Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis review

From the deranged minds that brought you Grand Theft Auto, and the sycophantic gorehounds that will soon unleash Manhunt 2, comes... Ping Pong? Or Table Tennis rather, (Rockstar hates it when we call it the "Double P" word) and even though the game won't turn near as many heads as beating a prostitute to death or disemboweling a leather gimp, Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis still serves up a game of ball worthy of some attention.

It's not entirely irrelevant to bring up the developer's past exploits. You think they put their name in the title to not conjure images of notorieties past? Just as it took the film industry forty years to honor Martin Scorsese with an Oscar, when all of the smoke of politics and morality clears, Rockstar will be remembered as the developer who brought a new level of artistic maturity into mainstream gaming.

And to a certain degree, they've employed that same bravado to utilize the controls in Table Tennis, much to the benefit ofany gamer craving more than a vessel for party games. After all, anyone who's owned a Wii for longer than a month has seen through the open-boxed veneer of Wii Tennis as just a game of timing, and little else.

Not content to merely use the Remote as a light gun, or a glorified D-pad,Table Tennishas pushed the motion controls into a new phase of the console's lifespan. There's no way around it, from the first time you pick it up, to the time you've mastered it, Table Tennis feels like just that. As if you were actually wielding a paddle, you can hit hard and high, or soft and low. Timing and position is as important as it would be in a real-world game, and you can even lob the ball just over the net or smash it between your opponent's eyes when the timing suits.