It was the first tennis game on the NES and allowed to play singles or doubles against five different levels of enemies.

Tennis was one of the launch titles for the NES way back in 1985, it succeeded back in winning new gamers to the system in much the same way as Wii Sports is doing nowadays. That begs the question of course, why bother with this if you already have Wii Sports Tennis, which you got as a freebie with your Wii? Well for a start YOU control the movement of your player in this game!

For a game developed over 20 years ago NES Sports Tennis is pretty impressive, it stood out from its contemporaries at the time with its attention to detail. The rules of tennis are modeled nicely here and a fair amount of strategy can be used in the game. You can also have singles matches against a friend and doubles matches against the CPU.

The controls are pretty simple, you simply press A to do a strong shot or B to do a lob shot and use the D-pad to move. Very often you'll either hit the ball into the net or hit it out, which you don't have much control over. Even when you do manage to hit a strong shot, the ball goes slowly which provides your opponent ample time to react and run after the ball. In addition to this often when you try to hit the ball, you'll either miss it entirely, even though it's an inch in front of you, or you'll hit the ball about a few feet in front of you, which seems to happen randomly. To rub it in the CPU rarely makes such mistakes, it’s fair to say that the controls can be a little unforgiving at times.

Mario makes an appearance in Tennis as the umpire calling the shots and faults. His next appearance as ref would be in the excellent Punch-Out which we desperately hope will arrive on the Virtual Console very soon.