Thirty years ago this month Nintendo released Super Tennis. The word "super" indicates nothing more than that it's a Super NES game, the replacement for the original Tennis on the NES. It blows that dinosaur out of the water. Super Tennis has three main draws: realistic tennis simulation, a Circuit mode, and gameplay options. The game achieves a surprisingly intricate level of tennis simulation by mapping each of the four main buttons to a different type of stroke, depending whether you're near or far from the net. When your player is near the base line (the back boundary of the court), A is slice (slow with low bounce), B is flat (normal), X is top spin (fast with high bounce), and Y is lob (slow with high bounce). When you're near the net, A is light volley, B is strong volley, and X and Y are still top spin and lob, respectively. However, if you hit the ball with A or B before it bounces, you instead do a drop shot, which is a light hit that gets the ball just...

Tennis is the last sports launch title I'll be playing (sorry, 10-Yard Fight, no one likes you), and it's not awful. As with Soccer , I had such low expectations that I was not disappointed. Bits of Tennis are found in the game NES Remix , so I knew what to expect. I mean, it's tennis, so you're bouncing a ball back and forth across a net. The action is fast paced and challenging, which is why it's still somewhat enjoyable. Tennis mostly does what you'd expect: you control a player, who runs around hitting a ball back and forth over a net against a computer-controlled player. If you're quick enough, you can volley (hit the ball back without letting it bounce), but I found this usually resulted in the computer scoring against me. Eventually, either you or the computer will miss, and it's on to the next serve. I struggled to figure out how to get the ball to go where I wanted, so the whole experience felt random. You can choose the difficulty level but not...