Top Spin 2, only recently released onto PC, is a fine, deep, involving tennis game. In fact, the whole Top Spin franchise, which has sprung to life in the gap while its main rival Virtua Tennis moved from iterations two to three, has been pleasantly praised, if hardly broadly embraced, for taking a slightly more serious take on a sport that's been quietly resident on home computers since Psion's Match Point back in the early 80s.

Virtua Tennis 3, though, smashes it out of the court.

Since it last launched a brand new version of Virtua Tennis onto a home console (the more recent PSP version doesn't really count), much has happened at Sega. Virtua Tennis 2 was a Dreamcast release and that's, sadly, now consigned to fondly-fingered history books. Sega has subsequently reinvented itself as purely software publisher, and yet has seemingly failed to do much with one of its most enjoyable franchises.

Save for a PSP retread of the game, it wasn't until the coin-op unveiling of Virtua Tennis 3 a year or two back that real signs of a new console game emerged. Now, some time further on, Virtua Tennis 3 is being released across Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, and surely on each format it's a heavy contender for one of the most enjoyable games of the year.

The main game itself is often dismissed as an arcade title, which is partly true. After all, the hallmarks are there: dramatic shots, incredibly easy-to-pick-up controls and plenty of crowd-enticing action are just the beginning. But it's always, subtlety, thrown its hat into the simulation ring, not to the extent of Top Spin, but nonetheless the game is so compulsive because the tennis works so well. The nuances to the control system, improved cleverly since Virtua Tennis 2, allow for a broad selection of shots, although as usual it's as much timing as shot selection that's the key.

In the single player game, though, and in the early days particularly, you'll find your player lacks any kind of punch. So you're invited to go on the main World Tour, which again mixes in training exercises with tournaments, and the aim of boosting your ranking to number one.

You create your player (unlike VT2, this third game only requires you to take one tennis player on this trip around the world), and are presented with a globe. Once you've picked your home location - where you'll need to go to get a rest if your stamina's down, or perhaps to pick up one of the new, more powerful racquets you unlock - you can choose any of the marked destinations on the planet. Some will be tournaments, with a ranking requirement to gain entry, others will be the aforementioned training, and occasionally you'll get an e-mail inviting you to a practice match too.

The training, though, is what fills most of the map, and Virtua Tennis 3 effectively offers a two-tiered approach to it (three, if you count the training matches). You can go to the tennis academy, where the teaching and learning of skills is presented in more of a strait-laced manner. Or you can choose to undertake one of the dozen or so mini-games that again test your abilities. What the two have in common is that if you successfully complete the exercise you're given, your player's abilities - across serving, volleying, groundstrokes and movement - will increase. However, it's the training mini-games where some of the game's finest entertainment is to be found.

It's the sheer thinking that has to be commended here. While the familiar knocking down skittles with serves or volleying balls at alien invaders are present, there are lots of new additions to get your teeth into. Some of the highlights? How about a form of tennis curling? Or bingo? Avoiding giant tennis balls rolling down a slope while picking up fruit? Or trying to pop balloons before they rise to the sky? The game's trick is that these wildly entertaining mini-games are teaching you the skills you need to win tournaments, and thus boost your ranking.

On the court it's just as much fun. The early tournaments are, to be fair, astoundingly easy to anyone who's played earlier entries in the franchise for any length of time, but it doesn't take long for the difficulty to suddenly shoot up (perhaps a little too severely). Yet it's extremely engrossing and you'll find yourself easily losing chunks of fifteen and twenty minutes of your life seemingly in no time, courtesy of some testing, borderline exhausting matches. It's wonderful, pure gaming entertainment.

And the trick is that while it continues to offer the appearance of a simple arcade game, it's got so much more going for it. We've not even factored in the at-times-savage multiplayer option that can have four players on court at any one time, with the kind of entertainment that can make evenings disappear.

If you haven't guessed, Virtua Tennis 3 is a gaming triumph that delivers on many levels. Not only is it the most fun we've had sitting at a screen this year to date, it's also set to be enjoyed for weeks and months after that top ranking has been attained, courtesy of it being such an enjoyable game to spend time with. Whatever gaming machine you own, Virtua Tennis 3 should be slap bang at the top of your most-wanted list.

A desperately enjoyable, immediately accessible and quite superb mix of sport, arcade and simulation.