the first time.

Is it me, or is the highest level racket not as good as the lower level ones? Maybe there was something I was missing, but I would almost always hit the ball out when I used it.

After finishing it, I gave Final Lap Twin a try, but couldn't get into it. I think it's a pretty poor racer, so even the RPG mode couldn't keep me interested.

[Edmond Dantes]

Totally need to look this up and especially Final Lap Twin.