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Out of Eight recently posted a new review of New Star Games' New Star Tennis, its latest sports title. The game features a full tennis tour with 66 tournaments, a variety of court styles, training challenges, and a detailed career mode spanning 15 tournaments.

From the reveiw:

In New Star Tennis, you start out as a wimpy fifteen-year-old with thoughts of grand tennis victory. You get to customize your name, date of birth, nationality, skin and hair color, and height. Unfortunately, you can only start the game as a very bad novice player, and this has serious negative consequences that we will delve into shortly. The world of New Star Tennis has almost-real players, using the one-letter-off mechanic done in previous games; you can tell who they are if you are familiar with tennis. In a sexist move, New Star Tennis does not allow you play as or against women; this would not have necessarily added anything different to the game, but the option should have been present. Apart from the career mode, you can partake in quick matches using any of the real/fake tennis stars included with the game. New Star Tennis does not include multiplayer in any fashion, either on the same computer (with a keyboard and a gamepad, for example), over a LAN, or on the Internet. The game also lacks doubles competition, a staple of tennis simulations.

During your wondrous career, you must maintain your energy, skills, lifestyle, and happiness. Energy is expended by practicing and playing in tournaments and replenished with old-fashioned rest. Your lifestyle is improved by buying things with the money earned in tournaments, a simplification that has interesting philosophical ramifications. New Star Tennis lacks relationship and family options present in previous titles, so they only way to enhance your life is to buy stuff. If it were only that simple in real life. You can get happy by betting on horses or in a casino, playing darts, or kart racing. The betting mini-games are simplistic with the usual options from previous games, darts uses the mouse and some semi-random targeting to increase uncertainty, and the kart racing is a poor replica of New Star Racing. You can choose up to three activities to do per week, but almost all of your time will be spend training.

Out Of Eight: New Star Tennis

New Star Games (add to watch list)

New Star Tennis (add to watch list)

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