

The game actually encourages you to swing as early as possible because the strength of your spin is determined by how long you hold the D pad. Rather than operating on a one-to-one control scale, where what you see correlates directly to your movement in real time, you can swing at any time that the ball is headed toward you, and your player will automatically swing when the time is right. The biggest problem, though, is the incredible disconnect between your movement and the action onscreen. It’s much more difficult to miss the table with the standard control scheme, which makes the game much, much easier. Still, there are compromises that sap the game of some of its kinetic feel. Considering the depth originally afforded on the Xbox 360, it’s impressive how much made it here. “All three options work pretty well, though in our experience, the control freak setup isn’t as useful as the other two because the game handles player movement well enough. Remember, it wasn’t until the MotionPlus add-on that Nintendo’s controller approached 1:1 movement: The controls were modified for the Wii remote, but worked OK, but when GameSpot‘s Ryan Davis reviewed that version, he lamented the lag in-between swinging the remote and having it appear on-screen. Rockstar’s Table Tennis treats the game like a serious sport, taking incredible care to present some of the most realistic player characters ever put in a game and delivering frenetic and nuanced action.”Įven years later, critics praise it as The One True Table Tennis Game:Īs mentioned earlier, Table Tennis never made its way to the PS3, but it did arrive on the Wii, one of the few times Rockstar flirted with Nintendo’s console.

But it also follows the same philosophy of stripping the experience down to its essence, something focused and intense. There is an obvious correlation between Pong and the newly minted Rockstar’s Table Tennis for the Xbox 360, in that Table Tennis is literally a ping-pong simulation. “As one of the first commercially available video games, Pong seems to have an almost academic importance, but not enough credit is given to the simple elegance of its design - two bar-shaped “paddles,” one square “ball” - something that was born largely out of technical limitations. Per GameSpot reviewer Ryan Davis (RIP, buddy) at the time: This was Serious Business, with Houser hoping “to create a sports game with the intensity of a fighting game and the sense of speed and control that would make playing it a more intense and more visceral experience than has previously been possible with sports games.”īy most estimations, it seems like Rockstar pulled that off.
