[Skybird]

And the big cousin, First Person Tennis. It too is in slow but constant improvement, and has changed noticably over the past two years, and content got added. Like Eleven's developer, this one too cares for his baby. The gameplay obviously makes compromises, all leg work necessarily must be worked around by game mechanisms, since real tennis depends a lot on running the line up and down, and that is hard to do in a living room. The method by which FPT does it, works surprisingly well, but gets a little bit used to. Since you do not swing a real racket with real mass and weight, swinging the VR grip feels differently and needs more discipline in beign precise in holding it to correctly appaly Topspin and Slice as you wish to see. A real racket stabilises your strike by its mass, a VR grip is more instabile since it is so light in weight.

You can run this as a relaxed ball-returning entertainment game, but if you want to play competitive, you need the force and speed in your strikes, and that means you need to apply according power to your swings, and then it indeed becomes sweat-producing. Also your foot positioning to the ball when striking, is as important as it is in reality. I use to have a small round tile laying on the centrespot of my playing space that I can search for and easly find with my foot to recentre myself after every ball exchange - else I would be in serious danger of bashing my living room into tiny pieces. Youtube videos usually show guys just standing there and do slight, almost desinterested movements with their right arm. Believe me, if you want to powerserve and play with force, that is not enough, you really must put power into your moves, seriously. And then it changes into a completely different ballgame. The legwork is not there (the computer slides you instead, the alternative is a sudden zoom to a new position but I find that disorientating), but arms and shoulders, hands and muscle in your sides copy quite some of what the real sports would see in needs and efforts. Also you must quickly jump into the correct stand according to what you play next: Backhand or Forehand. I tend to follow runnign the same drills like I did in real tennis 30 years ago - the sim is easily good enough to reward that by noticable raises in precision of your strikes. No complete replacement for the real sports, though, but still - impressive enough if you play it seriously. You sweat, you need to train your precision and discipline, and it is superb fun. Not for those who want maximum success easily after just learning for 30 minutes.




For comparison: this is first person footage from a real tennis player with a GoPro on his chest or head. It looks quite similiar in perspective.