After I got back from my recent holiday, I suddenly realized that I had to write a review of Perfect Ace Pro Tournament Tennis. So the obvious thing I had to do was panic about it. The Summer heat didn’t help matters at all, but it did give me inspiration as to how to write this review. And it comes from the few times I go to the fridge and find something to cool down with. Something in the fridge gave me inspiration, and I can now proclaim a statement that is a review unto itself.
"Perfect Ace Pro Tournament Tennis" is like "Hulk Mighty Tasty Wholemeal Yogurt"
Obscure, isn’t it? The pairing does not seem to fit together at all, but once you experience both, you then start to understand the idea behind what I said. For those of you whom cannot, read the rest of this.
Perfect Ace Pro Tournament Tennis (Perfect Ace for short) is a tennis game, where, for those who don’t go out much, you hit a ball over a net and try and make your opponent lose. There’s a whole industry revolving around it, with professional players and large tennis courts. It’s a very simple game with hardly any complicated rules. Oh, and strawberries are associated with it too.
The game allows for you to choose one of many "pro tennis players", all of whom I would guess were made up as I couldn’t recognize any of them, and each was a specialist of one court or another, and would perform better on those than others. They are, for the tennis-blind, Grass, Clay, Hard or Carpet. Each had their top service speed listed too, because as we all know the faster the better. All the players look different, although I am a bit worried by the lack of female players there. If you don’t like anyone you see, you can create your own up, as is the standard in sports sims today.
As you start playing, you begin to wonder about some decisions made by the developers, such as the choice of available resolutions to display. I’m not angry, but more disappointed that the only two choices you have are between 16 or 32-bit colour, and only at 640×480 at that. This is a pretty major problem within the game, but there is one further setback.
Even at this low resolution, at the less demanding of the two settings, it ran very slowly on a handy low-spec machine I have here. Don’t get me wrong, an 800mhz Duron with 640mb Ram and a GF2MX isn’t considered to be terrible, as there are worse machines out there, but when it gets to a stage when the menu screen crawls on this system, you know there might be something wrong. Yes, that’s right, the menu screen.
Gameplay is where it makes up for lost ground though, as it plays reasonably well. The controls are hardly what you can call complicated, in fact I would dare to say that it’s easier to control than most other tennis games out there. It does start to mess up with the AI being more predictable than not, but even then it still makes this a fun game to play on your own. Sure, knowing which way your opponent is going to move next is part of any game that uses even the smallest amount of strategy in it, but when you can tell that the computer opponent is going to most likely go to the right just after service, it shows that the AI is lacking somewhere. It doesn’t stop the game being fun though.
To sum up. "Perfect Ace Pro Tournament Tennis" is like "Hulk Mighty Tasty Wholemean Yogurt": It doesn’t look appetizing, but at the same time it has a small amount of taste in there.
Gameplay
Graphics
Sound
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