Thanks to the inclusion of Wii Sports with the console, everyone who owns Nintendo's white box should already own a tennis game. Therefore, any additional representations of the sport would have to do something pretty special in order to warrant the opening of gamers' wallets.
With Sega already having a successful tennis series in their back catalogue thanks to the Virtua Tennis games, the combination of this engine and a cast of classic Sega characters, coupled with the motion sensor controls of the Wii just cannot possibly lose, can it?
I suppose the answer to that question would be no, but at the same time, Sega Superstars Tennis doesn't quite win either. It's the equivalent of the plucky British hero at Wimbledon, making it through a few early rounds, before ultimately being pipped at the Quarter Final stage.
The thing is, if you dissect the game based upon its name, you'll soon realise that there's a whole lot of "Sega Superstars" involvement in the game, but not all that much actual tennis. Most of your time will be spent playing various mini-games, similar in style to those seen in the training modes of Virtua Tennis. These may involve avoiding projectiles being thrown at you, or hitting back balls to knock down targets.
In what proves to be a major stumbling block for the title, a lot of these mini-games fail to utilise the motion sensor controls of the Wii, forcing you to unplug your Nunchuck and play with the remote turned sideways. Whether the motion controls (which are implemented perfectly well when you do actually get to play real tennis) would prove too inefficient with these mini-games, we'll never go, because they don't bloomin' well give us the chance to find out for ourselves!!!
If you would rather just stick to standard tennis, you can do so with the Match and Tournament modes of the game. The former allows you to play a one-off game of singles or doubles, either alone or with up to three other players on one console. Tournament allows you to work your way through a series of knockout competitions, each one on a different themed course, and more challenging than the one that went before it. The game does default to the Easy setting though, so you may want to check the options menu if you're finding these to be far from challenging.