RealSports Tennis Review





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Developer: Williams Entertainment Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 1991 Also On: Genesis, Sega Master System, SNES and Xbox 360

For the longest time I believed that Tennis by Activision was the only tennis game on the Atari 2600. Then I came across a copy of RealSports Tennis by Atari. One almost wonders if there was room enough on the Atari 2600 for two tennis games considering that tennis has never been the most popular sport in America. How does RealSports Tennis compare to Tennis? Read on to find out.

In case you do not know the concept behind tennis, allow me to explain it to you. You have two people with rackets, a ball, and a net in the middle of a court. Your objective is to get the ball into a position where your opponent cannot reach it to hit it back toward you. You do this by hitting the ball back and forth jockeying for ball position. What angle you hit the ball in depends on what part of your racket the ball hits, whether it hits the edge or the middle.

Unlike Tennis, however, you have your choice not only of what direction you want to hit the ball in, but also how you want to hit the ball. If you are approaching the net when you hit the ball, you will do a faster, more powerful shot. You will do a normal shot if you are still or moving sideways when you hit the ball. You will do a lob shot if you are moving away from the net when you hit the ball. Thus, you have more options in this game than you did in Tennis.

This game has a more involved scoreboard than Tennis also, up to and including the fact that this game gives you the option of entering your own name on the scoreboard. The net and the court are a lot more detailed as well as the players. The games are only a couple years apart, but RealSports Tennis is the clear-cut winner in the graphics department. There is not really that much by way of sound effects, but the ones there are are pretty good. Overall, the aesthetics in this game are vastly superior to Tennis, although, in all fairness, this game was released a couple years later.

RealSports Tennis has the same four game modes as Tennis had, namely, slow or fast for one or two players. You can also choose whether you want to hit the ball automatically or have to press the button to swing the racket every time using the difficulty switch. In a one-player game, the second difficulty switch can be used to determine the skill level of the computer player. The controls regardless of whether you choose to require the button are simple. At worst, you are looking at using the joystick to move around and pressing the button to swing the racket. No matter what, you do have to press the button to serve the ball or get your computer opponent to serve it if you are playing against the computer.

Overall, RealSports Tennis is easily the better of the two tennis games on the Atari 2600. That is not to say that Tennis is bad, only that better exists. If you are a fan of tennis and of the Atari 2600, RealSports Tennis is probably the tennis game to look for although it is somewhat less common than Tennis. Granted, even RealSports Tennis is not a game that you are going to play in long bursts all of the time, but it is a nice game to play every once in a while.

Graphics: 8
Sound: 6
Gameplay: 7.5
Creativity: 7
Replay Value/Game Length: 7
Final: 7.1
Written by Martin Henely Write a User Review

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