08/1997
Path: menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet
From: andrey@cco.caltech.edu (Andre Yew)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Pro Tennis Tour 2
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games
Date: 8 Jan 1993 23:10:54 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
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Keywords: game, sports, tennis, skill, commercial
PRODUCT NAME
Pro Tennis Tour 2
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
Pro Tennis Tour 2 (PTT2) is a tennis simulator with enough features
to satisfy even most tennis players. It is system-friendly and epitomizes
ideal Amiga game programming.
AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION
Distributed by:
Name: UBI Soft
Address: 1505 Bridgeway, Suite 105
Sausalito, CA 94965
Telephone: (415) 332-8749
Actually written by:
Name: Bluebyte
Address: Aktienstr. 62
4330 Muelheim, Germany
LIST PRICE
$49.95 (US).
SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
HARDWARE
Though it runs on the Amiga 500, 1000, 2000, and 3000 with 512K of
memory, it has extra features if you have more RAM.
With 512K of Chip and 512K of Fast RAM, you get full save functions.
This means you can save only from the main set of menus and not from
the individual features. So you can only save only player
information and not ball machine information. What this means
becomes clearer later in the review.
With 1MB of Chip RAM, you can play mixed games, and you get better
sound effects.
SOFTWARE
PTT2 requires at least Kickstart 1.2. It runs fine under 2.04.
COPY PROTECTION
PTT2 is copy-protected by a lookup scheme. A purple piece of paper
with black ink (which is very low-contrast so you have a hard time copying
it, presumably) contains a matrix of codes. You are asked only once in the
beginning for a code.
PTT2 installs on a hard drive. It has its own installer that just
copies files to a partition. Make sure you specify a subdirectory for it,
because the files on the disk aren't in any. It will create the necessary
directories if it can't find the one you told it. After that, you can just
double-click on its icon to run it without the original disk.
If you install it to hard disk, it will automatically save all files
to the hard disk.
Overall, this is one of less annoying copy-protection methods I've
seen. It's similar to that of Maxis's games.
MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
I ran PTT2 on an Amiga 3000, with 2 MB of Chip RAM, 8 MB of Fast
RAM, and 2.04 softkicked. It has a Commodore Ethernet card installed that
caused no problems at all.
REVIEW
I like Pro Tennis Tour 2 (PTT2). As an intermediate tennis player,
I was impressed by how many features the programmers stuffed into this
1-disk game. For example, you can hit standard ground strokes like backhands
and forehands, as well as chips, slices, lobs, smashes, and volleys. About
the only thing missing is control of spin, so you can't do sidespins or
control the amount of topspin you apply on your backhand, for example.
So how do they do all this? The controls are relatively simple and
actually reflect real court experience. You see the court from one end,
like on television, and control your players with 1 to 4 joysticks (more on
this later). The standard way to hit the ball is to run up to the ball,
moving the joystick in whatever direction you want to go, bring back your
racquet, by pressing the fire button, and swing your racquet, by letting the
fire button go. How you get different strokes is by moving your joystick
while the fire button is pressed. Push up to lob, down to chip, left to hit
more towards the left, and right to hit more towards the right. When you're
at the other end of the court, reverse the up and down directions. The
longer you hold the joystick to one direction, the more extreme the action,
and the longer you hold your fire button, the harder the swing. This is
somewhat like real tennis -- the longer you have to set up for a shot, the
more choices you have for one. While this may sound a little difficult at
first, it's pretty easy to get used to it.
The computer opponents are quite good, though not unbeatable. Being
computer-controlled, they are very adept at controlling their swings and can
tell exactly where the ball will land. As a result, the computer ends up
making some pretty incredible-looking shots, but it is fair -- your computer
opponents have the same physical limitations as you do. So if the computer
barely chased down a ball, don't expect it to hit a blazing, super sharp
cross-court forehand. However, hit the ball softly to the computer, and it
will usually hit something nearly unreturnable by you.
