Now that it's out, I have the luxury of sitting atop my high horse and claiming that I was right, while all the naysayers were wrong, and the budget pricing for the title just makes it all the sweeter.

Okay, enough with the "I told you so" nonsense - it's time to get down and discover what makes Table Tennis deliver like a crosscourt smashpoint to a gaming public of an opponent who just took a pause from the game to take a bathroom break.

Rockstar billed this project as "a tennis game with the intensity of a fighting game," and we couldn't agree more. The strict one-on-one (sorry, doubles fans), quick-paced, back-and-forth, sealed-with-the-fact-that-there's-a-super... whoops, focus meter, make the parallel undeniable. One of the core elements of gameplay, as in the real game, is spin. You can apply spin in the four main directions (or some comination thereof) via either the face buttons or the right thumbstick. The ball, while in flight, aside from curving, will have a trail (and orbs rotating around the ball) which is coloured according to the face button that was used (or would be used) to generate that spin. To hit the best shots, the Top Spin method of press-and-hold has been applied - doing so as early as possible will cause you to not only put more spin and power into your shots, but also charge up your focus meter.

The positioning game is minimalist and twitchy, as it should be, since footwork in a quick table tennis resembles that of a fencing more than regular court tennis. Since, as with the tennis game standard, you can't efficiently move and swing at the same time, there's a nice dichotomy of working for the optimal balance between positioning and shot potential. If you're out of position, you can still lunge and attempt to save yourself from losing the point, but such actions will take a toll on your focus meter and not deliver a very convincing return, thus giving your oponent the opportunity to press their advantage.

You can also move back from the table to allow yourself more time to charge your shot, at the cost of giving your oponent a wider angle to slip it by you, so there's a considerable amount of depth in the positioning side of the game alone.

Going back to the spin, the ball physics are realistically modelled - the ball bounces off the table (including the dreaded corner edge) at all the right angles, and backspin shots have the potential to hang excrutiatingly atop the net before deciding which side to fall, and top spin shots can climb the net and dribble over when hit slightly below the tape.

One of the innovantive mechanics in play is that when a shot you're placing is in danger of going out, the controller will vibrate slightly, and when it's a sure thing, violently. It's a nice touch that adds significantly to the otherwise hit-and-miss, muscle-memory training game of pushing the ball to the edges inherent in all tennis games.

Upon the first few plays through, the game can seem a mixture of too easy and too hard, and the balancing act among the characters can seem a tad skewed in favour of the more power oriented players, such as Jesper (the Swedish powerhouse), Mark, Solayman, and Jung Soo. Once you peel back the layers, however, the more technical and defensive style players can hold up well in the right hands, and winners of matches at high level play will be determined, as they should, by who can dictate the terms of play.

The focus meter comes in to add an extra element of depth - as stated earlier, charging up shots charges your focus meter. Focus can be expended at will to add a little bit more oomph to your shots, or charged up to fill the meter, which will then begin to flash and empty, during which time all your shots will benefit with extra power and spin. Doing this will upgrade your meter from red to yellow, and yellow to green. For tough-fought rallies, both players might end up with a flashing green meter, resulting in a "focus rally" - the ambient noise gets zoned out, and a spotlight shines down on the players to reflect the added intensity.

The end result for the fundamental gameplay is that Rockstar Presents Table Tennis is about as good a game as one could imagine a table tennis video game being. A mild failing in this title is the online play. The title boasts full online functionality but this remained sound only as long as it remained on paper. There's fun to be had, so long as you have a decent connection with your opponent and the right amount of players for your strictly 4/8/16 tournament. The failing is not so much that the implementation is bad, but rather that it had potential to be a lot better, had they followed a simple lobby based winner-stays queue format of other one on one games, we'd be struggling to find anything wrong.

As it stands, the online functionality fails to deliver on tremendous potential - you can only spectate in matches as a passive observer without interacting (talking, or challenging) with the players. The tournament mode requires strict numbers, and has players pair off for a set number of minutes, playing short games to determine a winner - there's no option to have a knockout tournament or have only one pair playing at one time while everyone else watches. Lag also rears its ugly head, sometimes resulting in 'ghost returns', whereby the player appears to remain in the same position, but the ball gets returned, somewhat negating the depth of the positioning game. As we've intoned, this is merely a demerit on what we believe the game could have been - however, what it is still remains a solid title regardless of our expectations, worthy of any tennis or Pong loving 360 owner's collection.