Genre: Sports
Developer: Arc System Works
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment

A tennis engine, built for the Saturn from the ground up, featuring fully polygonal courts and players, viewable from a plethora of camera angles? Excellent! By its nature as a tennis game, it's inherently not going to be one of the first games which comes up during discussions of "most taxing Saturn releases"-- but its smooth framerate and animation, three varied courts, and solid aesthetic sensibilities make it interesting to take in. The designers are also clearly riding on the coat tails of Sega's "Virtua" series, both via the game's title, and with its pre-rendered character selection portraits, which look right out of "Virtua Fighter".

The usual shouts and grunts featured prominently in both the real sport and its digital facsimiles are almost completely absent here, taking place only during smashes. This leaves the usual court and ball noises as the only sound effect accompaniments to the action. The rather ho-hum situation is appropriately complemented with music which falls into the same category: it's one of those early CD mixtures of generic rock music and dance fusion, and it holds serve, if not much more.

As a release which lists Yoshinori Ono as one of its designers, this reviewer had high expectations going in-- but was let down. The game does fine on the modes front, allowing human and AI mixtures of singles and doubles exhibition matches, to go along with basic tournament and training selections. But the game is played with all six buttons, and it's confusing to know which type of shot to use when. Furthering the trouble is that simply returning a volley is challenging due to the extraordinarily tight frame window in which the button must be pressed.

When a game developer finds himself building features into his tennis title like "show dots where the ball is going to land and bounce", he knows he made a mistake somewhere; where later genre entries, such as the excellent "Virtua Tennis" series, "glue" the player to the ball for a few frames, allowing said player to take aim and successfully return volley, this release leaves the gamer out to dry. This isn't helped by the title's odd perspective, which is barely helped even by shifting the default camera to a more standard, three-quarters overhead perspective. It's a pity then that "Virtual Open Tennis" isn't just a bit more forgiving, because as one of the Saturn's only two tennis games, it has the correct ingredients to be a competent game.