[PS2] Smash Court Tennis: Pro Tournament 2 ~ Heihachi, Arcade Mode, Pro difficulty.

Smash Court Tennis: Pro Tournament 2 sure is one mouthful of a title! Let's just get what you probably came here for out of the way: Yes, this does happen to be an otherwise no frills, relatively straight faced and realistic Tennis game that happens to include Namco characters from Tekken and Soul Calibur, Heihachi and Raphael for the men and Xiaoyu and Cassandra for the women as bonus cameo characters. I consider this game somewhat lucky that meme culture hasn't yet truly gotten a hold of it to completely run it into the ground. Heihachi borrows his serve animation and stance from Hewitt, but he uses a One-Handed Backhand instead. He plays like an extremely exaggerated Power Player, having ridiculously strong groundstrokes far beyond what even a custom player with those stats cranked all the way up to max can pull off, and a Flat 1st serve consistently clocking in at over 220kmh. Despite this, old Heihachi is still decently quick on his feet, his weaknesses being below average stamina and poor defensive shots like his Slice. If you ever wanted to see Heihachi plowing through (extremely outdated representations of) Rod Laver Arena, Court Philippe Chatrier, Centre Court and Arthur Ashe Stadium, look no further! Released in 2004 for the PS2 by Namco, Smash Court Tennis 2 was one of the games that came in the wake of the relatively short lived tennis genre gold rush sparked by Sega with Virtua Tennis 1 and 2 in the late 90s and early 2000s. To differentiate itself from its competitors at the time, particularly Top Spin released the year prior, SCT2 takes a more simcade approach to its gameplay and especially its Career mode, where you create your own Tennis player and deal with things like micromanagement of Stamina in and out of matches, different gear to match your playstyle and the ability to customise every stat of your custom player down to minutia. Also, as far as I can tell, this is the first tennis game ever to properly license all 4 Grand Slams (the Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open) rather than using generic stand-ins, their inclusion being a huge selling point of the game as it proudly features the main courts of all 4 tournaments. SCT2 features 16 licensed Tennis players, 8 men (Hewitt, Roddick, Blake, Haas, Henman, Safin, Ferrero and Gasquet) and 8 women (Henin, Williams, Clijsters, Mauresmo, Davenport, Capriati, Hantuchova and Kournikova), in arguably the best roster relative to its time of release in a tennis game. The only strange inclusion being then 18 year old Richard Gasquet, a relatively unknown player at the time, over what would be far more sensible choices back in the game's release such as Kuerten, Sampras, Agassi, Federer or even Nadal, if they wanted to include an up-and-coming player. Luckily for them, Gasquet did go on to become an iconic French player, even if later down the line. Graphics are okay. The licensed players are represented... fairly okay, though the women only really have a passing resemblance to the real life person they are supposed to represent. The Grand Slam courts are represented extremely well, looking like a perfect copy of how they looked in the 2004 season. The same cannot be said for the other, generic venues, though: they look just okay. Even the ones with slightly more unique designs have that completely spoiled by the aggressive asset reusing going on in the Career mode. You will play different tournaments on the exact same venue, just retextured slightly (and often not at all) several times. Considering neither Virtua Tennis 2 nor Top Spin had to resort to this, this is absolutely unacceptable. Gameplay wise, credit where it's due, it is a breath of fresh air to see a Tennis game properly representing the full basic moveset of Tennis. The face buttons all correspond to different shots you can use at any time, Flats, Topspins, Slices, Lobs and Drops. You can access the Running Shot by holding R1 as you stroke on the move. Stroking the ball is timing based rather than charge based like in VT and TS, with the player automatically getting into stance when the ball gets close. This system has its advantages and disadvantages, so I will not really say if it's better or not. Thankfully, it does jive very well with the fact that surfaces actually have a very big impact on gameplay in this game, far more than most tennis games: Grass is noticeably MUCH faster than Clay for once! Serves are adequately powerful and very difficult to return (as they should be) but sadly volleying is very awkward as the players will never go for any Winners, simply blocking any incoming shots no matter how slow they come. While you can get a feel for it, I'd recommend sticking to the baseline on this one. I think this is one of the better tennis games released, but I'd rather have seen the licensed Slams and detailed stat customisation in a game with the execution of Virtua Tennis instead, personally.