The Maxim of the sports-gaming market, the Outlaw game series goes after the Clearasil crowd by making an aggressive appeal to their raging hormones and unrefined senses of humor, not to mention their light wallets. Planting a stink bomb down the stuffed shirts of officially licensed titles, the Outlaw games have the eye-popping surfaces of Pamela Anderson posters: Scantily clad vixens who accessorize like trailer-trash Barbie dolls, anti-heroes in the form of tattooed thugs or colorful ethnic stereotypes, WWE-style introductions, gratuitous fistfights, and an anti-PC streak that borders on reactionary. But after an hour of picking fights and drooling over cyber-flesh, the cut-scenes and snarky commentary begin repeating themselves, so there's only the game itself left to draw interest over the long haul. By that standard, Outlaw Tennis, the third sport in the series after Outlaw Golf and Outlaw Volleyball, holds up better than might be expected, thanks to the surprising breadth and variety of the gameplay.
Embracing its arcade aesthetic, Outlaw Tennis bucks just about every convention of real-world tennis save for a ball and a racquet, and even those options can vary. Rather than meticulously scaled stadium backdrops, the matches take place everywhere from an aircraft carrier to a slaughterhouse to Hell, where Satan presides over a lava-lined center court. The 16 players comprise a Benetton ad pumped up by steroids and implants, with hotties like Summer (a stripper with an interest in nuclear physics) and Shawnee (a Native American who screams "Sacagawea!" when a point doesn't go her way) balanced out by thugs and clowns like Vinny (a would-be gangster) and Ice Trey (an Eminem-type with a pit bull that's constantly attacking his groin). Though the drills are a clever diversion and essential to build up each character's skill points, the heart of the game is the tour mode, which runs deeper than expected. Since tennis remains a pretty rudimentary game, the makers of Outlaw Tennis have devised quirky point systems, wacky obstacles like a roving shot blocker and exploding balls, and even some inclement weather to spruce things up.
Beyond the gameplay: In a voice-casting coup, Stephen Colbert plays the announcer with all the hilarious fatuousness of his faux-reporter character on The Daily Show. Some of the lines are sharper than others, but Colbert's disinterested tone—he only gets excited near the end of matches, when a paycheck awaits—is a genuinely irreverent answer to other titles' stodgy play-by-play.
Worth playing for: Adding a "turbo" feature to tennis seems like overkill, but when the meter fills up and you hit a perfect shot, it can bail you out of a lot of trouble, especially in the service game. With the right timing, a turbo serve sends your player spinning through the air like a wire-fu master, smashing a nearly unhittable 160-mph blast.
Frustration sets in when: Sometimes the CPU returns your unhittable serves for a winner down the line, but more frustrating still is a problem inherent to all video-game tennis: It's much harder to play in the far court than the near court. And playing on both sides in rapid succession inevitably leads you to move in the opposite direction of the ball.
Final judgment: The promise of gigantic stripper breasts is probably enough to get some would-be players to drop $19.99, but Outlaw Tennis is a bargain for other reasons, too.