224. World Super Tennis (Home Data, Famicom, 1989)

World Super Tennis (published as Top Players' Tennis in North America) is a pro tennis game featuring at the time superstars Chris Evert and Ivan Lendl (who I have honestly never heard of, though I also was not alive in 1989 when it was released). 

You can choose to play as Evert or Landl, or as generic "boy" or "girl" characters. Naturally I chose "girl" in a singles match against the CPU, but the AI was pretty brutal and I lost my set without winning a single match, though I did at least score a couple times. I tried playing doubles with a CPU partner, but we didn't fare much better there. Because World Super Tennis uses actual tournament rules, the games go on for quite a while, which really tended to drag on.

World Super Tennis sports a progression system with stats so you can customize your character as you earn upgrade points by completing various matches. In terms of gamefeel, there's some nice momentum in your character's movement startup, but that also doesn't make for a good feeling tennis game, since I feel like my character is just sluggish. World Super Tennis is also a game that demands precision, so the speed and angle of your shot are crucial to even making the ball over the net on trickier shots, though some of this may have been my early game stats. 

It feels like World Super Tennis might be a decent game if you're willing to put in the work and really learn it, but I did not have a great time just dipping my toe in. There are some special shots that you can access, but the AI difficulty just starts out way too high for me to have any real fun here.

2/5, a tennis game that is realistic to its detriment