Rockstar presents Table Tennis
Despite Table Tennis becoming an Olympic sport back in 1988, it's rarely seen on T.V, and normally resigned to being played in run down youth clubs up and down the land. Therefore, Rockstar's announcement of a new table tennis game for the Xbox 360 came as a bit of shock. Now we're big fans of Rockstar's work so we were quite excited at the prospect of them creating this sport's title. The screenshots looked great, and we were promised an action packed game with a few surprises along the way.First off you'll need to become accustomed to the game's controls through the training mode. By playing through a series of drills, you'll fine tune your skills by learning how to serve, return, charge, spin, smash, counterspin and focus those high powered shots. The training area is similar to other sport's titles, where you need to battle your way through numerous modes and earn stars based on your performance. Disappointingly, the training mode won't help to increase your player's attributes but is essential if you're hoping to win any matches. If you thought table tennis was simply a matter of hitting a ball over the net you'd be very wrong - you'll need to pull out every trick in the book to become world Champion.
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Click for larger imageSingle player mode has a distinct lack of options, where is the career mode? And why can't you create your own character? You can however jump straight into an exhibition match or a tournament on one of the three difficulty settings, where you'll battle your way through four rounds against table tennis professionals from all corners of the globe. Each game is won by reaching 11 points. Now 11 points doesn't seem an awful lot, but some of the intense rallies that you'll be involved in can last a considerable amount of time. In single player mode, on the easy and normal settings it's not too hard to work out your opponent's weaknesses so speeding things up can stop the game from becoming too repetitive, changing the length of matches from 11 points to 7 can be done through the main menu. This isn't the case on the hardest difficulty where you'll need the agility, focus and timing of 'Catwoman' in order to win.