Producer: M.A.D.
Retail Price: £2.99

Ever dreamed of playing the Wimbledon final on centre court? Were you Bjorn to be a star? Grand Prix Tennis gives you the chance - grab your gear and your racket and get ready to pit your wits against a top professional player (human or computer!).

The contest is fought on a yellow monochrome tennis court, complete with umpire and players' chairs. Each match consists of three sets, and is played according to the rules of lawn tennis with a couple of minor alterations: players don't change ends, and the score table always shows player 1's score as the first (in the real game the server's score is the first).

Strokes ranging from simple forehands and backhands to complex smashes and lobs are available. Service is controlled by the FIRE button: make one press to throw up the ball, a second to make the shot.

At the end of a set the players can take a well-earned break on their courtside chairs, and the interval can be extended indefinitely to act almost as a pause option - though real stars shouldn't need a rest.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor. Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: crude animation of stick characters
Sound: simplicity at its limits
Options: definable keys: one or two players

The graphics are dismal and the little people are barely recognisable; Grand Prix Tennis is just a mixture of yellow and black with white text, a waste of everything the Spectrum is really capable of. And when you go to hit the ball it doesn't have to touch the racket - a spot 20 pixels away seems quite satisfactory. Grand Prix Tennis is way below average.
NICK

The inlay calls this a 'fully accurate simulation' - but if Wimbledon were like Grand Prix Tennis no-one would bother to come. There's no atmosphere (no audience or line judges, and you don't even change ends), and as the ball swings in an unrealistic arc across the court it looks and feels like it's attached to the net or your racket by an invisible string. Whether you hit or miss is a question more of luck than of timing and technique.

And the graphics don't give a clear indication of where the ball has landed; budding John McEnroes have some really good excuses to rant and rave.

The thoughtless design of the controls makes things worse. The joystick directions are the reverse of the obvious: playing a forehand, naturally to the right of the player, is effected by pulling the joystick to the left. Instinctive reactions lead to confusion.
KATI

It's been proved that lawn tennis can work on the Spectrum - Match Point (Issue 8/89%) is a fine example - so I have no sympathy with such a substandard version as this. The graphics may look impressive on the glossy inlay (the same could be said of Konami's Tennis), but the programmer apparently didn't know the first thing about accurate collision-detection and smooth animation.

And the very awkward control method is unresponsive as well as illogical.

If people must produce lawn tennis games, surely they should learn by others' mistakes - I mean, who's ever heard of a 3-D isometric tennis game?!
PAUL

Mastertronic
£2.99
Reviewer: Tony Worrall

I've always been a great tennis fan. There I am, at Wimbledon in front of the TV, a six-pack in one hand and a bowl of strawberries and low fat cream (gotta watch the calories y'know), in the other. Ah! There's nothing like it. Well, there probably is, but I'll tell you about that another time.

Grand Prix Tennis is another great game for all us armchair sporty types. All the excitement and none of the sweat. Well it would have been, except for one glaring point - the game is about as playable as snooker on a sloping table.

Trouble is, the game is far too easy, yet far too hard at the same time. I found it practically impossible to keep a rally going for more than two seconds, my opponent seemed to be Lendl, Becker and Borg rolled into one! On the other hand, it is possible to serve an ace with every - er - serve, thus making it tres easy to win that game.

These two poor gameplay design points make the program a bit of a laff to play, but add to that the terrible collision detector and you have a game that would make John McEnroe rotate in his tailor made Nike sports shoes. In fact Grand Prix Tennis adds nothing new to tennis sims, and as far as I'm concerned, that oldie but goldie Match Point still wins game, set and match every time.

Label: MAD
Author: Garry Hughes
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

The Summer days of Wimbledon are long over, but you can recapture all the thrills (except getting soaked) with MAD's Grand Prix Tennis. It's a oneor two-player game which very sensibly includes a full explanation of the rules of tennis, even down to the most obvious ("tennis is played between two players, one on each side of a net...").

The screen design is fairly realistic, with an isometric view of the court and the umpire sitting on his little tower. The court's yellow, the players are black, the scores are at the top, and that's yer lot in terms of graphics.

As usual with this kind of game, the main skill is in timing and positioning your player. Serving is a bit of an effort; you hit the Fire button to throw the ball up, move the joystick to select the type of shot, and hit Fire again to shoot.

There are eight kinds of shot available: forehand, forehand lob, lob, backhand lob, backhand smash and smash. Your computer opponent masters these all with consummate ease; for you, things will be more difficult.

The movement of the characters is gratifyingly fast, the ball's motion is very realistic. Extra touches like the players dashing off for a sit down and a glass of Robinson's Barley water add to the atmosphere. Basically Grand Prix Tennis is very fast, requires a good deal of skill and reproduces most of the important features of the real game.