We had mentioned TouchSports Tennis '09 back in November 2008 when Handheld Games Corp’s CEO Thomas Fessler had revealed that performance of their 3D TouchSports Tennis iPhone game is noticeably better on the 2nd generation iPod Touch as compared to the iPhone 3G, iPhone and 1st generation iPod Touch.
After watching the impressive demo video of Tennis '09; I had purchased the iPhone game, but it had issues running on my jailbroken iPhone 3G.
However, I didn't remove it from my iPhone, so couple of days back when I tried to launch it again; to my surprise it worked (as the developer had released an update to fix the compatibility issues). So I got a chance to finally play the iPhone game and was impressed.
TouchSports Tennis '09 is developed by HandHeld Games Corp, a veteran mobile games developer.
The iPhone supports iPhone firmware 2.2 and later. As I had mentioned earlier, it had some compatibility issues with jailbroken iPhone which has been fixed (actually quite sometime back). It is probably also the reason for its poor rating on the App Store.
The iPhone game features a combination of touchscreen and accelerometer based controls. The controls are not intuitive as I had to refer to the games help section to figure it out. However, that's not a bad thing, after taking sometime getting used to the controls I was quite impressed by the selection of controls.
To move the player before the serve, you can use iPhone's accelerometer, tilt the screen left or right. If it's your turn to serve, touch the screen to start the serve and as the power bar starts going up, touch the screen a second time to serve. You can also tilt the screen left/right or up/down to change the direction of the ball. To move the player after the server, you can touch the screen to move the player to a new position on your side of the court. When the player is in the range of the ball, the player will automatically swing to hit the ball.
The game offers different levels such as Easy, Medium and Hard. Based on the level you choose, things like CPU difficulty goes up or down. In the "Easy" level, the game will also display a disc (in red) to show you the best position to hit the incoming ball from which is not available in the "Hard" level. In the "Easy" level, you will also get to see where the player will return (a yellow shadow), so you can adjust the direction of the ball accordingly. In the "Hard" level, you don't have this assistance and have to depend on your skills to figure out where the ball is returned.
You can play in quick play or a tournament against the CPU and can choose either to play on hard courts, grass courts or clay courts.
TouchSports Tennis '09 is an impressive 3D Tennis game with its solid controls, good in-game graphics and sound effects. I would strongly recommend it if you are a tennis fan, its quite addictive.
You can checkout the demo video of TouchSports Tennis in action to get an idea:
The other good thing about TouchSports Tennis is the price. The developer has currently dropped the price to $0.99 from $4.99. You can download it from the App Store using this direct iTunes link.
As always, please drop us a line in the comments section to give us your feedback on TouchSports Tennis 09.
Comments: