So far so good, right? Well, unfortunately that’s where the fun ends in Top Spin. The graphics are just…well they look like they are three years old. The players don’t look that bad, but everything else around the players – such as the stadium, the umpire, the ball girls, the crowd, just doesn’t look very good. The screen transitions between the ‘scoreboard” and the game are plain awful.

Touches that you would expect in a tennis game aren’t there. While the court umpires do call the ball out on serves, the ball girls don’t run across the court to pick up net balls. The chair umpire watches the play go back and forth, but you never hear her. Well either that, or the woman chair umpire has quite a manly voice between points.

There’s also the matter of loading times. In a word, my doorstop 486/66 boots Windows faster. It’s just plain horrid how long it takes to load these games. This was a gripe with the Xbox version, but here it’s even worse. One would think that in two years, this could have been fixed. During the career mode, even the moving of the icon between the coaching icon and the court icon to play a match is frustratingly slow. It also looks bad..you wonder if they have Atari 2600 sprites being drawn because it almost looks like the earth ‘blinks’ as you scroll across it.

Audio isn’t bad, you’ll hear player grunts as they hit the ball back and forth. It does seem realistic, but again, when I think tennis I think Wimbledon. I think British chair umpires that say “quiet please.” You’ll have none of that in this game.

In conclusion, if you’ve absolutely positively have to have a tennis game for your PlayStation 2, check out eBay for Sega Sports Tennis. Sure you don’t get the eye toy functionality or online, but you do have some great single player action, and that’s what you need.