NEWS

Grunting With Maria Sharapova And Top Spin 3

Tennis, like golf, is a country club sport that we end up playing more of on Xbox than in real life. The sport is perfectly simple for the format—if you think about it, even the first video game, Pong, was basically a tennis sim. Our friends at 2K Sports invited Complex to Miami to preview Top Spin 3, and take loads of pictures of Maria Sharapova. We gladly obliged. See the highlights of our trip after the jump.

To help promote the game, 2K brought cover girl Maria Sharapova, who looked in person every bit the punishingly sexy Russian she is on TV. “The motion of the strokes impressed me,” said Maria. We suppressed it then, so we’ll say it now: PAUSE!

The very smiley James Blake was also in the building. He says his current favorite songs are John Mayer’s “Say,” Flo Rida’s “Low,” and Usher’s new one. One out of three ain’t bad…we guess.

Top Spin 3 is coming out in May for every console, but the Wii version seemed to get the most love. James and Maria played a Wii match (as themselves) for the adoring press. For the record, Maria got stomped.

James and Maria were nice and all, but Complex has a new favorite tennis player now—Monsieur Gael Monfils. The 6’4” Frenchman got way less attention than the other pros, but he seemed the most excited to be there. He said he plays Call of Duty 4 online (gamertag: “lamonf,” FYI) and dreamed about being in a video game when he was young.

Gael’s kicks. We told you he was Complex, right?

We played a few Top Spin 3 matches on the 360 and the Wii—the game is fun but the controls have a definite learning curve. Is it better than Virtua Tennis 3? Eh…we’ll wait for the finished product. Thanks 2K!