Interestingly, the World Tour provides a wholly different camera view when playing singles. Rather than having the broad overhead perspective, singles games in World Tour have this behind-the-shoulder look. This is more akin to real life, I suppose, but depth perception can be difficult.

As part of the career mode, you’ll have the opportunity to play practice matches against partners, participate in training exercise, and play a series of mini-games. These all add to your attributes. Winning tournaments gives you money that can then be spent in Tennis Store for new clothes, equipment, and so forth.

Bonus Games and Secret Characters

Aside from the core tennis game, Virtua Tennis 2009 also includes 12 mini-games. The one shown above, for instance, has you playing bowling with a tennis serve. Other games get you to break brick walls, “fight” pirate ships, and dodge obstacles. Each of these is supposed to improve a certain skill. Dodging obstacles improves your footwork, for example.

My personal favorite places your player on a giant billiards table to play a variation of 9-Ball. You’ll always “serve” from one end of the table, but the ultimate goal is to sink the nine ball. This works on your accuracy, as you can imagine.

Playing through the arcade mode, which gets you to win a series of short tournaments, you have the apparent chance to unlock some legendary players. I advanced through one of the arcade tournaments using Nadal and then I had to face Boris “Boom Boom” Becker in Milan. He was impossibly difficult.