PTT2 has three modes of play: singles, where you play with one
opponent, doubles, where you play with another person against two opponents,
and dirty doubles, where one person takes on a doubles team. The computer
is pretty savvy in singles play using many popular tactics in real tennis
and will take advantage of you any time it can. However, it is considerably
dumber in doubles play. If you play with a computer doubles partner, be
prepared for a frustrating game. Basically, the computer pretends it's in a
singles game and will mostly act like it. Sometimes, it will hog up the
whole court and not cover its side of the court, and sometimes it will just
stay on its side. It's very unpredictable what it does.
You can also play with up to three other human players. To do this
you need some sort of parallel port thing that the manual says to ask your
dealer about. I'm sure such a device exists, but I haven't looked for it.
If you play with only one other human player, you can just plug a second
joystick into the mouse port.
Not all tennis players are created equal, and this is reflected in
PTT2 as well. Each player has several categories -- forehand, backhand,
forehand volley, backhand volley, smash, service, and conditioning -- with
ratings for each. Initially, you start with 64 points in each category with
80 extra points to distribute among them. When that player is played by the
computer or a human in character mode, all those factors come into play.
You can also personalize other player characteristics such as name and sex
(which changes only how you look on court). Each character can be saved to
disk as well.
It can be frustrating to learn your tennis strokes in a game, so PTT2
also provides a programmable ball-machine for you to practice against. You
can vary the machine's ball frequency and speed as well as specify a
sequence of up to 9 different shooting positions. They cover shallow and
deep shots, as well as lobs. Each shot can be aimed to the left, middle or
right. You can also save your ball-machine sequences to disk.
So where can you actually play a game? There are two choices,
either the pickup game or tournament play. A pickup game is exactly that --
you play one match just for the fun of it. The computer opponent is no less
weaker than usual, though. Tournament play throws you onto the professional
tour where you start with no money and a dismal ranking, and enter
tournaments around the world to raise your ranking and get more money. You
can play the four Grand Slams (the Australian Open, the French Open,
Wimbledon, and the US Open), with their accompanying warmup tournaments
(usually small tournaments held before the Grand Slam event) along with the
Davis Cup, where players compete in national teams. You have a logbook in
which you can specify the tournaments you'd like to play in. Your
opponents start out weak and get progressively stronger. I haven't really
gotten very far into tournaments, so I don't know how strong computer
players really get. It seems pretty faithful to how the professional tennis
tour works in the real world (minus political and social intrigues).
Now on to the technical details of the game. Overall, it's very
well done with very nice touches throughout. The game opens with the
Bluebyte logo and then the PTT2 logo, a nice 32-color picture of a silver
trophy with, I suppose, the PTT2 theme music playing: some kind of Eurosynth
music. During the protection code screen and other menu screens in the
game, PTT2 switches to more sedate, Eurosynth elevator music. During
matches, each point is called out ("Fifteen-love" or "Advantage player 1")
in a digitized, German-accented voice. Game and set scores aren't called
out though. Net hits, outs and faults are called. There's also audience
applause at the beginning and end of sets, and after particularly choice
points. The sounds don't slow down the action at all, so you can go ahead
and serve while you hear the audience cheer and the umpire calling out the
points. Racquet sounds are also faithfully digitized, but only if you're
used to watching tennis on television. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is
there.
Graphics are equally well-done. The animation is slightly choppy,
but it is not noticeable unless you're willing to lose the point you're
playing. That is, it's not distracting. The characters sway from side to
side when they're waiting, players who are serving will bounce the ball up
and down between their racquets and their right hand, and the ball has a
tracking shadow (though the players themselves don't). If you're playing
with two characters on one side, they have distinguishing colors on their
headbands and clothing to distinguish them. About my only complaint is that
there is only one set of animation data for the players. So if you're
playing on the other side of the net, the court may look foreshortened, but
your character isn't. This isn't the troubling part -- it's that it becomes
harder to judge distance to an incoming ball and you have to hit earlier
than usual. It's not too hard to get used to though. You also get to play
on grass, clay, or hard courts, and the court color changes depending on
which court you play on. I haven't noticed any difference between the
courts in terms of ball play. Your set and game scores are also posted on a
scoreboard hanging behind the player on the far court. The ball moves in
realistic trajectories that seem to match up to real-world tennis experience.
