6-time All-Star.  3-time World Series Champion.  World Series MVP.  Huge nerd.  All of these are accurate descriptions of Curt Schilling, whose dominance on the mound during his playing days made the former pitcher synonymous with the word “winner”.   Since his retirement from Major League Baseball, Schilling put a lot of his earnings into his other passion- massively multiplayer online role-playing games.  Unfortunately for Curt and the 300+ people of 38 Studios that he formerly employed, the man with the bloody sock has been nothing short of a failure when it comes to his business venture. Read the rest of this entry »

It all started in 1999 with the arcade game, but truly exploded in 2000 on the Sega Dreamcast.  Virtua Tennis was one of my favorite games as a kid, not because I’m a tennis fan (spoiler alert, I’m not), but because of the ease of gameplay and the heated battles that would ensue.  If you were lucky enough to have a Dreamcast, a system truly ahead of its time, there’s a good chance you owned the original.

11 years later Sega released it’s 4th installment of the game with updated players and some new features that didn’t exist back in the Dreamcast days.  I have no idea what features are updates from Virtua Tennis 2 and 3 (nor do I care to look them up), but 4 can be played in 3D if you are rich enough to own a 3D TV and features a motion play option for use with the PlayStation Move controller.

The Players:

As you can see, almost all of today’s tennis stars are playable, and even a few legends too.  You can even create your own player in the game’s World Tour mode and use that player in Arcade and Exhibition modes as well.  I was wondering why only Venus Williams made the cut and no Serena, but then realized digitally reproducing this body would warrant an NC-17 rating and would require several additional programmers and graphic designers

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