Ubi Soft/ESP
£9.99 cass, £14.99 disk

Even though we're in midwinter, Ubisoft seem to think it's summer as they're just releasing this tennis game - maybe they want to cheer us up with summer notions. Pro Tennis Tour takes you around the world to compete in four major tournaments: the Melbourne Open, the French Open, the famous venue in Wimbledon and finally the US Open. The game starts with an options screen where you can start a tournament, practice (choose to either practice your service, or improve your shot on a six program machine), view the current rankings, choose a difficulty level and finally watch a demo.

When all the options have been set and you have practised to your heart's content, you enter the first tournament - the Melbourne Open. You are ranked 64th, and the main aim of the game is to battle your way to number one seed. The difficulty level you chose at the start determines how fast the ball is whacked by the opponent, and the size of racket you possess (in easy mode you have an outsized one).

The rules of tennis are quite simple, a match is split into three sections: games, sets and matches. The scoring system is 15, 30, 40 and deuce; at deuce the first player to score two consecutive points is the winner. Sets consist of six games, and each match consists of five sets, although the first person to win three sets wins Game, Set and Match (with the winning player leaping over the net and falling flat on their face). The combatants move smoothly around the court and are well drawn, which is more than can be said for the little fella up in his high chair - you can see right through him. As with most tennis games the greatest fun is gained by anticipating the opponent's next shot. Wimbledon is a fair way off yet, but fans are advised to take a look at Pro Tennis Tour.

MARK [66%]

Pro Tennis Tournament is, well, tennis! There is nothing here that hasn't been seen in all the other tennis games that have come out on the Spectrum. The sprites for the players, umpire and ball boy are all average, and there is some animation. Colour is the usual boring white on a green background, but what else can you use in a tennis game? The event is brightened up a bit by the inclusion of some music on the menu screen.

In the game you supposedly play in different cities across the world, but the look of the game doesn't change at all from one day to another. They could have at least put a flag in there somewhere to show where you are.
NICK [56%]

Ubi Soft
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Kati Hamza

An egg. L'oeuf, as they say in France. That's an oval-shaped thing full of cholesterol for dipping greasy soldiers in, I hear you cry. And indeed it is. But, me little French food lovers everywhere, 'l'ouef' is also the origin of the tennis term 'love', because, erm, the words sort of sound the same and the French orginally figured that the number zero was shaped like, yes well, an egg!

And by amazing coincidence zero is exactly what you're likely to score in this game, 'cos Pro Tennis Tour is pretty tough and fabby. So much so, in fact, that it won best sports sim in the Tiltd'Or awards (French computer games award ceremony). But does the Speccy version match up?

Well, the first thing that hits you right between those old beady eyes (yikes!) is that it's corkendously fast. It actually looks like the genuine object - real tennis, like blimmin' accurately animated (though Wimbledon's not usually in monochrome unless you're telly's black and white or you're colour blind!)

The second thing you notice is that the whole shenanigan comes complete with four (yes, four) different tournament locations, three (yes, three) difficulty levels, and, for those who are totally crap, two (yes, two) different types of practice sessions. One's for ground-strokers, with balls being gobbed at you from a machine, and the other's just for service. And that's all you need 'cos these are the only two types of shot.

A bit lacking in variety? Nope, 'cos you can make the ball sproing all over the court at all sorts of different angles just by timing and positioning. For example, supposing you want your ball to move to the left, you just stand, erm... to the left of it and time your shot. Once you've got the hang of this spunky little control method you can play incredibly involved matches with more line shots, hair-raising volleys and top-spin ralleys than you'd ever see in a month of Wimbledons. And 'cos there's no messing about with joystick angles or power meters to slow you down the action's always fast, furious and ferociously fun. Blimey!

'Snot easy though. You've got to practice for ages before you get good enough to beat any of the ranking compu players, so (in one player mode) it's blimmin' hard to win. Things are slightly better in two player mode though, because there's every chance that your opponent will be as crap as you are, making for a more even-handed match. Things are much tougher if you're the one playing at the far end of the court (since you're further away and much smaller it's a lot harder to tell where the ball's going to bounce) but luckily you swop positions every so often so things even out.

