Whether you create a character or jump right into matches with known tennis stars, the next generation hardware of your choice (both Xbox 360 and PS3) puts out a stellar presentation. The players and courts look great, with lots of detail, variety and butter smooth movement. Player animations are excellent, and your created player even has several options for standard stroke animations that make him a little more custom than usual. Instant replays pop up after the shot, and the only flaw is in the ball location, which doesn’t always line up perfectly to the player and racket. But it’s not off by much and most of the time you’ll be too busy watching everything else to notice.

The career mode gives you the choice of your home base location. Just pick a spot on the globe and you’re on tour. Each week, you’ll be able to play a training game, go through a drill at the academy (both activities raise your character’s stats) or play in a tournament. Until you increase your world ranking, your tournaments will be limited and training will be how you spend the bulk of your time.

The academy offers different drills to increase skill in areas like footwork, volleying and serving, with different ranks for forehands, backhands, control and more. Most of the drills are pretty simple at first, like hitting several drop shots in a row, but they get harder as you progress, like winning a point on a particular shot. Assuming you succeed at the drill, your stats go up.

The other way to increase stats is through training games. These range from a Space Invaders themed volley drill, where aliens march closer and closer unless you hit them with ground strokes, to target practice for control, giant rolling fruit to practice footwork, and tennis curling to practice aim (it’s more like shuffleboard, but maybe curling sounds more Olympic). There are many training games, and they’re all interesting, challenging and rewarding. They’re much more fun than the academy, and the difficulty progression makes them long-term keepers for improving your player. Good design doesn’t get boring, and the training games definitely qualify.

Tournaments start off pretty easy, with opponents that aren’t very good at staying centered on the court. Winning in the early going is a simple matter of ball placement.. But as you get into higher ranked tournaments, your opponent difficulty curve goes up sharply – suddenly they’re returning the ball much, much faster and you won’t be able to pick and choose your shots. Unless you have a very fast player you’ll end up diving at a lot of balls. Diving means you have much less power and control, and those shots lead to unforced errors. If you’re not diving, or at least very late to the ball, you won’t have much trouble keeping it in bounds.

Later opponents also depend far too much on the drop shot, using it at some point in almost every game. On the other hand, the lob is to be avoided because it will almost always get slammed right back in your face. Overall, the computer opponents could have been more varied in their tactics. But the career mode is still challenging and interesting enough to eat up hours and hours of playtime.

Online, however, you’ll find human opponents that bring out the best in Virtua Tennis 3. You can bring your created player online for ranked or unranked matches and set up your own tournaments. You can also watch other matches and a handful of highlights from other players. Most importantly, the game plays the same online as off.

The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions are nearly identical, particularly in appearance – the graphics appear to be pretty much the same. But there is one very important difference: The PS3 version does not support online play of any kind. Virtua Tennis 3 looks great, plays extremely well and, online, offers an excellent substitute for the real thing if it’s raining or you’re just too lazy to get out there and play.