Lastly, the game is totally system-friendly. It doesn't multitask,
but it locks out the rest of the computer in a friendly way. I have several
utilities running that have caused problems with other games (especially
Steve Koren's JM), but PTT2 had no problems. You can exit from the program
and go back to doing normal, productive :), Amiga things. For example, over
the course of writing this review, I've constantly had to refer to the game
itself; so I just loaded it, ran it for a while, exited, and went back to
typing. Not only that, I'm typing in an xterm window running on GfxBase's X
server that's displayed from a remote Sun through my Ethernet card. Running
PTT2 doesn't disrupt the TCP/IP software or the three X clients displayed
from the Sun. I don't lose any memory either. This game is a prime example
of Good Amiga Programming. I wish every game publisher and writer would
refer to this game when they're writing theirs. I haven't run Mungwall or
Enforcer on it, but I don't think I'm going to worry about it since my Amiga
has yet to crash after exiting PTT2.
DOCUMENTATION
The documentation is a small, 24-page, stapled manual that explains
the installation of the game as well as the functional aspects of the game.
It has helpful pictures that illustrate the screen it's talking about and
tells you generally how to do things in the game. However, it has no tennis
theory at all, so you have to come up with your own strategies and plans.
The manual is readable and terse in its descriptions, but easily
understandable.
LIKES AND DISLIKES
I liked the atmosphere of the game -- the sounds and graphics. I
liked the many options they give me -- customizing your own characters,
almost every shot in tennis, and the tournament play. I especially like the
playability of the game -- if you have no ball sense at all and don't know
where to run to hit a ball, there's a junior mode where the computer will
move for you and you have to press the button to hit the ball. As you get
better, the game still retains its challenge -- it's very well-balanced and
the computer is quite smart.
I really like the system-friendliness of the game. It installs on
hard disk, has no copy-protection except for a codeword lookup, and is
utterly friendly to other processes running on my Amiga, including the
network stuff. This is the way ALL Amiga games should be written.
I dislike only the non-foreshortening of players on the far court
making judging the distance between the racquet and ball difficult. I can
get used to this though.
COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS
If there's a PTT2, was there ever a PTT1? Yes, and it's called Pro
Tennis Tour. My opinion: after seeing PTT2, you don't even want to see
PTT. Buy PTT2 over PTT.
BUGS
Bugs? There are three that are inconsequential. One is the rare
flashing of white dots on the screen for less than a second which doesn't
affect the game at all. Second, sometimes after exiting, there are
vertical, spaced red lines covering the screen, but this disappears after a
second. It looks like PTT2 restoring or deallocating a screen. And
sometimes after exiting, a key on the keyboard will get stuck. This is
easily fixed by pressing return in a CLI. I don't know which of these bugs,
if any, are caused by other processes.
VENDOR SUPPORT
There is a technical support line, but I haven't used it. The
people there seemed to be friendly when I called them to help locate the
game.
WARRANTY
There's a 90-day media warranty.
CONCLUSIONS
This is a great game in all aspects. It's a good simulation of
tennis without being utterly unplayable or too easy. I have its icon left
out on my Workbench screen and when I have some free time.... Well, let's
just say it doesn't matter if I have much free time: I play it all the
time. It's very system friendly, installs on the hard disk, and has a
minimally annoying codeword lookup. It takes advantage of Amiga sound and
graphics capabilities. This is what a properly written Amiga game should be.
Everyone should buy it to show their support for a company that knows how to
program, and knows what a playable game is (unlike, unfortunately, many of
of the recent, exceedingly boring Maxis games).
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Do whatever you want with this review only if you keep it intact and
don't falsely claim it's yours (I don't care if my name gets left out).
---
Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
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