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Pro Tennis Tour |
Copyright/Publisher: UBI Soft, Original Design: Blue Byte,
Conversion by: ESP,
Programming: Mike Brown; Graphics: Steven Day,
Sonics: Tony Williams,
Release Year: 1990, Genre: Tennis,
Number Of Players: 1 or 2
At last, C64 owners can abuse their rackets in the privacy of their own home (the
Amiga game scored a worthy 88% in Issue 55). You can practise your strokes either
against the computer (choose from three skill levels) or a friend on the 3-D court
viewed from the usual TV angle.
A novel technique is used to serve; as the player throws the ball up, a small
cross appears on the court - this must be guided into the relevant service box. To
return the ball you must position your player and accurately time your swing.
To help you master this tricky technique, there are a variety of practice options.
The training machine can throw balls at you in six different patterns, and there's
another option to practise serving.
When you're ready, you can take on computer players of various ability in the
four major international tennis tournaments: Wimbledon and the Australian, French
and US Opens.
Even if you don't win a tournament, the more matches you win the higher your
ranking (starting at 64th) will get. As getting to No.1 is likely to take a long time,
the game includes a useful save facility.
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S.L. |
Another silly sport if you ask me: knocking balls over a net with a piece of wood
with string tied across it. But if you've got a fetish for that sort of thing,
Pro Tennis Tour is your pot of yoghurt.
Originally called Great Courts (a strange translation from the French), Ubi
soft's tennis sim is just as good as it was on the Amiga with almost identical
fast-paced action. The only things missing are the strawberries and cream, but who
needs them when you've got an economy bottle of Big Dom.
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Phil |
This is a really good conversion (by British programmers ESP), retaining the Amiga
game's simple playability and featuring some very good, large player sprites.
The game plays almost identically to the original with a high speed of play that
makes hitting the ball a difficult task at first.
One slight annoyance is that the player sometines performs a backhand shot when
you want a forehand (and vice versa), but this is a minor niggle. With the short-term
playability of the two-player game plus the long-term interest provided by world
tournaments, Pro Tennis Tour must be the top-seeded tennis sim.
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