Still, even when you're playing at the front of the court it's pretty hard. Due to the angle at which you view the game it's fairly easy to judge left and right, but much harder to tell how close to the net the ball will bounce. In fact, it's murder! Still, at least you can see he whole court all the time, which is a far better set-up than the one in Passing Shot, for instance, in which the court scrolled and you couldn't even see your player half the time! Now that really was a nightmare!

Pro Tennis Tour is one of the slickest, quickest and spiffiest tennis games I've seen in yonks. If you fancy yourself as a bit of a Borg then you're on to a winner, though you probably won't be the winner yourself for a bit, if you see worramean. As for me, I only lost 'cos someone knobbled the line judge. I mean - anyone could have seen that chalk dust!

REPLAY

Re-pla, vt To play again. n

That section in YS which covers re-released games. (We just thought you'd like to know.)

Hit Squad
£3.99
061 832 6633
Reviewer: Stuart Campbell

Tennis, huh? in all my years of (etc etc) I've never seen a tennis game match the classic simplicity and playability of Psion's legendary Match Point, so could this be the one that makes the difference?

Well, no. Can I go now? (No. Get on with it. Ed)

You want to know why? It's all in the control, really. While Match Point used a control method so instinctive and obvious that you could grasp every kind of shot within two minutes of picking the game up, Pro Tennis Tour is hamstrung by a system which uses the fire button not as the trigger which makes you hit the ball, but more as a sort of safety catch which you have to take off before you can do anything dangerous. Returning a shot from the computer player in Pro Tennis Tour, then, involves getting across the court to where the fast-moving ball is heading, positioning yourself to intercept it, pressing fire to draw back your racquet, holding down one of the joystick directions to determine the kind of shot you're going to play, and finally releasing the fire button to actually hit the pesky thing.

What this meant for me, not too bad a gamesplayer (actually, I'm still officially the best Spectrum gamesplayer in Britain, having won the title in 1989 and never been beaten in competition since - bet you didn't know that) (Stop boasting. Ed) was that I was one set to love down in my first game before I'd managed to return a single one of the computer's shots. While you do get to grips with the control eventually, you never get to the stage where you're thinking more about the shot than you are about which ridiculous control manoeuvre you're going to have to tangle your fingers up with to play it. This is a bit of a game-wrecking flaw.

Mind you, this is still the second-best Speccy tennis game I've played, and it's got lots of groovy features like a serving-machine practice mode and three clever dificulty settings which let the computer do varying amounts of the work for you. It's just not as good as Match Point, that's all.

SUPER GAME GUIDE

Following on from last month's frollicking funderland of fabbo games still available for the Speccy, Mark 'Cor Blimey Guv' Patterson gives us the lowdown on another batch of game greats from the pages of the world's most SU-per Speccy mag. The sheer number and variety of games is bewildering but since bewilderment is Marky's lot he's definitely the best man to give 'em a go...

PRO TENNIS TOUR
Label: Hit Squad
Memory: 48/128K
Price: Tape £3.99
Reviewer: Mike Patterson

The last great British tennis player was Fred Perry, which shows how poor we are in this sport - that was so long ago even his T-shirts have gone out of fashion. You can redeem this fact though (the tennis, not the shirts), with Pro Tennis Tour, the most realistic bat n' ball sim on the Spectrum.

The graphics are massive, with large, well defined players blatting the hell of the ball. The controls are very responsive and playing sneaking sideline shots is surprisingly easy. All this makes PTT by far the best tennis sim you can get your hands on.

Label: Ubisoft
Price: £8.95
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Since the French are totalement merde at le tennis, you wouldn't think Ubisoft's Pro Tennis Tour would be anything to fall in love with. In fact you'd think it would Borg the pants off you. But net at all - in fact as you play it, it gets Becker and Becker.

OK, that's all the puns out of the way in the first paragraph, apart from the one about balls. Pro Tennis Tour is in fact a very realistic, very flexible, very comprehensive and very pointless tennis simulation.

Why's it pointless? just because there are almost as many tennis games out there as there are football games, and every year a new crop appear with tiresome predictability whenever it's Wimbledon season. PTT is good, but not so good that I would have thought even the most fanatical tennis simulation collector (and are there any of those?) would feel obliged to dash out and buy it.

