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A confession to start out: I've never been that fond of simulations. Flying simulations, driving simulations, American football simulations, they all leave me cold. I used to think that this unnatural hatred for things simulational was due to the fact that I can't fly, drive or play American football. Serve And Volley, however, gives the lie to this theory: I can play tennis [after a fashion - Ed] but I still found it as boring as watching the grass grow on Centre Court.

Then again, perhaps it's because Serve And Volley isn't really a very hot example of the simulator game.

My heart sank when I read the somewhat depressing instructions: "ball boys patrols [sic] the perimeter as you take your place at the serving line" - as any fule kno, the line behind which you stand to serve is called the base-line, the service line being the line which runs across the court, creating the service boxes. Then there's the extraordinary assertion that grass is the slowest playing surface followed by clay and then hard. I can't believe that anybody who's ever played the tennis, or even watched it on TV, could make a howler of such epic proportions (grass is in fact the fastest court surface, and hard the slowest). And I'm not just being nit-picky here; the instructions read like they were drafted by somebody who really didn't know anything about the sport they were attempting to simulate.

But whatever faults the instructions may have had, at least they were mildly amusing. Serve And Volley is quite simply terrible to play.

In common with many sports simulations, an inordinate amount of work is done planning each move, with comparatively little satisfying action in between. This may be someway justifiable in a sport like American football where coaches routinely plan out moves and routines on the drawingboard, but in reaction sports it becomes farcical.

If you pause the game at each choice panel to decide where you're going to move, where you want the ball to land and what stroke you wish to use, it turns the sport into an utterly dreary game of draughts, with virtually no skill or coordination involved at all; and if you play at the pace of the computer, the number of activities which you force your tiny, wooden onscreen character to go through in order to hit the ball makes a joke of the whole concept of a "simulation".

What small amount of skill there is consists of timing hitting the fire button to coincide with the passage of a moving bar. Depending on how close you can make the bar stop to the centre of the "difficulty level window", the computer produces a calculation of how likely your shot is to be successful. Then of course there's the usual range of player characteristics and statistics to select from, difficulty levels and even the prospect of manufacturing your own player. I mean, how boring, what has any of this farting around with statistics and configurations got to do with the game of tennis?

Sorry to be such a damp squib, but it would have been a far better idea if rain had stopped programming.