Top Spin 2

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $9.00

Features:

• Use Player Creator to create realistic player models and customize them with the highest level of detail with hairstyles, facial features, and an incredible array of real-life apparel.
• If traditional tennis isn’t your style, kick back and enjoy multiplayer Party Games like Splash Court, Wall Breaker, and Time Bomb.
• Vibrant colors and shockingly high-definition resolutions deliver illustrious depictions of players, stadiums, crowds and tracksides, bringing next-gen tennis to life on your PC.
• Innovative gameplay allows you to play your style of tennis with a variety of shots.
• Challenge other players around the world with online play.

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

good, but lacking... [Posted on 2007-04-10]
Good graphics, nice game play. It does get choppy at times, usually just after a return of serve, and more so in the bigger events. This can be disconcerting, and at worse, nauseating. Patch, please. One major guffaw: when playing in Grand Slams it is common for the #1 and #2 seeds to be on the SAME half of the draw. As a #2 seed I ended up playing Federer, a #1, in the quarterfinals of the French. As a tennis fan, this is an INEXCUSABLE mistake! #1's play #2's in the final of an event when the seedings hold, no exceptions. IMO this is a huge error which detracts from the authenticity of the game and should be patched. In addition, the stadiums have a handful of fans in the early rounds and not many more for the finals, even in the Grand Slams. This really gets the juices....not....flowing.

It would be nice if the game kept more detailed career statistics and a record of wins vs losses against other pros. And I'm at a loss for what to do with all my winnings. There are only so many shirts, shorts and shoes you can buy before it gets tedious and boring. How 'bout the chance to buy a trip to the Riviera with Maria Sharapova? That would keep me playing.

Customizable strokes other than the serve would be cool. Having the umpire refer to me by name, any name, rather than, "player #1" would also be nice. I mean, I am a top ten player for God's sake. Load times for events is rather slow.

Still, the game progresses nicely and is fun to play. It is worth $17. I do wish EA would come out with a tennis game, though. Dream on...

Top Spin 2 is not that great [Posted on 2007-05-10]
Top spin 2 was not done well for the PC. I like sports game on the PC and image that top spin 2 would be great. It was a complete letdown. the grapics were shoddy the game play was bad. Stick with the xbox 360 version.

Had a huge potential [Posted on 2007-08-05]
This game does almost everything right, but it has also some issues that would make a 5-star rating unjustified:
1. Top Spin 2 has horrific FPS issues on the PC (even on high-end systems).
2. You can't save/open replay matches, and - unfortunately - it doesn't even replay points. Instead of showing you rallies and special moments, it displays your player with controllable emotions (which I find boring).
3. The game is a little too challenging on beginners at the start of the career, as well as a little too easy as you get to the very end (world rank 2 or 1). The latter is the consequence of the somewhat predictable A.I.
Also, you will find only 0-1 players online at a given point, which is not the game's fault but does disappoint a little.

Risk shots are near impossible [Posted on 2008-04-18]
Gameplay is fun and challenging unlike Virtual Tennis 3 where the ball almost never goes out. Also the players in VT3 are constantly diving for the ball which ruins the gameplay. Graphics are decent, I like the realistic ads and scoreboard. But as mentioned already there are lots of frame rate issues. Only two complaints - I am unable to run at my native resolution of 1400x1050. Finally what really keeps this from being a great game is the ridiculously hard risk shots. They are so hard to pull off why even bother to put it in the game. In conclusion its a fun game to kill some time with but wouldve been great if they fixed the FPS issue and risk shots.

Best Tennis PC Game but...... [Posted on 2008-06-23]
The great thing about this game are the options available. Player creation, coaches, outfits are all very good. But, I have to admit like the others have said, the game takes a long time to load. First, you have to load to get to the menu. That takes a while. Then, you have to load career. That takes longer. Then, you you have to load the tournament....which also takes a long time. Aah, finally...that's what you wanted to hear me say, isn't it? No....it's still not over yet. You now have to load the match!

I have a very fast PC with a damn good graphics accelerator. Still, it takes such a long time to load.

There are graphic glitches as well. Sometimes, everything goes in slow motion. It happens occasionally. Oh, by the way, they are called "BALL BOYS," and not "RUN BOYS." They are supposed to pick up the ball when it hits the net, which they don't. They just run. This is a major goof up and makes a great game look silly. One other reviewer mentioned that having the Number 1 and Number 2 player in the same draw is an inexcusable error. Boy, was that an understatement. I guess he was being nice. Almost all the top players are put in one draw and the rest are put in the other. This is a mockery of tennis. There is also another inexcusable error from the standpoint of a true tennis fan. Two errors in fact. But, I'll discuss one.

One - The "GOLDEN RULE" of Wimbledon is that all competitors are required to wear whites - white t-shirts, white shorts, white skirts, white whatever. Never will you ever see any player at Wimbledon wearing colors. Wimbledon is going on right now in 2008. Check it out if it isn't too late.

Other major goof ups: The whole attitude stuff after each point is quite frankly silly. There are no replays, which is not realistic. And as far as I can remember, I have never seen anyone playing tennis with pants in grand slam events. It looks silly. The entire rival player idea is pathetic. The player's rival loses in the first round of every tournament, yet keeps rising up in the rankings rapidly. That's just plain impossible. There was no need for a rival scenario in the game. It just makes the game look silly. In the real world, a player's major rival is almost always from a different country. Federer-Nadal, Edberg-Becker, Graf-Seles...so on. Sampras-Agassi was one major exception.

If you are a female tennis fan, I also have to warn you that the female career mode has been made unnecessarily harder than the men's career mode. I don't think either career mode should be harder than the other.

But, the bottom line, is it fun to play? Definitely. For $30 (including taxes and shipping), I believe this game is absolutely worth the money. And I have to admit that this is still the best tennis PC game out there. Tennis Masters Series by Microids could have easily beaten this game. But what was lacking there were a lot options available in Top Spin. I hope Aspyr does not disappoint tennis fans with goof-ups like these the next time.

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