Ocean
£9.99/£14.99

Serve, lob, smash, they're all here in Adidas Championship Tie Break. Ocean's tennis extravaganza! Tie Break is full of selections for the player to make, giving you one of the most comprehensive tennis simulations yet. All this with TV-style presentation!

At the beginning of each game you have the choice of playing on either grass, clay or indoor courts. A single or doubles game is available: once selected you have to designate a major tournament to play at. Those available are Wimbledon, the Davis Cup or the French Open. The choices to be made don't end there though, there are six different racquets for your selection. Each is made from a light material and vary in weight, strength and type of strings.

Training mode will help out those of you who aren't budding Ivan Lendls. All the options of the real game are available and you have the choice of any of the six computer players as partners and opponents in a single or doubles game. They all have different statistics so you can have the ones best suited to your needs.

Tennis games on the Spectrum go back as long as the computer itself (anyone remember Match Point?). Tie-Break has excellent presentation: screen after screen of colourful, highly detailed options. But having made your selections you move out onto the court, and this is a real let down. The courts are all monochrome, the colour changing when you change from grass to clay or indoor. You play from an aerial view which is supposed to be as on TV! Whenever I've watched tennis on the telly the main camera view has always been from behind one of the players, not from a seagull flying overhead! The wealth of options will give the game an advantage over many of the other tennis simulations, but this isn't enough to keep me playing for long. An average tennis game, nothing to jump the net about.

NICK [69%]

One thing I like about Adidas Championsip Tie Break is that you only have to decide which shot to play. I hate tennis games where you have to concentrate on moving the character as well. Graphically the tame is pretty good, though the main sprites are seen from above so a head with arms is all that's visible. Adidas Championship Tie Break with its pre-game options and fast moving sprites is one of the better tennis games around.
MARK [77%]

Ocean
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

I thought I'd make the effort to get into the right frame of mind for this one, so off I went to the greengrocer's. Unfortunately, however, my attempts to procure a punnet of the traditional Wimbeldon fruit were met with blank stares - apparently strawberries aren't generally the 'thing' at this time of year. Mind you, I shouldn't have thought tennis games were either, but there seems to be no stopping the people at Ocean now they've got their heart set on this Adidas series. (In the end I had to make do with some strawberry-flavour Tuttle Frutties, although they're not the same really - don't soak up the cream properly for a start.)

So it's a tennis game then? Indeed it is, but it's not quite the same as all the other tennis games that have appeared this year. For a start, it scrolls (huh?), and there are a whole bunch of options that give you various combinations of singles, doubles and two-player games. The box also contains an invitation to join the Adidas Elite, allowing you to 'get closer to your favourite stars, like Steffi Graff, Mark Hughes or Steve Cram', and receive a newsletter three times a year bringing you the latest sporting headlines'. This I declined.

But back to that scrolling business. It all a bit weird for a tennis game, don't you think? After all, tennis courts are pretty small on the whole, and it ought to be possible to fit it all onto the screen at once. Ocean, however, appear to have decided that, as the idea worked so well in Championship Football, perhaps the same principle could be applied to Tie-Break. So what we've got is a window looking onto about a quarter of the court which scrolls to keep up with the ball. This means that your player is only on the screen about half the time, but, as we'll discover later, this isn't too much of a problem.

So how about all these options? Well, before you start you've got to choose between 'Tournament' or 'Practice' modes, which sort of court you'll be playing on (these range from grass to PVC, with some decidedly silly colours for some of them), what weight of racquet you'd like to use (?), who you'd prefer to play against if you're in Practice mode, and whether you'll be playing singles or doubles.

Once out on the court you'll find your range of moves is pretty restricted. In fact, you can't actually move at all. The computer looks after all that, always ensuring that your player is in the right position to knock the ball back over the net. So it doesn't really matter that your player keeps disappearing off the screen. Phew. But what can you actually do? Well, really it's all down to pressing the 'Hit' button occasionally. The computer takes care of forehand and backhand, and all you have to do is arrange to hit the ball at the right moment to send the ball in the right direction. You can vary things a bit with stop shots, top-spin and lobs, whatever they are, but there's a general feeling that things are a bit out of your hands. You will have to keep an eye on which player is which though. They all look the same, you see, and in a game of doubles it's very easy to forget which side of the court you're playing on and mess everything up.

So, as long as you don't mind the substantial lack of 'player involvement', and the strange purple-skinned people on the loading screen, Tie-Break is a neatly put together and enjoyable game. It's longterm prospects look a little limited, but sports fans should get out there and grab a copy.