The big gimmick is that rather than just playing one opponent, you get to work your way up through the ranks at various tournaments. Melbourne, US Open, Wimbledon - starting as 64th and aiming for the World Tennis Championship. A score table shows you your ranking between games, and there are various skill levels (in the early stages at least).

The best aspect of the game is that it's fast - with all too many tennis sims it's a matter of smacking the ball, then going off and having a glass of Robinson's Barley Water while you wait for it to float to the other side. In PTT, although the animation of the players doesn't feature quite enough frames, the ball moves quickly, demanding fast reactions. In Easy mode, when you serve, the ball always goes over the net - all you have to do is hit Fire and aim a crosshair at the right side of the court. A small black marker shows you where to position your player to return the ball, and you don't have to be precisely on target to hit it. On more advanced levels, all these aids disappear as fast as Jimmy Connors' equilibrium at match point.

The rules of the game are as incomprehensible as the real thing, but you always serve first, and you don't change ends of the court. Different types of shot - lobs, volleys, drop shots - are selected automatically according to your position, movement, and aim; the computer also determines the spin on the ball according to the type of surface you're playing on, ball speed, and so on. Little line judges sitting one the sides of the court wiggle their fingers to indicate decisions, and a score display appears at the bottom of the screen between services.

You can save a tournament at any stage, and there's a practice mode in which you can hone your serving technique, or test your return skills against a serving machine.

Oh, and the pun about balls? Well, I'm sure you can make your own up, I can't be bothered.

Label: Hit Squad
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £3.99 Tape
Reviewer: Marc Richards

Alright then, Jeremy! What went wrong, eh? The whole country was counting on you to win! I mean, do you realize just how embarrassing it is that a British man hasn't won Wimbledon since the 1930s and we're the country that holds the tournament?! What do you have to say for yourself?

If only he'd had a copy of Blue Byte's Pro Tennis Simulator to practise on and things might have been different. He could have played any of the four Grandslam tournaments - the Australian Open, the French Open, The US Open and, of course, Wimbledon, each one with it's own type of playing surface - without even leaving the comfort of his own bathroom.

He could have practised his serving and returning with the tennis machine option. He could have had a game with a friend using the two player option. He could have chosen between playing at an easy, advanced or professional level. Oh, what Jeremy could have done with Pro Tennis Tour!

OK, so you can't view the court from ten different angles like you can in GBH's International 3D Tennis, but in this game we're not playing with matchstick men! Oh no, missus, this is the real thing! Your chunky little sprite is brilliantly animated with dozens of different positions and stances.

The sound effects are quite realistic, and there is a reassuringly catchy title tune that plays on the menu screens.

All in all, this is an extremely accurate tennis simulator, albeit difficult, with loadsa' options and plenty of game there to keep you hooked for ages! Although Pro Tennis Tour doesn't have a wide range of different shots that you can play, I think that it offers some great knockabout fun. PTT just has the edge on International 3D, but only just!

STEVE KEEN:
I'm still not sure whether PTT is as good as last month's International 3D Tennis. What I liked about that game was the simplicity and clearness of the vector graphics, and the vast array of different shots at your disposal. But then if you're into tennis you could always get both games - you won't be disappointed!

Thrash Becker and Lendl - thanks to Ubisoft.

Pro-Tennis Tour brings you up against the top players on the world tennis circuit - Lendl, Becker, they are all here as you seek to up your own personal world ranking.

Ubisoft opt for a fairly straightforward presentation of the court with the action viewed from your end of the court throughout. No split screens or three dimensional rotation here. Game controls are simplicity itself. To serve, you throw the ball in the air and then move a cross hair to determine the direction you want it to travel.

Returning shots is equally simple. All you have to do is press fire - the computer works out for you whether to use a backhand or forearm return depending on your position on the court. This simplicity does facilitate some excellent rallies, but you can't move and swing at the same time. The bat seems to take forever to make the swing before it connects with the ball and this means your positioning has to be spot-on, arriving at the position where the ball will be returned just before it gets there. This doesn't spoil the rallies exactly, it just makes them slightly unrealistic.

Pro-Tennis Tour has excellent sound and graphics. Worthy of particular mention are the landmark shots at the start of various tournaments. The Tower of London never looked so good in pixels, and the Statue of Liberty isn't bad either.