Previous Next

With Wimbledon in the news, now is a good time to start thinking about tennis simulations/games. And Activision have brought over this game from the French company Loriciels.

Since Pong was released (and I'm talking about video games here), which is generally regarded as the first ever video game. Tennis games have come a long way. A few years ago Match Point from Psion and Atari Tennis made big splashes with games that actually resembled tennis rather than just the disembodied bats playing to themselves.

The Activision game is played in full 3D perspective with a full crowd in attendance and a couple of umpires. The main feature of the game is the number of options. As well as all the usual combinations you can select automatic or manual play.

Automatic play is very similar to Pong in that you just get near the ball and the computer takes care of actually hitting it. In manual mode, however, you have to get to the ball at a time where you could realistically hope to reach it, and then press fire to return the ball.

As you might expect, the automatic method has its advantages, but in manual mode there is a lot more that you can actually do to the ball in the way of positioning it so that your opponent is likely to miss it. However, when playing the computer the skill needed to control the ball properly means that it is difficult to get a single point from the damn thing.

A very good game, you can't go much to liven up a game like this, but Loriciels have tried their best.