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November: not exactly the most auspicious month in the tennis calendar. Sure, you've got the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals, with a potential purse of $2 million plus for an undefeated champion. But I doubt that sum factored high on Nintendo's list of reasons to publish such a sunny, summery game at a time of year when it's permanently dark and cold, and any mention of Wimbledon fever is more likely to pertain to an unexpected outbreak of bacterial infections in south west London. Yet oddly enough, Ultra Smash follows a great Nintendo tradition of tennis games releasing in November. The GameCube's Mario Power Tennis debuted eleven years ago this month. And the great Mario Tennis 64 simultaneously launched in Europe and the US in November 2000. In other words, you'd be wrong to think that the release date suggested this would be a hurriedly assembled schedule-filler. The game itself does a good enough job of that.
Perhaps the most damning evidence came on the day review code arrived. I picked my son up from school at half three, and between us, we'd unlocked every court surface and character - including the more powerful star variants - by five. That's including a break for snacks, too.
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