When Wii Sports came packaged with the Wii, people were understandably happy at the notion of the golden age of game pack-ins returning to our sunlit shores, but the happiness soon faded as Wii Sports, while fun in spots, played more like a tech demo of the Wii's motion controls than full fledged simulations of the included games. Tennis was one of the strongest sports represented, however the simplistic take on the sport left many Wimbledon junkies wanting for more. Enter Top Spin 3 for the Wii, a game that manages to deliver some of the finest controls in a tennis game to date, and unfortunately, not much more.

The biggest complaint about the controls in Wii Sports Tennis was the inability to move your player to the ball or have finer control over aiming. Top Spin 3 remedies these problems through the use of the nunchuk. The game uses full on motion controls for your tennis swing, with the use of the nunchuk changing based on your swing. Before you bring the Wiimote back for your swing, moving the nunchuk's thumbstick moves the position of your player. Once you bring the Wiimote back, moving the thumbstick allows you to aim your shot. It takes some getting used to, and the fast frantic play means that you'll whip yourself in the face with the nunchuk cord more than once, but once you get the feel of things, it works great.

To further add to the feel of playing real tennis, you hold the Wiimote on its side which is not only more comfortable, but approximates the width of a tennis racket more than the traditional mode of holding the Wiimote. While serving, you can choose to hit the Z button on the nunchuk, the safest option, thereby relinquishing all serving control, save for aiming, to the AI. Faults are a rarity in this mode, but it's not exactly the most powerful option. For a more motion-tastic mode, you can press the C button to pick up the ball, and then lift the Wiimote in the air, loosely approximating a tennis serve. Doing so brings up on onscreen meter with a moving line. Bring the Wiimote down once the line is in the red zone and you can unleash a devastating triple digit speed serve. The serving isn't quite one to one, which takes away from it a bit, however you can certainly get used to it.

Along with your normal forehand and backhand swings, you can do lobs, drop shots and slices. Matching your swing with your player's swing adds more power to the shot, even to the point where the game can recognize when you're swinging a virtual backhand. Your opponents have all of these shots at their disposal as well, and they will use them all. The AI in this game is very challenging, and if you try to be cute with a lob or drop shot, when they're in position to make you pay for it, well, you can expect to be cleaning neon yellow fuzz off of your forehead while you watch the rest of the tournament from the stands.

With the controls being as good as they are, it's a real shame that the game doesn't give you much motivation to use them. In one of the strangest decisions in recent memory, 2K Sports decided to not add a create a player, or proper career mode. Instead, players can choose from over 20 professional players (except Nadal, bummer) and compete in the Road to Glory mode, a string of various tournaments starting with matches on community courts all the way up to the US Open. You can pick any player for the different tournaments, which is kind of odd as it completely takes away any feeling of progression.