Reviews

Having already played Adidas Championship Football and feeling massively disappointed with it, I was eager to play the second game in the series. Adidas Championship Tie-Break itself seems like an odd name, especially since it is a Tennis game, so why not call it Adidas Championship Tennis instead of Tie-Break? Unfortunately this is not the only drawback for the game.

As soon as you start the game up you instantly see the difference between this and Football. Football contained nicely detailed colourful graphics and a great soundtrack but was greatly let down by its fast, uncontrolable gameplay...Tie-Break though has far inferior graphics, almost out-dated for 1990's standard. It also has a very dodgy control system, mainly in the serve where you press up to throw up the ball and down to hit it and it's very difficult to make a perfect serve. You also press up and down to hit the ball as it comes towards you but again it very difficult.

For music it's composed with the beeper rather Football's AY music, but it's composed by Tiny Williams of Sound Images and his beeper tunes were usually good...this, though not his best is still a decent tune.

But overall I was left feeling very disappointed with Adidas Tie-Break, there are much better Tennis games than this for the Spectrum and there aren't many worse off. So the Adidas games were ultimately busts, leaving no wonder why there were only two of them and there wasn't any Adidas Championship Checkers or Championship Keepy-Uppy or Championship Dressage. Stick to the day job Adidas.

1990 Ocean Software (UK)
by Antony Lill

I wasn't totally disappointed with the jerky screen scrolling and the average looking graphics, I've seen a lot worse than that. But the fact that you can't actually move at all and can only press fire to hit the ball, really makes the game a bit pointless. The computer looks after all, so I'll let him entertain himself. Now, where did I leave my Match Point copy?

1,5 points

Why is this called Tie-Break and not Tennis? Because it may have been originally called Tie-Break but then they acquired the Adidas license and then its name changed to accommodate that. This game quite uniquely gives you a choice of racket to use in the game, however from my experience whatever you choose doesn't make any difference to the game so this choice is pretty pointless. It's also weird seeing you as “Team” 1 rather than Player 1 at the start but then refers to you as Player 1 during the game and your opponent as Player 2 even though he had a name at the beginning. Anyway this game reminds me a bit of Passing Shot because of its top down view bit it really is a poor man's equivalent of it. The graphics are not great and the gameplay is extremely lacking in quality for a tennis game. Serving is a bollocks and returning balls is pretty much down to luck. It's ugly, unpredictable and pretty much unplayable, as far as Tennis games go this may be one of the worst I've ever played. Match Point, which by this point was already six years old when this game came out, absolutely crushes this.