We finally have some new details about the game that has, up until now, been rather secretive.

The latest issue of the Weekly Famitsu magazine in Japan has announced some new details about the upcoming Mario Tennis game.

Mario, Toad, Luigi, Wario, Waruigi, Yoshi, Donkey Kong and Theresa the ghost will all be playable, but more will probably be attainable during the game.

As with a lot of Mario sport titles this will not be your average game of tennis. Each character will have a special move, such as Mario's hammer shot. The tennis courts will also have traps to interrupt the game and they will all be based upon the court theme.

As usual mini-games will be attainable during the game. Two confirmed games include one where you have to hit "Shines" and another where you have to play against the giant squid from Super Mario Sunshine.

Weekly Famitsu interviewed Hiroyuki and Shugo Takahashi, head and vice head of Japanese developer Camelot, about the title. Hiroyuki spoke about why it has taken so long for the game to be released. "Last year around March, we tossed the Mario Tennis GC that we'd been working on until then and restarted from the beginning." It seems that Camelot looked at the Mario Golf game and decided it should be a less serious game. "If we'd made [tennis] before golf, it would've been a more serious game. It likely wouldn't have been a game with so many gimmicks."

Apparently Hiroyuki wanted to make sure that this game was not just an updated version of the previous title but one that maintained the quality of previous Mario titles. "This is unacceptable for a Mario game. My brother and I love Mario, so much that we have memories of losing sleep trying to save Princess Peach in Super Mario Brothers. So, we couldn't accept a Mario game that merely brought graphics up to the system's specifications."

Shugo spoke about the difficulty of creating Mario Tennis compared to Mario Golf. "In that sense, we were worried about what we would do for Mario Tennis." But for tennis, the court is flat, so, adding height to courts is difficult."

Hiroyuki carried on discussing the development of the title. "We restarted from scratch, and, pushing aside the thoughts that we'd created Mario Tennis, assumed that there was a big hit called Mario Tennis out there. We began development by considering how we could make a title that compared with this. I believe the solution is contained within Mario Tennis GC."

"There was pressure to make a new game. said Shugo. "Following the success of the N64 version, we were confident that we could make something interesting. However, we felt that if the fun [of the new title] were not communicated without people actually playing the game, people would probably, prior to trying the game, say 'Isn't this the same as the last one?' and not play the game. So, we made the effort to make a game that would make people think 'This is different from the last one' the moment they saw the screen."

After all the work that has gone into the title it looks like this game will be a big hit when it is finally launched in Japan in October.