I just can’t help the fact that I’m fascinated by Rockstar Table Tennis. It’s the not the fact that it’s a realistic table tennis simulator or anything or that I like the sport so much, on the contrary I completely hate it. But somehow reading a preview of this game, made by the company that you’d half expect to hide a submachine gun in the bat’s handle, fascinates me. The preview in casu comes from Joystiq, who went over to Rockstar’s offices with two legit ping pong players.

To summarize their preview: the bat didn’t do anything unexpected like explode or fire bullets during the whole session, the 11 players (7 male, 4 female) did not remove any clothes uncommon during a sports session and did not look like whores or pimps, the game physics and everything seems to handle correctly, and even the tournament arenas look detailed and authentic with sponsoring all around. If you’re expecting camel toes or hot coffee skip this Rockstar title. If you want an authentic Ping Pong simulator, do get this one.

The game even puts a learning curve in there requiring you to specialize in giving effect to the ball with the analog stick to attain superiority over other players:

My wife […] actually beat me on the first game we played. She was using the buttons, I had opted for the analog stick. That was the first in a string of defeats for me. I recognized immediately the superiority of the analog stick for ball control, but underestimated how much time it would take me to actually become facile with it. All of the finalists in the double-elimination tournament that Rockstar arranged chose to use the buttons rather than the analog stick. The buttons are easier to press, produce surer responses, and allow the new player to concentrate on getting up to speed on the core game. This will allow button-mashers to dominate the early Xbox Live rankings, but we predict that those who stick with the analog stick will ultimately dominate the top 10 rankings within weeks of the game’s public release.

The game is nearly completed, with the team rounding off the last changes and modifications to the game engine itself before it goes Gold to be released on May 22nd.