gooneysen
01-22-2010, 05:49 PM
Hi there everybody,
just received a newsletter about this new tennis game from NSG, and without even checking it out I went ahead and bought it, in good faith that it might be or become as awesome as the NSS series has been so far. No doubt Simon and his buddies deserve the money, no matter how good NST actually might be right now, but I thought I'd offer my opinion anyway.
And unfortunately I have to say I got a proper ticking-off after a couple minutes. I'm gonna tell you why in a minute.
First off let me start by applauding the effort of making yet another sports game with an entertaining career mode, which I think is always lacking in most of the bigger titles from moronic EA or their competitors.
The whole career part of the game is not exactly a reinvented wheel, much of it we have already seen in NSS. Nevertheless - don't change a winning team, it's good to have sort of the same system in NST because it works just fine, with a few new details to it which I think are cool (e.g. kart racing and other stuff affecting your lifestyle and thus your standing with sponsors, great stuff really :D).
The main reason why I was thrown off my initially rather high excitement-level is the way you actually play a match. The way you control the player, the way you have to hit the ball, the way you determine the direction of the shot. I'm not yet able to exactly tell you what feels wrong, but somehow after playing almost every goddamn tennis game on this planet (starting with Great Courts on an Amiga to the latest VirtuaTennis) NST's match engine doesn't work for me. Apart from the graphics/animations (which are funny to look at but not very refined) I can't seem to get a grip on properly positioning my player towards where the ball's darting, and after that trying to make a well placed shot by fumbling around the circle on the other side. It just doesn't work very well, the controls don't seem to be very intuitive and responsive.
Mind you, I'm playing this on a 2 year old Mac, so I don't know if there are any differences on Windows versions of the game (I guess not).
One of the best Tennis games out there is, in my opinion, Tennis Elbow - at least when it comes down the actual gameplay (match engine). I don't really like their ideas about training and tournament schedules and the rather pointless system of difficulty levels, but controlling the player and his shots feels very realistic and responsive. This is something NST totally lacks.
I don't want to be too negative in my first few comments, NST has barely arrived at version 1.0 and still has a long life and lots of improvements ahead of it, but I'd really like to point the NSG team in a different direction for the match engine, because to make NST a game worthy of the New Star legacy it really needs a different approach.
So long, keep up the great effort, I'll play around a bit more and throw in more cents once I found some... ;)
cu
Goon
just received a newsletter about this new tennis game from NSG, and without even checking it out I went ahead and bought it, in good faith that it might be or become as awesome as the NSS series has been so far. No doubt Simon and his buddies deserve the money, no matter how good NST actually might be right now, but I thought I'd offer my opinion anyway.
And unfortunately I have to say I got a proper ticking-off after a couple minutes. I'm gonna tell you why in a minute.
First off let me start by applauding the effort of making yet another sports game with an entertaining career mode, which I think is always lacking in most of the bigger titles from moronic EA or their competitors.
The whole career part of the game is not exactly a reinvented wheel, much of it we have already seen in NSS. Nevertheless - don't change a winning team, it's good to have sort of the same system in NST because it works just fine, with a few new details to it which I think are cool (e.g. kart racing and other stuff affecting your lifestyle and thus your standing with sponsors, great stuff really :D).
The main reason why I was thrown off my initially rather high excitement-level is the way you actually play a match. The way you control the player, the way you have to hit the ball, the way you determine the direction of the shot. I'm not yet able to exactly tell you what feels wrong, but somehow after playing almost every goddamn tennis game on this planet (starting with Great Courts on an Amiga to the latest VirtuaTennis) NST's match engine doesn't work for me. Apart from the graphics/animations (which are funny to look at but not very refined) I can't seem to get a grip on properly positioning my player towards where the ball's darting, and after that trying to make a well placed shot by fumbling around the circle on the other side. It just doesn't work very well, the controls don't seem to be very intuitive and responsive.
Mind you, I'm playing this on a 2 year old Mac, so I don't know if there are any differences on Windows versions of the game (I guess not).
One of the best Tennis games out there is, in my opinion, Tennis Elbow - at least when it comes down the actual gameplay (match engine). I don't really like their ideas about training and tournament schedules and the rather pointless system of difficulty levels, but controlling the player and his shots feels very realistic and responsive. This is something NST totally lacks.
I don't want to be too negative in my first few comments, NST has barely arrived at version 1.0 and still has a long life and lots of improvements ahead of it, but I'd really like to point the NSG team in a different direction for the match engine, because to make NST a game worthy of the New Star legacy it really needs a different approach.
So long, keep up the great effort, I'll play around a bit more and throw in more cents once I found some... ;)
cu
Goon