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International Tennis (Commodore 64)

Datafile

Company: Commodore
Year: 1985
Platform: Commodore 64
Controller: One button Joystick or keyboard.

Foreword

Serving is not difficult, serving an ace is another story.

Early 80s, the company Commodore developed videogames for their own personal computers, many of these games were ports of popular arcade videogames, but others were developed by them.

There were few sports titles in their catalogs, and we have already written about the first two videogames in previous entries, and they were quite funny and really effective for quick matches.

This videogame instead of being one of team sports, it was about an individual one, with notorious variants compared to other videogames about the same sport.

Game

Unlike other tennis videogames, this one has an horizontal view, very different from the traditional vertical one used in most of the sport videogames at the time.

Those pastel colors are eye-catching.

Just like the previous titles before mentioned, the videoplayer has to choose from different colors and skill level. The lowest number in skill level, the easiest to play against for, and I highly suggest to start with the lowest one. The control is very responsive, moving the virtual tennis player with the joystick and pressing the button hits the ball to return it to the rival. Moving slightly the joystick at the same time of pressing the button can apply effects to the shoot.

I felt the pace of the match a bit slow, but let me get this straight: it’s not that it feel slow or dragged. However, after a long exchange of shoots, actually it did not pass too many seconds in real life as one would think at first. It’s funny, that most of the points I got were that the rival sent the ball outside the court, instead of not reaching it or missing.

The match is to win 2 of 3 sets, with all the normal rules of tennis with deuces and so on. If the videogamer wins the match, at the end he goes toward the net, raises its arms in sign of victory, and appear the credits of the programmers and the staff involved in the videogame.

Epilogue

Playing this videogame is easy, and gives a reasonable challenge to the videogamer. I can not find exactly what is missing compared to other videogames of the same sport and in the same years. Maybe the different view is one of the factors, being the videogamers more accustomed to the vertical one.

Highly recommended for a quick match, either with a human rival, or against the Artificial Intelligence.

References

Sport Icon designed by Smashicons of FlatIcon licensed by CC 3.0 BY.

Console Icon created by Ciro Alfredo Consentino for the program EmuLoader.

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