Three Generations of Tennis

The original tennis video game for Nintendo is possibly the most awkward series of bodily movements ever assembled, complete with totally unnecessary perspective that makes the ball at its apex in the service toss ten times bigger than your head. Also, note the umpire: Mario, from Mario and Luigi. Why is Mario calling your game? I don't know. His expertise in plumbing does not make me terribly confident that he will call it correctly, and while plumbers have their own elan, it's true, they tend not to move in social circles where tennis is as prominent as, say, NASCAR. Perhaps that's why he makes such an obnoxious point to call the ball "IN!" whenever it lands in, a moderating tactic that if used in real tennis matches would make Andy Roddick's head explode.

Trying to control a player's movements in this game can be upsetting. Nintendo designed each man to be some kind of giant creaturely mistake, like a bunch of semi-paralyzed proto-beings, discarded drafts of complete persons that stumble and retch their way toward the ball as they contemplate--or try to, in the baffling primitive space of their miscreated brains--their own absurdity.

But you see, this is what makes the game fun. The play control is so fantastically bad that a new challenge presents itself: can you successfully get your deranged blue sportsman across the court, without falling down, in time to miss the ball? (He'll never actually hit the ball--such is his sad, miscreated limit.) So, inevitably the match turns into a contest between two almost human glitches who drunkenly race from side to side on the baseline trying to be the first to get to the ball and not hit it. It is, at its best, stupidly hilarious. Like a Ionesco play.

Jimmy Connors Tennis came out years later, after Connors had that fiery run through the US Open semifinals and proved to everyone that a thirty-seven year old man can slash and burn his way through any opponent who is not Andre Agassi, who at the time was twenty years younger than Connors and looked like a demented rooster.

It's a smart game, which is why its wild unpopularity is so hard to explain. (The best image I could find is of the back of the box.) To play at the net you need great timing and a keen tactical eye, and a sense of what, and how much, spin to put on a volley and at what angle. The cause-and-effect factor is fairly realistic--except that your player can cover the entire court in roughly one and a quarter seconds, making all rallies equally improbable and always interminable. Nobody hits a winner. Balls either go into the net or out wide, or they get vollied into a corner. Those are the facts.

The upside is that a lack of winners forces you to out think your opponent, who, remember, is actually a computer without a mind or reflexes, so in truth it forces you to out think a predetermined set of rules communicated through code to a processing mechanism that implements them in a rational sequence . . . anyway, it forces you to play tactically, which is cool. Also cool, your character choices are 1) your own dumbass, insignificant self or 2) Jimmy Connors. Who the hell chooses to play as himself? Even better, whether you choose (1) or (2), you look exactly the same, making the whole thing totally intellectual and therefore meaningless. Similarly, during play you make a grand tour of tournaments, including Munich, Roland Garros, Wimbledon, and Montreal, but every place looks exactly the same and the ball bounces no differently where ever you are, so, again, being in Italy or Spain or on Jupiter's third moon is merely an imaginative exercise and totally irrelevant to making you or Jimmy Connors out think your logically confined, automated opponent who can act only on conditional statements that have been inserted into its frame.

Opponents do learn, which is surprising, and your serve will become less effective over time as the computer adjusts his play in response to your style. Pretty good for such an old game.

Finally, there's good old terrible Top Players Tennis, featuring the improbable and inappropriate pairing of Chris Evert and Ivan Lendl (????). What a husband-bouncing flirt and a twitching machine have to do with each other, who knows, but the game just sucks, because everybody looks like a swollen circle and the players move like hyperactive mice, making strategy or premeditation or any normal, earthly physics impossible. It also makes it impossible to squeeze the slightest imagination into a match, so that neither you nor the computer, nor the nameless forces that govern match play itself, cares much about who wins, who loses, and who gets mad, expecting some more discernibly female version of a computerized Chris Evert to manipulate and enjoy.

And why is there no Top Swearing Tennis, in which John McEnroe and Boris Becker compete for the world's angriest title?