The deepest tennis game to date
User Rating: 8.9 | Top Spin 2 X360
TS2 is the first game I played that actually could’ve been $60 but wasn’t. To put this in context Madden 360 is on the other side of the spectrum. TS2 has out done almost everything Virtua Tennis 2 did but still didn’t capture how fun the training mini games are in Segasports Tennis 2K2 (SST2K2). The one thing that made me stop playing TS1 as much as I wanted to was the insane load times and the amount of them. TS2 is still almost as bad as TS1 in that respect which is something I don’t understand. You can either train twice a month or play in tournaments if you’re ranked high enough to participate. Now you have to hire and fire coaches depending on what part of you game you want to be train on and how high they can train you on that particular attribute. Instead of getting less than 20 stars to distribute to your attributes like in TS1 you have 60 stars to go between your attributes but they can be turned into silver and gold stars which makes a total of 180 possible stars to distribute. Like I mentioned before P.A.M. has squeezed in a lot more training games but still didn’t capture how addicting and fun they are in SST2K2. VC helped Sega with SST2K2 and you see some of the players from that game in TS2. The one thing that made VT, SST2K2 and TS1 so good to noobs was its pick up and playability. PAM changed the gameplay some which may turn some people off. TS2 can still be picked up and played by anybody but if you want to win and not end up with hour-long volleys you’ll have to use more advanced shots. TS2 is only slightly better looking than TS1 but that’s still pretty good. The player creator in career mode is the deepest I’ve ever used but you can make some of the ugliest players on accident trying to put your own face in the game. The sound in TS2 is okay but it sure would have been a lot better if you could’ve used custom soundtracks while practicing or playing exhibition games. Some of the songs from TS1 made its way back into TS2. There are a few other things PAM should have lifted from SST2K2 was making and training a male and female player at the same time so you could use them to play mixed doubles. Also they should have made it where you could hire your doubles partner like in SST2K2. I can still hope they get all that in if they make TS3. If you like tennis and don’t want to spend $65 on one game TS2 is for you. 
